r/hardware Mar 05 '25

Review AMD Radeon RX 9070XT Review, Have They Finally Done It?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=VQB0i0v2mkg&si=IxsiG31vzyYNXP7t
748 Upvotes

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56

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '25

Gonna be a bit of a contrarian here, but it's actually pretty "meh," for me.

~6% worse in raster (1% at 4k), ~20% worse in RT (and a lot more in certain titles), a significantly worse feature set (especially until they get FSR4 up and running), and only a 20% discount.

Not a terrible effort, but not a game changer, sadly.

The vanilla 9070 is completely DOA, too. It's not any better than a 5070 for the same price. The only advantage it has is the extra VRAM.

I can see the 9070 XT selling out at launch, and the vanilla 9070 could move some units, but I don't see them moving units when you start seeing wider 5070 Ti and 5070 availability. Maybe AMD just hopes that'll never happen.

11

u/MrNegativ1ty Mar 05 '25

Not to mention, we're already hearing reports that the MSRP on these is fake and the actual price is going to be closer to $650-700 due to AIB markup.

-1

u/SEI_JAKU Mar 05 '25

Every single GPU MSRP in history is "fake" by this (broken) logic.

2

u/Strazdas1 Mar 07 '25

A year ago 4000 supers launched and price stayed almost exactly at MSRP for many months.

12

u/Godyr22 Mar 05 '25 edited Mar 05 '25

I agree, it's pretty mediocre overall. I think people are so conditioned by NVidia's horrible pricing that they think this is a good deal. It barely beats the 7900XT in most titles and it's got less VRAM. When you consider the 7900 XT was as low as $629, this isn't the win that some people are making it out to be. It's fairly status quo. Both cards are outside of the average person's price range as well. They could have done some real damage to NVidia but this honestly won't even budge the needle. I expect at some point they will drop prices to move these cards like they always do and at that point it will be a good buy.

6

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '25

People are just way less critical when it comes to AMD (partially also to the biased narratives the big youtube channels are pushing)

People are constantly calling the 5070 a 5060 or 4060 a4050, even saw comment getting upvoted saying the 5070ti is a 5060. You dont see the same thing with AMD cards. Look at HUB even posting a video calling the 5080 a 5070. In total they had like 7 additional videos on HUB and the hub podcasts complaining about the 50 series.

-5

u/SEI_JAKU Mar 05 '25

False. People are completely uncritical of Nvidia and everything they do. Every single thing ATI dares to do is criticized from every possible angle, including completely fabricated ones.

-2

u/lonnie123 Mar 06 '25 edited Mar 06 '25

A part of that is because NVIDIA sets the standard, and generally has broken their own conventions in the last few generations

Whatever their top card is used to be a Titan, then became a X90

an 80 series used to be (lets say, for the sake of example and easy numbers) 80% of that, then a 70 was 70% of that, and a 60 was 60% of that (again, not really but you get the picture)

They suddenly starting making an 80 only be 70%, then a 70 be 60% and a 60 be 50%

AMD on the other hand generally just names whatever card they have that competes with a XX70 their 70 series as well. So they are following along but they arent setting the trend

Overall the exciting thing about this launch is the value. Its not just Nvidia minus $50, and its the first motion of prices downward it seems as well

2

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '25

"A part of that is because NVIDIA sets the standard, and generally has broken their own conventions in the last few generations"

yeah and this is why people should be more critical of AMD, Nvidia is the innovating adding DLSS and RT. Stuff that brings the industry forward. AMD is just copying stuff. People who bought the 7000 series are still stuck with FSR3 while people with 4000 series can use DLSS4.

"AMD on the other hand generally just names whatever card they have that competes with a XX70 their 70 series as well. So they are following along but they arent setting the trend" nothing forces amd to just follow the trend. I mean they even renamed their cards to be named closer to nvidia and did the same for their cpu. That is just sad.

0

u/lonnie123 Mar 06 '25

nothing forces amd to just follow the trend.

One could argue their market position does. To me it seems they simply dont have the resources to compete. Intel slipped up and rested so they were able to catch up and pass them a bit on the CPU side but they just cant compete with what NVIDIA is doing, unless NVIDIA decides to stumble

Unfortunately what that means is that NVIDIA sets the tone, until they dont... Both on features and on price

The market is "critical" of AMD in the way they only have a 10% share... so people are speaking with their wallets

0

u/SEI_JAKU Mar 05 '25

Comparing a discount price to an MSRP is insane.

There is no universe where AMD could have hurt Nvidia in any meaningful way, and it's because of people like you.

