ASRock Radeon RX 9070 XT Taichi OC 16 GB Graphics Card Review – 3.1 GHz RDNA 4 With Fantastic Cooling & Gaming Performance

AMD Radeon RX 9000 RDNA 4 Series - Radeon RX 9070 XT

The first two cards within the AMD RDNA 4 lineup were the Radeon RX 9070 XT and the RX 9070. These cards are positioned against the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 series products from NVIDIA.

After looking at the launch lineup, you might be wondering what happened to higher-end SKUs such as the 9080 (RX 7900 successor). Well, the company decided it was prime time to it would focus on getting things right where the majority of the gaming audiences spend their money, & unlike NVIDIA, which can invest in all segments, including the ultra-enthusiast GPU market, AMD chose the high-end and mainstream segments. So, as of right now, AMD's strategy is to build up market share, and RDNA 4's positioning is said to kick-start their winning streak.

So, with that out of the way, let's start by taking a look at the specifications of the Radeon RX 9070 XT & RX 9070 graphics cards before diving into the official performance figures.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT - The Almost 3 GHz RDNA 4

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU features the full Navi 48 (XT) SKU with a total of 64 compute units or 3584 cores. In addition to the CUs, it features 128 ROPS, 56 ray tracing accelerators, and 112 hardware AI accelerators. The reference GPU is clocked at up to 2520 MHz. The total board power is maintained at 220W, which is around 17% higher than Radeon RX 7900 GRE & RX 7800 XT GPUs.

On the memory front, the card comes with 16 GB of GDDR6 memory operating at 20 Gbps across a 256-bit wide bus interface. This provides the card with 640 GB/s of total bandwidth, but there's also 64 MB of 3rd Gen Infinity Cache, which should also deliver higher available bandwidth to the GPU. It also features PCIe 5.0 x16 functionality, and the reference design is shown powered by two 8-pin power connectors, though this model won't be available for sale.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 - The More Efficient RDNA 4

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 GPU features a cut-down Navi 48 (XL) SKU with a total of 56 compute units or 4096 cores. In addition to the CUs, it features 128 ROPS, 56 ray tracing accelerators, and 128 hardware AI accelerators. The reference GPU is clocked at up to 2970 MHz, so we can expect over 3 GHz factory overclocks. The TBP is maintained at 220W, which is 25W lower than the Radeon RX 7700 XT.

On the memory front, the card comes with the same 16 GB of GDDR6 memory operating at 20 Gbps across a 256-bit wide bus interface. This provides the card with 640 GB/s of total bandwidth, but there's also 64 MB of 3rd Gen Infinity Cache, which should also deliver higher available bandwidth to the GPU. It also features PCIe 5.0 x16 functionality.

RDNA 4's Gaming Performance (Official)

AMD is also sharing the first official performance figures for the Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070 GPUs, which are as follows:

• Radeon RX 9070 XT vs RX 6900 XT (4K Max) -> +51% Faster AVG
• Radeon RX 9070 XT vs RX 7900 GRE (4K Max) -> +42% Faster AVG
• Radeon RX 9070 XT vs RTX 3090 (4K Max) -> +26% Faster AVG
• Radeon RX 9070 XT vs RX 7900 GRE (1440P Max) -> +38% Faster AVG

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The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is said to deliver an average 42% gain on average at 4K Max and 38% gain on average at 1440P Max against the Radeon RX 7900 GRE. The gains can be as much as 44% in native rasterized titles and up to 68% in native ray-tracing games. The company also uses an RX 6900 XT and RTX 3090 comparison at their respective $999 and $1499 US price points, though it would have been better to compare them against 7900 XTX or RTX 4090 GPUs, since these two are also priced the same.

• Radeon RX 9070 vs RX 6800 XT (4K Max) -> +38% Faster AVG
• Radeon RX 9070 vs RX 7900 GRE (4K Max) -> +21% Faster AVG
• Radeon RX 9070 vs RTX 3080 (4K Max) -> +26% Faster AVG
• Radeon RX 9070 vs RX 7900 GRE (1440P Max) -> +20% Faster AVG

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For the Radeon RX 9070, AMD claims a 21% average gain at 4K and a 20% average gain at 1440p vs the 7900 GRE. The RX 9070 offers up to 28% gains in native rasterized and up to 34% gains in native raytracing performance versus the same 7900 GRE. The RX 9070 is also compared to older cards such as the RX 6800 XT and RTX 3080. The 9070 sits at 38% faster than the 6800 XT and 26% faster than the RTX 3080, but once again, these cards should be replaced by newer options such as the RTX 4070 Ti and the RX 7900 XT, which are now selling at the same price points.

FSR 4 & HYPR-RX Performance Delivers More Gaming Smoothness

AMD is also sharing HYPR-RX figures, which can offer almost 3x performance gains versus the native render using the latest upscaling and Frame Gen technologies in games such as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, and Star Citizen.

In Space Marine 2 at 4K, FSR 4 offers a boost of up to 3.4x, which pushes the FPS from an average of 53 at the native renderer to an average of 182 FPS (Performance mode).

