Linus Tech Tips: AMD's Radeon 9070 XT GPU offers competitive performance and value, challenging NVIDIA's dominance.
Linus Tech Tips - AMD, I Could Kiss You - 9070 and 9070 XT Review
The AMD Radeon 9070 XT GPU is recognized for its competitive pricing and performance, particularly in 4K gaming and ray tracing. Priced at $599, it offers a strong alternative to NVIDIA's RTX 5070 Ti, often matching or surpassing its performance while being $150 cheaper. The 9070 XT excels in 1440p rasterization and provides significant VRAM for ultra HD gaming, which helps it outperform NVIDIA in certain scenarios. However, AMD still faces challenges in ray tracing and AI performance, where NVIDIA maintains a lead. The new GPU architecture, built on TSMC's N4C process, improves efficiency and performance per compute unit, making it a compelling choice for gamers. Despite these advancements, AMD's GPUs still lag in professional video encoding and AI applications compared to NVIDIA. The 9070 XT's power consumption is higher than its rated TBP, but thermal management remains effective. Overall, the 9070 XT is a strong contender in the mid-range market, offering good value for gamers, though AMD needs to address high-end competition and non-gaming performance to capture more market share.
Key Points:
- AMD's Radeon 9070 XT is priced at $599, offering competitive performance against NVIDIA's RTX 5070 Ti, especially in 4K gaming.
- The GPU features significant VRAM, enhancing performance in high-resolution gaming scenarios, but still lags in ray tracing compared to NVIDIA.
- AMD's new architecture improves efficiency and performance per compute unit, but power consumption is higher than expected.
- The 9070 XT provides good value for gamers, but AMD needs to improve in professional video encoding and AI applications.
- AMD's market strategy focuses on mid-range dominance, but lacks high-end competition, impacting overall market share.
Details:
1. 🏆 AMD Wins 2025's Best GPU Award
- AMD's Radeon 9070 XT was awarded the best GPU of 2025, signifying a major achievement for the company and indicating a strong competitive position in the GPU market.
- The Radeon 9070 XT is competitively priced at $599, while the 9070 non-XT version is available for $550, both offering value in the 4K gaming and ray tracing segments.
- Despite AMD's advancement in AI-powered upscaling and gaming features, challenges remain in performance efficiency and power consumption, highlighting areas for further improvement.
- Maintaining stock levels will be crucial for AMD to capitalize on this momentum and potentially shift industry dynamics, given the competitive landscape dominated by players like NVIDIA.
- This award marks a turnaround for AMD and reflects their strategic efforts to enhance product offerings and market presence.
2. 💪 AMD 9070 XT: Performance and Price Analysis
2.1. Performance Comparison
2.2. Pricing Insights and Additional Considerations
3. 🔬 Innovative Tech and Efficiency in AMD GPUs
- AMD's $550 graphics cards are equipped with ample VRAM suitable for ultra HD gaming, offering a competitive edge over other brands by using GDDR6 memory instead of the newer GDDR7.
- In 'Last of Us Part One,' the AMD 9070 outperforms the RTX 5070 by 23% at higher resolutions, underscoring the importance of sufficient VRAM in maintaining smooth gameplay and preventing hitches.
- AMD's 9070 and similar NVIDIA cards, equipped with 16GB of VRAM, address performance issues that arise in cards with less memory, ensuring a seamless gaming experience even if not all games require 4K capabilities.
- The AMD 9000 series struggles to consistently achieve 60 FPS at 4K ultra settings, falling short of expectations in terms of performance margins when compared to the 7900 GRE, although enhanced ray tracing features offer a different level of gameplay realism.
- With the new cards, AMD demonstrates a significant generational leap in performance, particularly in ray tracing capabilities, which transforms the gaming experience.
4. 🌟 Ray Tracing: AMD vs. NVIDIA
- The new AMD cards, 9070 and 9070 XT, built on TSMC's N4C process node, have 92% as many transistors as the 7900 XTX within two-thirds of the die area, significantly improving performance per CU.