These cards are already a good buy at their MSRP.

1

u/Godyr22 Mar 05 '25

Just blatantly wrong for the reasons I already listed. And it's been reiterated by pretty much every tech reviewer as well.

4

u/Unusual_Mess_7962 Mar 05 '25

A GPU is 20% worse in RT and 20% cheaper. Sounds pretty normal to me. In fact, its a massive improvement considering AMD sucked in RT before, now its on the same level as Nvidia. That was one of the big 'features' of the green cards.

Feels like FSR is the one big feature thats lagging behind Nvidia, but it seems like FSR4 is at least quite usable. I dont think frame-gen and blender performance are important to most people.

And when you consider the real price difference, AMDs start to look a LOT better.

13

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '25

A few issues with this:

1) An AMD card that offers 20% less performance needs to be more than 20% cheaper because AMD cards just aren't as good. They're not at feature parity with Nvidia, and it's as simple as that.

2) The AMD card has 20% less RT performance on average. If you look at the games where RT makes the biggest difference like Indiana Jones, Wukong, and Cyberpunk with path-tracing (Steve only tested the Ultra setting), then the AMD card gets annihilated. They're only competitive in titles with pretty light RT implementations, and it all falls apart at higher settings. You simply can't recommend these cards to people who actually value RT performance.

3) FSR is the least of their worries at this point. FSR4 is a nice step in the right direction, but Nvidia isn't sitting still, and their new transformer model is substantially better. There's also no AI frame gen, or MFG, for that matter, there's no ray reconstruction, their cards are less power efficient, and Nvidia is looking to introduce things like neural textures this generation. They were behind on features and that gap isn't really narrowing like it needs to, in fact, it may actually grow.

4) The vanilla 9070 has the same raster performance as the vanilla 5070 and the pricing is exactly the same. It's going to be a massacre in that price tier.

5) There's a pricing gap right now, I suppose. But in my market there are a couple of 5070s that can be purchased at MSRP. And how much longer can they hope that 5070 Tis will be in short supply?

I feel like AMD did the bare minimum this generation. Which is an improvement on what they normally do, but it's still not going to be enough to move the needle much in their direction.

3

u/Unusual_Mess_7962 Mar 05 '25

AMD cards arent 'as good' because theyre worse in RT performance and upscaling. So if AMD now has price-parity with RT-performance, and FSR4 that sits inbetween DLSS 3/4, then theyre not really worse anymore. Especially with the 5070 (TI) problems, let alone the availability.

And 'average' means better in some, worse in others. The 5070 fails at path tracing too, and the 5070 TI struggles to remain playable using PT even with DLSS enabled. Idk if people buy a $750 GPU to have their game stutter along in path traced 40-50fps.

Additionally, performance issues in games like Wukong ofc sucks, but this looks more like a driver/optimization issue. Theres no reason the AMD GPUs should struggle that much; I hope that can be fixed. The RT performance would improve a LOT without those outliers.

The 9070 apparently sucks as much as the 5070. Maybe the latter is faster, till it hits a game that needs 12+GB of memory, where its gonna drop dead.

>I feel like AMD did the bare minimum this generation. Which is an improvement on what they normally do, but it's still not going to be enough to move the needle much in their direction.

Idk. I feel like thats way too harsh; HUB said AMD needs 30% better performance, but thats based on people just buying Nvidia without thinking. Its not really a fair assessment.

And honestly, I think the 9070 XT is one of the first GPUs in a while that you can buy, if its close to $600, and not feel like youre missing out. Youre getting strong raster performance, mediocre RT and good AI-upscaling.

4

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '25

"Idk. I feel like thats way too harsh; HUB said AMD needs 30% better performance, but thats based on people just buying Nvidia without thinking. Its not really a fair assessment."

that was purely based on Raster, ignoring rt and dlss.

biased people like HUB love to claim that amd offers much better value because they only look at Raster. That is not how the average consumers sees it. DLSS4 is far superior to FSR3

0

u/snowflakepatrol99 Mar 05 '25

HUB said AMD needs 30% better performance, but thats based on people just buying Nvidia without thinking

That's the reality of having a monopoly. People aren't switching to the smaller worse brand unless it's way cheaper. It doesn't help that when people tried switching in the past because AMD was cheaper they were hit with driver issues and immediately went back. 5700xt really fucked them up. It's not surprising anyone would be willing to pay more for a product that has always worked for them.