There are a lot of FSR 4 & HYPR-RX performance figures shared by the Red team, and the main point is to showcase the FPS boost to over 150-200 on average versus just 60–90 FPS at native resolutions.

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For AI enthusiasts, AMD's Radeon RX 9000 GPUs offer a big uplift versus the RDNA 3 lineup. In AI, you get an average uplift of 55% while content creation sees a nice uplift of 16.25%. Gen AI perf is also dramatically boosted up to 4.1x using the ONNX runtime, and memory usage is also reduced significantly.

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Then we have FSR 4 support, which is being extended to over 60 game titles today. With FSR 4's frame-generation, leveraging machine learning, AI upscaling, and frame-gen, the new tech will boost FSP in games by up to 3.4x. A lot of good things are being said about FSR 4, which has now come close to NVIDIA's DLSS 4 in terms of image quality.

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DLSS 4 still holds the upper hand with its MFG modes that enable up to 4x frame-gen, but the Red team has some cool tricks planned in the future FSR updates, such as the "Redstone" release which is expected in the second half of 2025 & will deliver various improvements including Neural Radiance Caching, ML Ray Regeneration for accurate and faster ray tracing, ML Super Resolution and ML Frame Generation.

The Pricing & Availability

In terms of pricing, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT retails for $599 US, which puts it between the RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti (at MSRP). This is $100 US higher than the $499 US store price of the RX 7900 GRE at the moment and the RX 9070 retails for $549 US, which is the same price as the RTX 5070, but the RDNA 4 offering comes with more VRAM (16 GB vs 12 GB) and should be great competition.

Availability of both cards began 6th of March, and several AIB models were available from partners such as ACER, ASUS, ASRock, Gigabyte, PowerColor, Sapphire, XFX, Yeston, and Vastarmor.

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AMD Radeon RX 9000 "RDNA 4" GPU Specs:

GPU	Radeon RX 9070 XT	Radeon RX 9070	Radeon RX 9070 GRE 16 GB	Radeon RX 9070 GRE 12 GB	Radeon RX 9060 XT	Radeon RX 9060	Radeon RX 9050?
Architecture	RDNA 4	RDNA 4	RDNA 4	RDNA 4	RDNA 4	RDNA 4	RDNA 4
GPU SKU	Navi 48	Navi 48	Navi 48	Navi 48	Navi 44	Navi 44	Navi 44
Process Node	TSMC 4nm	TSMC 4nm	TSMC 4nm	TSMC 4nm	TSMC 4nm	TSMC 4nm	TSMC 4nm
Transistor Count	53.9 Billion	53.9 Billion	53.9 Billion	53.9 Billion	29.7 Billion	29.7 Billion	29.7 Billion
Die Size	357mm2	357mm2	357mm2	357mm2	199mm2	199mm2	TBD
Compute Units	64	56	TBD	48	32	28	TBD
Ray Accelerators	64	56	TBD	48	32	28	TBD
AI Accelerators	128	112	TBD	96	64	56	TBD
Stream Processors	4096	3584	TBD	3072	2048	1792	TBD
Game Clock	2400 MHz	2070 MHz	TBD	2220 MHz	2530 MHz	TBD	TBD
Boost Clock	2970 MHz	2540 MHz	TBD	2790 MHz	3130 MHz	2990 MHz	TBD
Peak FP32	48.7 TFLOPs	36.1 TFLOPs	TBD	34.3 TFLOPs	25.6 TFLOPs	21.4 TFLOPS	TBD
Peak FP16	97.3 TFLOPs	72.3 TFLOPs	TBD	68.6 TFLOPs	51.3 TFLOPs	42.9 TFLOPS	TBD
Peak INT8	779 TOPS (Sparsity)	578 TOPS (Sparsity)	TBD	549 TOPS (Sparsity)	410 TOPS (Sparsity)	343 TOPS	TBD
Peak INT4	1557 TOPS (Sparsity)	1156 TOPS (Sparsity)	TBD	1097 TOPS (Sparsity)	821 TOPS (Sparsity)	686 TOPS	TBD
ROPS	128	128	TBD	96	64	64	TBD
Infinity Cache	64 MB	64 MB	64 MB?	48 MB	32 MB	32 MB	TBD
Memory	16 GB GDDR6	16 GB GDDR6	16 GB GDDR6	12 GB GDDR6	8/16 GB GDDR6	8 GB GDDR6	TBD
Memory Speed	20 Gbps	20 Gbps	18 Gbps?	18 Gbps	20 Gbps	18 Gbps	TBD
Bus Interface	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	192-bit	128-bit	128-bit	TBD
PCIe Interface	PCIe 5.0 x16	PCIe 5.0 x16	PCIe 5.0 x16	PCIe 5.0 x16	PCIe 5.0 x16	PCIe 5.0 x16	TBD
TBP	304W	220W	TBD	220W	150-182W	TBD	TBD
Price	$599 US	$549 US	TBD	4199 RMB	$299/$349 US	TBD	TBD
Launch	6th March, 2025	6th March, 2025	Sep-Oct 2025	8th May, 2025	2025	TBD	TBD

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