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It's finally here. After the terrible launch of the 5090, followed by the terrible launch of the RTX 4080, followed by the terrible launch of the 5070 Ti, followed by the terrible launch of Nvidia's RTX 5070. We FINALLY have a new GPU from AMD in the form the the 9070 XT and 9070. Built on RDNA4 this new generation of team red GPUS looks to bring the hurt to both Nvidia and Intel. But how much hurt, and where will it hurt the most? Find out in our review.
Discuss on the forum: https://linustechtips.com/topic/1604046-amd-i-could-kiss-you-9070-and-9070-xt-review/
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Buy a PNY GeForce RTX 5080: https://geni.us/qFzMwnD
Buy a NVIDIA GeForce 5070 FE: https://geni.us/9qrVn
Buy a GIGABYTE Eagle OC ICE GeForce RTX 4070 Super: https://geni.us/LqdhN5
Buy a MSI Ventus GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER: https://geni.us/kvm6
Buy a XFX Speedster MERC310 Radeon RX 7900 XTX: https://geni.us/EkudH5R
Buy a PowerColor Hellhound Radeon RX 7800 XT: https://geni.us/WhWPw
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CHAPTERS
---------------------------------------------------
0:00 Intro
1:26 1440 Raster
3:13 4K Raster
4:54 RDNA4 Architecture
6:32 1080 and 1440 Ray Tracing
8:07 1080 Raster
8:47 FSR4 and AFMF 2.1
11:00 Productivity
13:11 Power and Thermals
14:24 Key Takeaways
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It's finally here. After the terrible launch of the 5090, followed by the terrible launch of the RTX 4080, followed by the terrible launch of the 5070 Ti, followed by the terrible launch of Nvidia's RTX 5070. We FINALLY have a new GPU from AMD in the form the the 9070 XT and 9070. Built on RDNA4 this new generation of team red GPUS looks to bring the hurt to both Nvidia and Intel. But how much hurt, and where will it hurt the most? Find out in our review.
Discuss on the forum: https://linustechtips.com/topic/1604046-amd-i-could-kiss-you-9070-and-9070-xt-review/
Buy an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT: https://geni.us/yr3c9n (Amazon: https://geni.us/98AkAS)
Buy an AMD Radeon RX 9070: https://geni.us/3mdqXMV (Amazon: https://geni.us/Am5a)
Buy a MSI Gaming Trio GeForce RTX 5090: https://geni.us/UWz9V6
Buy a PNY GeForce RTX 5080: https://geni.us/qFzMwnD
Buy a NVIDIA GeForce 5070 FE: https://geni.us/9qrVn
Buy a GIGABYTE Eagle OC ICE GeForce RTX 4070 Super: https://geni.us/LqdhN5
Buy a MSI Ventus GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER: https://geni.us/kvm6
Buy a XFX Speedster MERC310 Radeon RX 7900 XTX: https://geni.us/EkudH5R
Buy a PowerColor Hellhound Radeon RX 7800 XT: https://geni.us/WhWPw
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Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.
CHAPTERS
---------------------------------------------------
0:00 Intro
1:26 1440 Raster
3:13 4K Raster
4:54 RDNA4 Architecture
6:32 1080 and 1440 Ray Tracing
8:07 1080 Raster
8:47 FSR4 and AFMF 2.1
11:00 Productivity
13:11 Power and Thermals
14:24 Key Takeaways
Category
🎮️
GamingTranscript
00:00Oh, Linus Sebastian is remoting in from Texas
00:03to present our next award of the evening.
00:05And the Least Crap GPU of 2025 award goes to
00:11AMD for the Radeon 9070 XT.
00:16That's right, folks.
00:17After fumbling for years,
00:19AMD has finally figured out how to manufacture
00:22and price a GPU that will actually sell.
00:25And all it took for this to happen
00:27was for NVIDIA to slip on a banana peel,
00:30fall down an elevator shaft,
00:31and then have a piano dropped on.
00:34As for the 9070 non-XT, it's also here.
00:39In all seriousness, though, at $599 and $550,
00:43both of these cards are well-priced,
00:45capable of both 4K gaming and actually good ray tracing,
00:49and even add AI-powered upscaling capabilities.
00:53But as per AMD's long, proud tradition,
00:56they also come with caveats,
00:58like performance and productivity and power consumption.
01:02With that said, if they can stay in stock,
01:04I think we're gonna be able to look past
01:06those little details toward a brighter future for gamers
01:10and a bright segue to our sponsor.
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01:27Otherwise, I won't.
01:28AMD says these cards, they're for high-resolution gaming.