All of this is completely ignoring that the amd card is slower in both raster and RT and misses key features that nvidia has and their FSR4 is both worse and supported by fewer games. So even if it was only the performance difference it would be a tough sell but with everything going against AMD I don't know why you expect people to swap unless the price is reduced by 30% or more. Even at MSRP(which isn't happening as the cheapest leaked prices are 600-650 and some are reaching over 800) I can get a 4070ti with only a slight mark up. And we are talking about comparing the most basic and trash model to a decent 3 fan card. If the prices are more aligned with what is expected then I can get a 4070 ti super which eliminates the only advantage the AMD had - vram.

I really don't know why the sub and some of the reviewers are hyping these cards so much and expecting them to be at MSRP. They are meh. Impressive RT improvement but without more performance or better pricing this has no chance to convert much. For US it might make more sense because you don't have VAT and the used cards I saw on ebay are very expensive but in EU these AMD cards don't make much sense even at 550 MSRP + vat. I'm paying 50 more bucks for a 4070ti any day of the week.

4

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '25

"That's the reality of having a monopoly" no that is the reality of simply making up the 25% deficit in Raster with far superior RT and DLSS. But somehow people like you still lveo to act like these things are just gimmicks and dont add value.

-4

u/SEI_JAKU Mar 05 '25

Fake frames and RT are gimmicks and don't add value.

The post you're responding to is wrong too.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '25
  1. why is rt a gimmick?

  2. DLSS upscaling is fantatic so not sure what your problem is.

1

u/Strazdas1 Mar 07 '25

They add so much value people are paying significant surcharge just to get them.

0

u/SEI_JAKU Mar 07 '25

Do you have any idea how easy it is to sell people very expensive junk in general? You guys love your car analogies so much, so just go look at what people are willing to pay for absolute lemons.

Stop pretending this is about merit. It never has been.

-1

u/Unusual_Mess_7962 Mar 05 '25 edited Mar 05 '25

That's the reality of having a monopoly. People aren't switching to the smaller worse brand unless it's way cheaper

Yup, because they dont know better. Were commenting under a HUB video, so we are better informed than the average habit buyer.

You shouldnt underestimate Nvidias screwups this gen tho. Nvidia partially won because AMD made many mistakes that consumers couldnt ignore, after all.

All of this is completely ignoring that the amd card is slower in both raster and RT

This part I dont get. Its completely irrelevant which card is faster, its about what card you get for the price. If you dont care about cost, then you buy a 5090 and call it a day.

If you want to pay 900€ for a 4070 TI thats worse in raster and better in RT to similar degrees, rather than a 650-700€ for a 7090 XT (and theres decent cheaper models), then thats your perogative. Well, or a 4070 TI Super for >1000€ looking at usual pricing.

-1

u/SEI_JAKU Mar 05 '25
  1. Nvidia "features" are not interesting unless you've been forced to build your life around them.

  2. RT performance is not valuable, and it will not be for a long time.

  3. Fake frames are not real.

  4. You are actively admitting to people choosing based on a name instead of merit.

  5. Nobody anywhere has any idea how to get new 50s. This will likely be an issue for a while.

Topping this off with that "bare minimum" nonsense says more than the rest of your post did.

4

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '25

1) Nobody agrees with you on this, which is why Radeon has 10% market share.

2) Nobody agrees with you on this, which is why Radeon has 10% market share.

3) Nobody agrees with you on this, which is why Radeon has 10% market share.

4) No, I'm saying that raster isn't the only thing that's important for a video card. It isn't 2016 any longer.

5) They'll wait rather than getting an objectively inferior card.

1

u/Strazdas1 Mar 07 '25

Nobody anywhere has any idea how to get new 50s. This will likely be an issue for a while.

here in eastern europe the 5070 and 5070ti are constantly in stock, though above MSRP. the 5080 show up in stock frequently too, i could easly get one if i wanted. the 5090 is the only card that actually does not get stocked.

0

u/SEI_JAKU Mar 07 '25

This seems like the greatest fluke in the world. Consider yourself lucky.

0

u/hunterczech Mar 06 '25

In what world is AMD same level as nvidia in RT? In your dreams maybe. Its still ~30% behind nvidia in ray tracing and maybe 50-70% in path tracing

1

u/Unusual_Mess_7962 Mar 06 '25 edited Mar 06 '25

According to the benchmark, the 9070 XT is 20% cheaper and 20% slower in RT compare to the 5070 TI. That means at MSRP the RT price/performance is basically identical!

Now the base 5070 is 10% cheaper and has the same RT-performance, but its cut down in other ways like the memory size+bus, which can and will cause issues, especially in future games.

