AMD Fine Wine! Radeon RX 9070 XT performance improves with new GPU drivers

AMD Fine Wine Returns! New drivers give AMD’s RX 9070 XT a boost

According to new testing from Hardware Unboxed, AMD’s newest GPU drivers have delivered significant performance gains for the Radeon RX 9070 XT across a wide range of games.

AMD is actively optimising the performance of its RDNA 4-based graphics cards, resulting in improved framerates across a variety of games. In the video below, Hardware Unboxed saw performance gains as high as 27%, highlighting the difference that new GPU drivers can make. It looks like AMD’s GPU drivers are ageing like fine wine.

At 1440p, an average performance gain of 9% was noted across 16 games. Four games saw no performance changes with AMD’s new drivers. Twelve games saw performance gains, with framerate boosts ranging from 3% to 27%.

The largest performance gains were seen in Spider-Man Remastered, Counter-Strike 2, and Hogwarts Legacy. These gains saw performance gains of 27%, 23%, and 18% respectively.

(Data from Hardware Unboxed)

At 4K, performance gains were smaller than 1440p. On average, AMD’s RX 9070 XT had 4% gains across the 16 games tested. Seven of the games tested had no performance gains at 4K.

In Counter-Strike 2, Hardware Unboxed noted the largest performance gains at 4K. This game’s performance increased by 14% at 4K. This is much smaller than the game’s 23% performance boost at 1440p. It is unknown why AMD’s performance gains are smaller at 4K, though it has been speculated that AMD’s use of GDDR6 memory may be a contributing factor. Is AMD’s RX 9070 XT bandwidth-limited at 4K?

(Data from Hardware Unboxed)

Will we see more “Fine Wine” with AMD’s RX 9070 XT?

If AMD continues to optimise its drivers, we will likely continue to see performance improvements with RDNA 4 graphics cards. Not only is RDNA 4 a new graphics architecture for AMD, it’s a new architecture that has arrived at a time when AMD has become increasingly software-focused. Both AMD and Nvidia are investing heavily in software, hoping to gain an advantage over their competitors within the AI market. Although AI and gaming are distinct markets, AMD has the potential to gain market share in both with RDNA 4. As such, AMD is working hard to push its software forward to gain all the advantages it can.

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