01:39So let's talk 1080p later
01:41and jump right into 1440p rasterization,
01:44where, wow, does the 9070 XT ever make Nvidia
01:48look like a bunch of greedy buffoons.
01:50It nearly matches the performance of the RTX 5070 Ti
01:55while coming in $150 below the MSRP of that card,
02:00which, of course, is an imaginary price
02:03that no gamer has ever paid.
02:05Even the lesser non-XT variant looks decent here,
02:08going blow for blow with the 5070
02:10across all of our benchmarks.
02:13We even got the occasional clear win for AMD,
02:15like in Alan Wake 2,
02:17where the non-XT beats the non-Ti by a whopping 17%.
02:23The only definitive loss for AMD in our suite
02:26was in Black Myth Wukong,
02:27where the Ti beats the XT by around 9%.
02:30But the second you factor in the price,
02:33AMD's small L turns into a big W.
02:38In our Vulcan benchmark, Red Dead Redemption 2,
02:40we do see some worrying issues in frame pacing
02:43where both of the new cards drop in ranking
02:45because of their poor 1% lows,
02:47despite solid average FPS.
02:49So hopefully this is something that AMD's team
02:51can work on post-launch.
02:53Overall, though, we're off to a great start.
02:56The 9070 XT is a clear winner in performance and value.
03:01And as for the 9070, well,
03:03it's about as bad a deal as the RTX 5070,
03:07at least on paper.
03:08And we'll talk a bit more about our theory as to why later.
03:11First, I wanna talk about 4K,
03:13because unlike NVIDIA,
03:15AMD gave their $550 card sufficient VRAM
03:19for Ultra HD gaming.
03:21Sure, it's GDDR6 and not GDDR7,
03:24but faster memory is gonna be irrelevant
03:27when you don't have the capacity to keep up.
03:29And there is no better illustration of this
03:32than the way that the 9070 extends its lead
03:35at higher resolutions,
03:36especially when we look at the all-important 1% lows,
03:40which is what determines the smoothness of your gameplay.
03:43Look at Last of Us Part I here.
03:45The 9070 leads by a whopping 23% over the RTX 5070.
03:52Why?
03:53Well, look at the VRAM usage.
03:55On the 5070, it's full,
03:57which results in these gameplay hitches that you see here.
04:01Compare that to the 9070 or to NVIDIA's own cards
04:04that do have 16 gigs and those hitches disappear.
04:08And I mean, sure, not everyone has a 4K monitor
04:11and these limitations don't rear their heads in every game
04:14or even most games,
04:15but still, it's kind of embarrassing
04:18when you're supposed to be the market leader
04:19in gaming GPUs, right?
04:22Overall, the 9000 series does fall a bit short
04:25of true 60 FPS, 4K Ultra gaming,
04:28and in our tests, it did not achieve the lofty margins
04:33over the 7900 GRE that AMD promised in their slides.
04:36But we're not that disappointed yet
04:39because AMD included ray tracing in their averages,
04:42and that is a very different story with these new cards.
04:46Before we look at those results though,
04:48let's dive into what AMD has done
04:50to bring about this generational leap in performance.
04:53To me, the most impressive thing is shrinkage.
04:56The new monolithic die that underpins
04:57both the 9070 and 9070 XT
04:59should have been codenamed Frightened Turtle.
05:01It's built on TSMC's N4C process node
05:04and it cramps 92% as many transistors as the 7900 XTX
05:08into just two thirds of the die area.
05:11This, along with some major improvements
05:12in performance per CU,
05:14is what makes these cards such a compelling value.
05:16Diving deeper into the Compute Engine,
05:18we see vastly improved matrix operations
05:19with support for more data types,
05:21a new dynamic register allocator,
05:22and improvements to the scheduler.
05:25Combine this with dual SIMD32 vector units,
05:27overhauled AI accelerators,
05:28and beefed up ray tracing capabilities,
05:30and you get a card that can do a lot of calculations
05:32all at once, especially when it comes to ray tracing and AI.
05:36But wait, there is more.
05:38Both cards get an improved media engine,
05:40which provides a considerable improvement
05:42for low bitrate encoding during streaming.
05:44YouTube's compression might make this impossible to see,
05:46but to the human eye,
05:47these Twitch-optimized recordings of Returnal,
05:50there's a clear improvement over the 7900 XTX.
05:53And it's even difficult to distinguish AMD
05:55from NVIDIA's NVENC encoding.
05:57We'll talk more about encoding later,
05:58but it's really great to see AMD finally catching up here.
