After a long wait, the future of AMD’s best graphics cards is finally here. The company just announced the RX 9000 series, comprised of two new GPUs: The RX 9070 XT and the RX 9070. Both are set to launch on March 6. While the GPUs sound thrilling, I’m left with several questions even though AMD truly filled in the gaps on RDNA 4.
AMD initially teased RDNA 4, or RX 9000 series, during CES 2025. However, it took nearly two months for more concrete information to arrive, and today, it’s all finally here.
AMD’s focus throughout the presentation was the fact that gamers buy mainstream GPUs more often than behemoths along the lines of the RTX 5090. To that end, AMD cited its own research, saying that 85% of gamers buy GPUs that cost less than $700. At the same time, higher resolutions are slowly becoming mainstream, with more and more people buying 1440p and 4K monitors. The needs of gamers have gone up, now including solid performance in ray tracing, but keeping it affordable is important too.
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That’s where my first question comes in: How much these GPUs will cost. AMD didn’t reveal that key piece of information during the press briefing, but it’ll come up during the event, at which point we’ll update this article. Until we know the price, it’s hard to speculate about where RDNA 4 will land among competing cards, but at least we have a lot of specs and some benchmarks to go over here.
The specs of RDNA 4 have been leaked months ago, and it turns out that leakers got a lot of it right. The flagship RX 9070 XT serves up 64 compute units (CUs), 64 hardware ray tracing (HW RT) accelerators, and 128 AI accelerators. The boost clock nearly hits 3GHz, maxing out at 2.97GHz, which means that overclocked GPUs will definitely go past that threshold. The card comes with 16GB of VRAM across a 256-bit bus, and this memory configuration also applies to the RX 9070 non-XT. The flagship has a total board power (TBP) of 304 watts.
The RX 9070 cuts back on every spec, scaling down to 56 CUs and a maximum clock speed of 2.52GHz. On the other hand, the power consumption is also significantly lower, now at 220 watts.
Both GPUs will use GDDR6 memory. AMD chose to stick to GDDR6, clocked at 20Gbps, which it found to offer the best balance of performance and cost. Nvidia’s RTX 50-series already made the switch to GDDR7, having used GDDR6X in the previous generation, but AMD offsets for the loss of bandwidth by adding plenty of VRAM to its GPUs.
AMD revealed some benchmarks for both GPUs, and they seem pretty great. However, when comparing to Nvidia, it used an RTX 3090 as opposed to something from a current generation. AMD explained that this was because people who bought the RTX 30-series will be looking to upgrade now, but it would’ve been nice to see some scores for that.
Regardless, the RX 9070 is said to offer up to 21% faster performance than the RX 7900 GRE at 4K, which is a sizeable uplift. Meanwhile, the RX 9070 XT will be up to 42% faster at 4K, while also showing solid ray tracing improvements.
With the new compute unit (CU) in RDNA 4, AMD was able to boost efficiency, clock speeds, and register allocation. The new graphics cards will come equipped with third-gen ray tracing accelerators, which will offer 2x ray tracing throughput per CU. Historically, AMD trailed behind Nvidia in ray tracing, but it’s certainly making improvements in that regard.
The new GPUs will also come with second-gen AI accelerators, which AMD promises will result in up to 8x faster AI performance when compared to RDNA 3. The die size is at about 350mm2, and the transistor count at around 44 billion. AMD also revealed that the GPU was built on a 4nm process.
The RX 9000 series makes the switch to PCIe 5.0, and it also offers DisplayPort 2.1a and HDMI 2.1b support.
