AMD's RX 9070 XT and 9070 are the Most Exciting GPUs in Years
Published: 04-10-2025
NVIDIA Better Watch Out!
Image Credit: AMD
Let’s face it—the modern GPU market isn’t in great shape. NVIDIA might be the market leader in this space, but the company’s focus is elsewhere entirely these days. After all, about 97% of its revenue now comes from selling chips for AI applications, with general graphics customers making up a tiny minority of its business.
The Blackwell-based 50-series launch hasn’t gone well either, with melting power connectors, cards missing ROPs, and a distinct lack of actual stock to buy, at least anywhere near MSRP.
It’s into these troubled times that AMD comes out swinging with the RX 9070 and 9070 XT. With promises of plenty stock, and pricing that seems almost reasonable, could these be the GPUs to guide us through the storm?
AMD’s Upper Middle-Class Champions
The 9070 and 9070 XT are aimed at roughly the RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti level of performance, which means they are nowhere near NVIDIA’s top-tier cards in performance, but few people are going to complain about something as capable as a 5070, and there are perks here that don’t relate to raw performance.
On the point of performance, however, AMD has put a lot of work into improving the ray-tracing performance of its cards, and while the 9070 cards don’t quite march Blackwell in this regard, if you were staying away from NVIDIA specifically for ray tracing performance you’ll find these cards are perfectly adequate.
No Melting Power Cables?
AMD has stuck with the standard 2x8-Pin PCIe power connectors, since these cards aren’t 600W monsters that need active cooling just to keep the wires in one piece. This is also the full chip for this generation of card (in the 9070 XT) so barring third-party overclocked cards that’s the extent of the power draw you’ll see.
VRAM for Days
For some reason, NVIDIA tends to be quite stingy with its VRAM, and even the 5070 only comes with 12GB of the stuff, while the 5070 Ti has 16GB.
Both of the RX 9070 cards come with 16GB of VRAM, which is great news if you’re on a budget and mainly care about VRAM, which is a big deal for things like running local AI LLMs.
Pricing and Availability
At $549 and $599 respectively, AMD has priced these cards to sell. However, that’s just the MSRP and we all know how little that can mean. After all, the RTX 5090 is meant to be a $2000 card, but even bulk sellers are asking as much as $3000 for them! In private sales people are asking $4000 or more—and people are paying it!
So we do expect that if demand is high enough, and because there are no reference cards, that these two 9070-series cards will go for more than the suggested price, but AMD has promised lots and lots of supply, so hopefully the markup won’t be as mad.
Also, with only a $50 price difference between the two cards, it makes little sense to ever buy the cut-down 9070, except that we expect that stock of the 9070 will be higher than the XT and so the real-world price-gap will be higher, which makes the plain 9070 potentially more attractive.
It won’t be long before we know how all the third-party cards shake out and what the pricing situation will be, but you can be sure that if AMD’s latest cards offer good enough value, we’ll be one of the first to integrate them into our hand-built workstation.
|
