Radeon RX 9070 XT – Sapphire, ASUS and XFX Review

Introduction and Technical Specifications

Introduction

If you’ve been following our coverage here at OC3D Towers then you’ll be aware that AMD have launched their newest Radeon graphics entry. With RDNA 4 architecture it’s currently available in both RX 9070 XT and vanilla RX 9070 formats.

Naturally with a new card there are always a bunch of technology upgrades. The recent Nvidia launches brought us DLSS 4 and Multi-FrameGen. AMD have similar upgrades to their existing technologies. We have covered them all here. Primarily the excellent AMD FSR technology is now on Version 4. FSR has been crazily successful and really changed the market when it was first introduced. On the 7000 series cards AMD introduced their own take on frame-generation technology, AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF). The early version was more of a proof of concept than anything useful. Now on 2.1 it promises to massively improve image quality.

It’s not only things for gamers than these new cards are bringing to the party. There is a new Radiance Display Engine bringing full AV1 encode and decode support for video streaming. If you like talking to your work colleagues, shouting at your enemies or, more probably, shouting at your useless team mates then the AMD Noise Suppression makes your audio clearer, reducing background distractions. Unique to the new RDNA 4 cards is RIS 2, the image sharpening technology. You can read more on that here if you like. Yes, we cover it all here at OC3D.

Hope For the Red Team

Given that ray tracing was a weakness on the 7000 series cards we’re really happy to see AMD place so much emphasis on improving this area. Additionally the improvements to AFMF really looks like it might become a viable frame-generation technology that doesn’t turn your games into an impressionist painting.

We’re really hopeful for this new generation of Radeon cards. If the street price is anything close to the MSRP – and stock exists – this could be a massive seller for AMD. The pricing is going be the key element. Nvidia promised one price, but desperate stock shortages have seen them go sky high even at reputable stores. Should AMD be able to deliver them to retailers at the promised price point, and in suitable quantities, they will fly out the door. Depending on performance. Let’s find out how that is.

Technical Specifications

The specifications for the two flavours of RX 9070 remind us a lot of the high end 7000 cards. Mainly that the XT option, for a relatively small extra outlay, looks like it comfortably bests the vanilla card on paper. We will, of course, go through our testing to demonstrate if this is true. We do recall that the performance gap was bigger than the price gap. Or, perhaps it’s better to say, the XT provided better value for money despite being more expensive.