The full details of the new AMD Radeon RX 9070 gaming GPU have been officially revealed, and the new GPU seriously threatens the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070, which has the same MSRP. The new graphics card makes big strides when it comes to ray tracing performance, and it also supports AMD’s new fine-looking FSR 4 upscaling tech to improve frame rates without making your games look like a blurry mess.
You can now read all about this new GPU by reading our full AMD Radeon RX 9070 review, where we found a graphics card that generally beats the RTX 5070, although the latter still has the upper hand when it comes to path tracing. The Radeon RX 9070 now also has a place on our best graphics card guide, although its main competitor is arguably its own bigger sibling, the 9070 XT.
AMD Radeon RX 9070 release date
The AMD Radeon RX 9070 release date was Thursday, March 6, 2025, meaning it went head to head with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070, which comes out in the same week. AMD said there would be “wide availability” of the new GPU on this date, and while there does appear to have been lots of stock released, it’s currently hard to find in stock.
AMD Radeon RX 9070 price
The Radeon RX 9070 price is $549, which is exactly the same as the price of the 12GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070. With more VRAM at its disposal, and generally faster performance, the 9070 is generally the better buy. However, the price is also only $50 less than the Radeon RX 9070 XT price, which means it’s also threatened by AMD’s own top-end chip.
AMD Radeon RX 9070 specs
The AMD Radeon RX 9070 specs include 16GB of VRAM, 56 compute units, and a 2.54GHz boost clock speed.
| AMD Radeon RX 9070 specs | |
| Architecture | AMD RDNA 4 |
| Compute units | 56 |
| RT cores | 56 |
| AI cores | 112 |
| Game clock | 2.1GHz |
| Boost clock | 2.54GHz |
| VRAM | 16GB GDDR6 |
| Infinity cache | 64MB |
| Memory interface | 256-bit |
| Peak AI TOPS | 1,165 |
| Interface | 16x PCIe 5.0 |
| Power draw | 220W |
This new lineup of GPUs sees AMD moving to the new RDNA 4 GPU architecture, which AMD says not only improves ray tracing and AI performance, but can also hit higher clock speeds than equivalent last-gen GPUs. The 9070 contains 56 of AMD’s new RDNA 4 compute units, compared to 64 in the 9070 XT.
That’s four fewer than the 60 compute units in the Radeon RX 7800 XT, but the substantial improvements to the compute unit design make up this shortfall. At stock speed, the RX 9070 also has a top boost clock of 2.54GHz, which is a fair way below the 2.97GHz of the 9070 XT, but still higher than the 2.43GHz of the 7800 XT.
One of the key new elements with this GPU design is, of course, the new ray tracing core, which AMD says is significantly quicker than the old RDNA 3 design, doubling the ray tracing throughput, and we saw big improvements in our own tests. This generation also sees AMD properly discussing path tracing in its marketing materials, and it can definitely now handle path tracing in Cyberpunk 2077, although we found it struggles with the Full RT settings in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
Importantly, unlike the RTX 5070, the Radeon RX 9070 also comes with 16GB of VRAM. It’s not GDDR7, but in our tests we’ve found that VRAM capacity is becoming more and more important as you start enabling advanced features such as path tracing, even in games that are out already.
As a case in point, you can’t max out the settings in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on a 12GB card, as we found in our GeForce RTX 5070 review. Even at 1080p, as it pushes the VRAM to its limit and frame rates fall off a cliff.
The Radeon RX 9070 has one RT core per compute unit, so you get 56 of them in the new GPU. That’s lower than the 60 in the Radeon RX 7800 XT, but the new RT core design will hopefully make up for the shortfall in numbers. The other key new feature with RDNA 4 is an apparently greatly-improved AI core architecture, with AMD introducing a new design of its matrix cores (AMD’s equivalent of Nvidia’s Tensor cores).
Going head to head with Nvidia, AMD cites a peak AI performance figure of 1,165 TOPS, compared to 988 for the RTX 5070, though it’s always best to take companies’ own claims for these figures with a grain of salt until we can properly test them.
The big deal here for gamers is the introduction of AMD’s first resolution upscaling tech based on machine learning, and requiring the use of AMD’s new matrix cores in the 9070 and 9070 XT. It’s called FSR 4, and it massively improves image quality compared to FSR 3, with a significantly sharper image, and much less ghosting and blurriness. You can read our FSR 4 test, where we played with the tech in Ratchet and Clank at CES, for more information about it.
FSR 4 is potentially a big deal for AMD. Historically, FSR has seriously lagged behind DLSS when it comes to image quality, particularly now it’s up against Nvidia DLSS 4 with the new transformer model, and FSR 4 looks set to close that gap.
It all depends on game support, though, and AMD says that FSR 4 will be supported in 30 games at launch, including Marvel Rivals, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, and Space Marine 2, with over 75 more FSR4 games promised to come later in 2025. AMD says that its new AI cores are also “neural rendering ready” and cites neural radiance cache as an example – a tech that looked really promising when we tested neural rendering in Half-Life 2 RTX at CES.
As we mentioned earlier, though, the biggest problem for the Radeon RX 9070 is the fact that the 9070 XT only costs $50 more, and is substantially more powerful. You can check out our full Radeon RX 9070 XT review to see how this GPU copes with our current game benchmark suite.
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