- Technical enhancements include vastly improved matrix operations, a new dynamic register allocator, dual SIMD 32 vector units, enhanced AI accelerators, and improved ray tracing capabilities, which allow for extensive calculations.
- The upgraded media engine in these cards significantly enhances low bitrate encoding for streaming, making AMD's output comparable to NVIDIA's NVENC encoding, though it still lacks 422 hardware encoding and decoding for professional video creators.
- AMD's DisplayPort 2.1a supports UHBR 13.5 instead of UHBR 20, enabling 4K at 240Hz with display stream compression, potentially imperceptible to some users.
- In ray tracing performance, these new cards surpass the 7900 XTX, positioning them as strong competitors to NVIDIA in this domain.
5. 🎮 Gaming Experience and Upscaling Features
- The 5070 card exhibits significantly poorer performance compared to the 5070 Ti and NVIDIA's offerings, suggesting that the 5070 Ti is the preferable choice for enthusiasts seeking high performance.
- In 'Black Myth: Wukong,' AMD's 9000 series outperforms the 7000 series but remains behind NVIDIA's latest cards, underscoring NVIDIA's superior performance in this game.
- AMD demonstrates robust performance in 'F1 24,' surpassing the 5070. Notably, the 5070 is even outperformed by its predecessor, the 4070 SUPER, highlighting an inconsistency in NVIDIA's product line.
- Excluding 'Black Myth: Wukong,' AMD's 9070 series competes closely with NVIDIA, indicating improvements in AMD's ray tracing capabilities, effectively narrowing the gap from what was previously two generations behind.
- Performance gaps in 'Black Myth: Wukong' and AMD's tech demo reveal that AMD still lags one generation behind NVIDIA in ray tracing, particularly in path tracing implementations, where issues such as artifacts and ghosting persist.
6. 🖥️ AI Upscaling and Image Quality Enhancements
6.1. Introduction to AI Upscaling
6.2. AMD's Upscaling and Image Quality
7. ⚙️ Power, Thermals, and Efficiency Improvements
- AMD's improvements in computer vision are notable but still lag behind NVIDIA, with the 4070 SUPER outperforming the 9070 XT by a significant margin.
- In AI text generation and Stable Diffusion, AMD's new cards show minimal improvement over the previous generation and are significantly outperformed by NVIDIA's offerings, specifically in tasks requiring extensive neural network computations.
- AMD's cards support running all models that the NVIDIA 5080 can and some that the 5070 cannot, primarily due to the inclusion of 16GB of VRAM, which provides a strategic advantage in handling larger datasets.
- In content creation, AMD's 9070 and 70XT offer satisfactory performance in video editing software like Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, but fall short in Blender due to NVIDIA's superior optics rendering capabilities.
- Despite improvements, AMD's encoder quality remains inferior to NVIDIA and Intel, especially at lower bit rates in H264. However, using AV1 can enhance encoding quality across the board, albeit AMD still trails behind.
- Specific tests show that AMD's encoder quality sees noticeable improvement with AV1, but NVIDIA and Intel maintain a lead in quality and efficiency, highlighting areas for future enhancement.
8. 🔍 Market Dynamics and AMD's Strategic Future
- AMD's 9070 XT GPU experiences power spikes up to 426 watts, averaging 309 watts, which exceeds its rated TBP of 305 watts, indicating strong performance but also high power consumption.
- Despite high power consumption, the thermals remain controlled, suggesting effective thermal management technologies like PTM7950 are in use.
- The 9070 and 9070 XT show significant improvements in raster and ray tracing performance compared to previous generations, such as the 2000 and 6000 series, highlighting AMD's advancements in GPU technology.
- AMD's pricing strategy is competitive for the 9070 XT at $599, aiming to capture more market share, though the 9070 non-XT may not offer as compelling value, indicating room for strategic pricing adjustments.
- To increase market share, AMD must address the absence of high-end competition and potentially adjust its product lineup and pricing strategy.
- The anticipated release of the 9060 cards in Q2 could provide better value if AMD optimizes pricing, representing a strategic opportunity to enhance its market position.
- AMD needs to enhance its competitive strategy by focusing on high-end markets and leveraging upcoming product releases to strengthen its market foothold.