06:01But where AMD is still behind
06:03is in 422 hardware encoding and decoding,
06:06which could make this a less desirable option
06:08for professional video creators,
06:09but it's unlikely to matter for non-pros.
06:12Another slight disappointment compared to the RTX 50 series
06:14is AMD's DisplayPort 2.1a,
06:17which are only UHBR 13.5 rather than UHBR 20.
06:21So these new cards can still do 4K 240 hertz,
06:24but they will rely on display stream compression to do so.
06:26Not a huge deal to me, I find it nigh imperceptible,
06:29but your mileage may vary.
06:30Enough specs, let's talk ray tracing,
06:33where both the new cards beat the 7900 XTX,
06:36a card that was well-received at 1,000 US dollars.
06:39Too bad they don't fare quite as well against NVIDIA.
06:42In Alan Wake 2, the 9070 keeps up with the 5070,
06:46showing just how bad the 5070 is,
06:49but the 5070 Ti provides substantially better performance
06:53than the 9070 XT, giving NVIDIA one clear win
06:57for their overpriced 50 series cards, or one win so far.
07:02In the heavily path-traced Black Myth Wukong,
07:05the 9000 cards handily outclass the 7000 series,
07:09but fall substantially behind NVIDIA's latest,
07:13and as for F124, AMD looks great across the board here,
07:17while the 5070 gets beaten by its own predecessor,
07:21the 4070 Super.
07:25The clown show.
07:26Removing Black Myth Wukong from the equation,
07:28the 9070 family is neck and neck with the competition,
07:32showing that AMD is no longer two generations behind
07:35in ray tracing.
07:36With that said, Black Myth Wukong does in fact exist,
07:40and shows that AMD is still one generation behind,
07:44which may matter in future games.
07:47And even in AMD's own tech demo,
07:49we can see that their path-tracing implementations
07:51struggle with boiling artifacts and ghosting
07:54that reminds me more of last gen's Ray Reconstruction.
07:57Hey, but here's hoping that AMD can continue to catch up
08:01and maybe even surpass NVIDIA in the future.
08:04Maybe.
08:05A guy can dream.
08:06Hey, did we leave a 1080p raster?
08:09We ran those numbers, so dammit, I want them in the video.
08:12Even if the story remains largely the same,
08:14the 5070 Ti is still a pretty bad deal.
08:17It does win, but its margin of victory is so small
08:21compared to the pricing chasm between these cards
08:23that it's really hard to recommend.
08:25So if you are looking for an overkill 1080p upgrade,
08:27the 9070 XT looks like a great way
08:30to push huge FPS numbers in esports titles.
08:33Or any title, if you don't mind a little AI upscaling.
08:36AMD said at one point that they don't think
08:38AI is necessary for upscaling
08:40and they could get the same results
08:41using more traditional means.
08:43Ah, spoken like a company
08:44that did not have AI figured out yet.
08:46The good news is that AMD has used their slow start
08:48to squeeze a lot of image quality out of temporal upscaling
08:51and now that they've added their proprietary
08:52FP8 machine learning model to improve upscaling
08:55even further, the results are very impressive.
08:58Compared to FSR 3.1, we see reductions in artifacting
09:00and improvements in the rendering of fine lines.
09:03There are a few instances where it even beats DLSS 4,
09:05like with these butterflies in Horizon Forbidden West.
09:08On FSR 3, there's unsightly trailing and dissolving
09:10and on DLSS 4, they just kind of are blurry.
09:13But with FSR 4, they appear much crisp and clearer
09:16than either of the other technologies.
09:17Sure, when you look closely, the artifacts are still there,
09:19but it's a marked improvement.
09:21Just like haloing around detailed character models,
09:23it's very heavily reduced
09:24and motion is just sharper in general.
09:26I would say that at least when upscaling to 4K,
09:28I found the image quality of FSR 4
09:30to be no more distracting than that of DLSS 4.
09:32But none of the reduced image quality trade-offs matter
09:34if we don't get better performance.
09:36And compared to DLSS, FSR gives a less substantial
09:40performance uplift at each quality setting than NVIDIA,
09:42in both The Last of Us Part 1 and in Horizon Zero Dawn.
09:46But we do see that AMD's FrameGen provides a better uplift
09:49than NVIDIA's solution,
09:50which indicates that FSR 3.1 FrameGen
09:52has less overhead than NVIDIA's MultiFrameGen.
09:55While AMD doesn't quite match NVIDIA yet,
09:57this is the most competitive their upscaler has been ever.
10:01Except support is a problem.
10:03Even though you can use the driver
10:05to force the updated FSR 4 model in games with FSR 3,
10:08AMD just has less games that use FSR 3.
