AMD announce the RDNA 4 with two new cards, RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 XTX
At CES, AMD sort of announced their next line of video cards. While they were presented to us during a press briefing before CES, they didn’t really mention it during their keynote address. Nevertheless, AMD was talking about it when I met with them in a private meeting, but today you get all the answers for RDNA 4.
RDNA 4 consists of two video cards at launch, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 and AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT. As mentioned during my CES coverage, AMD renumbered their graphics card line to match up with NVIDIA’s lineup and lets you know quickly what the card’s competing against. For this line they wanted to address the people who spend under $700. Considering that the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti has an MSRP of $750 (Good luck finding it at that price) and the GeForce RTX 5070 has an MSRP of $549, AMD needs to aggressively price RDNA 4 in order to capture market share. NVIDIA’s having a lot of problems with the Blackwell launch and AMD has the perfect opportunity to strike and increase their customer base.
AMD says their two RDNA 4 cards are about 40% faster than RDNA3. Along with improved rasterization speeds, AMD made improving ray tracing one of their main goals for this generation and added a second ray intersection engine to help with that goal. With a dedicated ray transformation block, AMD thinks they have doubled the throughput of their ray tracing capabilities.
Of course, the big buzz word these days is AI and AMD has made RDNA 4 more AI performant. They are touting double the FP16 performance, quadruple the INT8 and FP16 with Sparsity performance, and are pushing 8X performance in INT8 with Sparsity. It’ll be interesting to see how these cards match up to the competition in AI performance.
From the chart below, you can see the differences between the RX 9070 and the RX 9070 XT. The RX 9070 will have 8 less RDNA 4 Compute Units, 8 less HW RT Accelerators, 16 less HW AI Accelerators, and clocked a little bit lower. It does also have a lower TGP at 220W versus the 304W of the XT version. But, both cards do come with 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM with a bandwidth of 20 Gb/s. I know the public wants more VRAM in these cards, but AMD feels 16GB is more than enough for 4K and 1440P gaming.
While AMD didn’t have any Blackwell cards to compare it to, they are saying the RX 9070 is on average 26% faster than the GeForce RTX 3080 at 4K settings. When compared to the RX 7900 GRE, AMD is touting an increase of 20% to 21% on average gaming at 1440P and 4K respectively in both native rendering and using raytracing.
Going to the RX 9070 XT, AMD claims it’ll also be 26% faster on average, but this time over a GeForce RTX 3090. Compared to the RX 7900 GRE, we’re talking on average a 38% uplift and a 42% uplift in 1440P and 4K gaming respectively.
Interestingly enough, they didn’t say how it compares to the Ada Lovelace side of things in their slides as I’m sure many people would like to have seen that, but they did have a slide against the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti today during their announcement.
On the software side of things, AMD continues to improve their suite of products to enhance gaming. The big one is AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 or FSR4. AMD’s FSR looks to improve on the image quality when upscaling games. In the one image below, you can see the quality improvements in the building’s extended structure even over native rendering. They look more accurate and more visible. AMD’s FSR technology has been a little bit behind compared to NVIDIA’s DLSS technology so it’s good to see the improvement. AMD has said that FSR4 will only be on the two RDNA 4 cards at launch, but hopefully it’ll come to older GPUs in the near future. At launch, there will be around 30 or so games that will have FSR4 available with more than 75 coming this year.
With NVIDIA touting multi frame generation, AMD has looked into that technology, but is solely focused on improving single frame generation for now. Which makes sense to me as you want to get that working as best as possible. You really need a good base frame rate to have multi frame generation work well and even then it’s only for some special use cases.
If you use your video card for content creation, AMD has improved the media engine with RDNA 4. The cards will support encoding and decoding in H.264, HEVC, and AV1 at up to 8K and 80FPS. And one nice improvement over NVIDIA, there are no limits to the number of streams the card can facilitate whereas NVIDIA artificially limits that in their consumer cards.
So when can you get these cards? They will be available March 6th from various AIB partners. There won’t be a first party card coming from AMD themselves on this one, but they said there’s going to be plenty of stock from all the vendors that are producing these cards.
Price wise, AMD really needs to hit this one out of the park. During the press briefing last week, they didn’t mention any word on how much these cards will cost. And up until today, we didn’t know, which is rather odd. NVIDIA’s recent troubles would have you believe AMD’s got the one of the absolute best times to start turning around their graphics card division, just like they did against Intel many years ago and with a great price, this would be a great time to start that turn.
So how much are the two cards going to cost? $549 for the RX 9070, which is a good starting price. That matches the GeForce RTX 5070 MSRP so if it offers better performance at that price, then it’s a compelling alternative to NVIDIA’s card.
RX 9070 XT at $599 is even a better deal on paper. AMD states an OC version that’s coming will be 2% worse than the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti and that card has a MSRP of $749. Again, that is if you can find it for that price. Of course, that depends on how much the OC version will be, but if you can overclock the standard RX 9070 XT to that level and get better RTX 5070 Ti performance at around 20% less than its competitor, that’s a really great value. I’m glad AMD didn’t go NVIDIA price - $50 here and it shows AMD is really trying to be aggressive with RDNA 4.
Of course, this depends on availability at that price. As we’ve seen with NVIDIA, it doesn’t mean much if you set a price and barely anyone can get the card at that price. Hopefully, we’ll have a good amount of supply come March 6th and a good amount of consumers can order one without issues. I think AMD, on paper, looks to really have a great offering here. We’ll see how it is once reviews come out.