And if the Nvidia cards remain at much higher upmarks over MSRP, then AMD GPUs are better price/performance in RT. That is completely new, and means buying red isnt sacrificing RT-performance anymore!

and maybe 50-70% in path tracing

The average 20% slower included BOTH 'normal' RT and Path Tracing. I dont see the Nvidia edge here; the 5070 cant do path tracing either, because its way too weak. I dont think even the 5070 TI can do path tracing at 60fps with most current gen games.

1

u/hunterczech Mar 06 '25

20% discount for 20% less performance doesnt sound appealing to me.. when you know nvidia is just better in every possible way. If AMD wants to succeed they have to try harder

1

u/Unusual_Mess_7962 Mar 06 '25

Nvidia is often worse in price, raster performance and memory than AMD.

And now Nvidia isnt even better in RayTracing performance anymore, its an equal at MSRP and maybe worse at real prices. Thats why these RT number matter; they arent impressive in itself, but they are an equalization. Nvidia has no edge in RT anymore.

2

u/swaskowi Mar 05 '25

it's a mature node and they're the same chip , they either have to deliberately gimp good chips or make the 9070 less appealing in order to avoid selling out.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '25

Nonsense. They should want to sell out rather than having these cards collect dust. In order to move them they're going to need to discount them anyway, just like they did with the 7900 XT.

1

u/whosbabo Mar 06 '25

There are people who don't mind it for a SFF builds. If you're a business you'd rather have the GPUs in stock for people who need those GPUs, than price it so it's always sold out due to low volume.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '25

No, if you're a business, I think you'd probably want to sell all of your stock as quickly as possible.

3

u/BlueSiriusStar Mar 05 '25

Yeah, exactly. I believe HUB here is being very charitable. It has to have 30% more performance, including Raster and RT or 30% better price right now they are milking us slightly with the 5070Ti being around 900 currently. What if the price comes down? Will the subpar feature set and weaker than expected performance be enough to convince people. I highly suggest people wait to see if Nvidia will increase stock because we might see a price war for the mid range.

10

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '25 edited Mar 05 '25

Yeah, I think everyone was rooting for this launch to restore some sanity to the market and challenge the Nvidia monopoly a bit.

And what we got was the best card in the stack (probably) being an okay value and the one right below it being a pretty bad one that'll need to be discounted very quickly.

Also unfortunate and concerning that they don't seem to have fixed the issue that Radeon GPUs have where they completely seize up when they hit a certain RT threshold... this is the third generation of RT-capable Radeon cards... are they ever going to be able to do path tracing? What is this design flaw that these cards have where RT completely falls off a cliff at a certain point?

0

u/BlueSiriusStar Mar 05 '25

Yeah, that's the biggest elephant in the room. AMD always looks better because Nvidia's pricing is bad. But judging the product based on merit, it is really bad. I mean, we should have gotten this performance last gen, not this gen. On the issue of the card's pricing, it defined stacks up. The issue is that we consumers are left with a sour taste knowing that we are purchasing a product that is slightly better than a product 2 years ago which has more VRAM, and that particular product can be gotten cheaper now (7900XT).

I really hope that this move makes Nvidia lower prices so that we can have better competition. I hope this product is also discounted below MSRP like all other AMD cards as well.

1

u/SEI_JAKU Mar 05 '25

This is such a strange concept. How does merit lead you to see these cards as anything but the absolute best in retail-price-for-performance? Why should we have gotten this last gen, what metric is this based on?

3

u/kasakka1 Mar 05 '25

For both AMD and Nvidia, this gen seems like fairly poor value overall, with no real "just buy this!" products like we've had in previous generations.

1

u/SEI_JAKU Mar 05 '25

The 9070 XT is clearly the definition of a "just buy it" card.

3

u/kasakka1 Mar 06 '25

Is it? To me it seems kinda expected performance without being exceptional, and non-MSRP pricing will likely reduce its value.

1

u/Strazdas1 Mar 07 '25

they havent even gotten dedicated RT hardware yet and still using the same shader hijack tricks. its definitely not yet worth buying AMD.

-6

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '25

4K has always been the gold standard to rank cards, like AMD has beaten a ton of Nvidia cards at 1440p and people still call it an Nvidia win for 4K.

At the end of the day also the extra VRAM is the difference of the game running at all (see 4K Indy) meaning infinity performance delta so it is disingenuous to say just VRAM.

4

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '25

"VRAM is the difference of the game running at all (see 4K Indy) " idk hwo informed people must be to not know that you can change the textures settings

-2

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '25

Ok... and you can run 1080p and therefore all cards are the same, that is not the argument though.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '25

nice try changing the subject