10:10And unlike DLSS 4, older cards are not able
10:13to take advantage of the new machine learning
10:15and enhanced upscaling.
10:16And AMD still doesn't have a competitor
10:18for MultiFrameGen yet.
10:19However, FSR 4 does have FrameGen,
10:21but it makes use of FSR 3.1's FrameGen implementation.
10:25But you can bring FrameGen to any game
10:27using AMD's driver-level fluid motion frames,
10:29now on version 2.1.
10:31But even with the additional decimal point,
10:33AFMF still sucks.
10:34Without game integration,
10:35you get all these weird UI issues
10:37and overlays get mangled with motion-heavy,
10:39heck, and even motion light scenes.
10:41Let's be real, it's just frame interpolation,
10:43and no number of fancy names can change that.
10:45And if the use case for NVIDIA's FrameGen was already weak,
10:48AFMF feels like it exists only so AMD can say,
10:50actually, we support FrameGen in way more games.
10:55But no, it's gar, no one wants it.
10:57It's, I don't know, who cares?
10:59Despite the swath of shareholder-approved AI junk
11:03in their latest driver software,
11:05AMD falls pretty well short of the mark here.
11:09There are some great gen-over-gen improvements
11:11in computer vision, but even the 4070 Super
11:15manages a sizable lead over the 9070 XT.
11:19The generational gains are even more apparent
11:20in stable diffusion, but the story remains the same.
11:25Finally, there's AI text generation,
11:27and I bet AMD wishes an AI could rewrite
11:30these benchmark results where the new cards
11:33fail to improve substantially over last gen,
11:36and get absolutely dunked on by NVIDIA,
11:38regardless of which model you're using.
11:41The one silver lining is that either of these cards
11:44can run all the same models that the 5080 can,
11:48and can run some that the 5070 cannot,
11:51thanks to AMD's generous 16 gigs of VRAM.
11:56I mean, it's only generous compared to NVIDIA,
11:57but thank you, guys.
12:00Don't be too thankful, though.
12:01AMD still needs to impress in content creation,
12:04where they do okay.
12:06For video editing, the 9070 and 70XT provide good,
12:10but not exceptional performance
12:11in Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve.
12:13And in Blender, the 9070 and 70XT perform about on par
12:18with the flagships from AMD's last generation,
12:21but they still just don't really get anywhere close
12:23to NVIDIA, thanks to optics rendering.
12:26Yeah, there was a transition that I was written
12:28that made more sense before we had to record this.
12:31Speaking of updates, we have some encoder testing for you.
12:33While AMD has made strides to improve their encoder,
12:36they still fall behind in quality
12:38compared to NVIDIA and Intel,
12:39especially at lower bit rates in H.264.
12:42For this encoding test, we only set the bit rate
12:45and no other parameters.
12:46Depending on what encoder tweaks are used,
12:48any of these cards could have improved quality
12:50compared to our tests.
12:52But the simplest way to improve quality is use AV1.
12:55But sadly, we've excluded the 7000 series
12:58from our results due to a hardware bug.
13:00The good news is everyone outputs better quality in AV1,
13:03and AMD is sadly still in last place.
13:06Whew, we are almost there.
13:08Let's talk power and thermals.
13:09Over the past several generations,
13:11AMD has made some substantial improvements to efficiency,
13:14and in their announcement,
13:15they didn't really talk much about it.
13:16I guess they were being modest.
13:18In F124, the 9070 pulls lower power on average
13:21than the 5070, but with less stable power delivery,
13:24having transient spikes as high as 321 watts.
13:28Speaking of which, the 9070 XT has a massive spike
13:31to 426 watts, and its average is 309 watts,
13:34which is already higher than its rated TBP of 305 watts.
13:38And that propensity for pulling profuse power
13:40can be found in combustor,
13:42where both AMD cards also use more
13:44than their rated total board power on average.
13:46But AMD is allowing some partner cards
13:49to use a higher power budget,
13:50so I guess this isn't fully out of spec,
13:53but I would definitely recommend you stick
13:55with the manufacturer-recommended power supply capacity.
13:58And I recommend you check out PSU Circuit
14:00if you need to make an upgrade decision.
14:01Lots of good info there.
14:02Thankfully, despite the power draw,
14:03thermals seem to be under control
14:05on our provided Sapphire pulse samples.
14:07I'm sure in part to their use of PTM7950,
14:09which you can buy for yourself over at lttstore.com.
14:12That's a double plug, double whammy.
14:14Self-promo, baby!
14:15AMD doesn't feel the need to hide GPU hotspot metrics
14:17like Nvidia does, and in combustor,
14:19we see that Sapphire's coolers provide
14:21ample thermal headroom, which is good.
14:23And they're a little big.
14:24They're not obnoxious, but you know, come on.
14:27It does allow the cards to stay much cooler
14:28than say the 5070 or the 6700 XT in F124.
14:32So if you're coming from an older card,
14:33you can confidently upgrade to either the 9070
14:36or the 9070 XT and know you'll get a solid improvement
14:38in raster performance and ray tracing,
14:41which is a big plus for folks
14:42who are on older ray tracing cards like the 2000 series,
14:45or if you're coming from the 6000 series on AMD.
14:48It's just, it's good, it's good.
14:49It's cool, it's nice, we like it, we're happy.
14:51They could be cheaper.
14:53They could be cheaper.
14:54There's kind of two conclusions here.
14:57A short one and a long one.
14:58The short one is that the 9070 XT is a winner.
15:02If AMD can keep this thing in stock
15:04and you have $600 to spend on a gaming GPU,
15:07you are gonna love this thing
15:09and Nvidia needs to respond now,
15:11or AMD might actually take some real market share
15:14for a change.
15:15The long conclusion is that it seems like AMD
15:17is trying to eat their cake and have it too here.
15:20See, the XT's 599 price point
15:22is giving real good guy AMD vibes,
15:25but the 9070 non XT's price is giving maximize margins
15:30while GPUs are in short supply vibes.
15:33By matching the 5070 in both price and performance,
15:37unfortunately, you've also matched it in value.
15:40And let's be real, the 5070 is not a great value.
15:45Once nobody buys the non XT
15:47because the XT is so much better for just 50 more dollars,
15:51you're gonna end up dropping the price on this thing
15:54after the reputational damage has already been done to it.
15:58Did you guys learn nothing
15:59from the terrible initial reception to the 7900 XT?
16:03And it's not like you have just reputation
16:06for days to give up.
16:07You have nothing to compete in the high end.
16:10And sure, 85% of gamers do buy cards under $700.
16:14I'm sure that's true.
16:15But without a high end card at all,
16:18you're giving up precious mindshare.
16:20I mean, we didn't even bother to compare the 9000 series
16:24against Nvidia's last gen flagship, the 4090,
16:27let alone their new flagship.
16:29And yes, 16 gigs of VRAM at 550 bucks is nice,
16:33but it's a bummer that the cheapest way
16:35to get more VRAM in your lineup
16:37is still a last generation 7900 XT.
16:41If you have no plans to compete in the high end,
16:44we need you guys dominating
16:46the mid range and enthusiast segments,
16:48especially because your non gaming performance
16:51still kind of lacking.
16:53Another thing that we need to acknowledge
16:54in our longer conclusion
16:56is the PlayStation shaped elephant in the room.
16:58As impressive as these cards are,
17:01there is still a strong argument to be made
17:03that PC gaming has just plain gotten too expensive
17:06when you can pick up an all in one gaming box
17:09that will already run at 4K
17:10for less than the MSRP of a 9070
17:13and even lesser if you buy it second hand.
17:17Sure, you'll pay more for games
17:18and online services in the long run,
17:20but boy, is it ever a reasonable upfront cost.
17:23But hey, maybe the best is yet to come
17:26on the discrete GPU side.
17:27AMD has announced that 9060 cards will be coming in Q2
17:31and those could provide even better value.
17:34Assuming of course that AMD doesn't launch them
17:36at a high price in order to maximize margin for those ones,
17:39which grosses me out just thinking about it.
17:41What I'm not grossed out by
17:43is ending this video saying that this is truly
17:46probably the best GPU launch of the year
17:48and save for Intel's B580,
17:50perhaps the best launch of the past several years,
17:53if they can keep it in stock.
17:55But as per usual, for you the consumer,
17:58there is no single right answer, just what's right for you.
18:01So whether you wanna go with these new cards
18:03or pay extra for team green or go for a console,
18:07all the power to you.
18:08And all the power to our sponsor.
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18:50Over 70 million players are on the battlefield
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18:53That's way more friends than you would meet
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18:56Thanks for watching, guys.
18:57We are pretty tired from doing back to back to back
19:00to back GPU launches.
19:01Massive shout out to you for watching.
19:04And of course, to our labs team, our editors,
19:06our camera team, our writers, everyone for being part of it.
19:09I think there's a little time to breathe.
19:11Wait, 90, 60 in Q2?
19:12Okay, okay, no.
19:13Oh, and 50, 60 I guess is coming.
19:16Well, whatever.
19:17If you like this video, check out, I don't know,
19:1950 AD review.