AMD RX 9070 Review ft. Sapphire

1. Introduction2. Meet the Sapphire RX 9070 Pulse3. Testing Methodology4. Alan Wake II5. Black Myth: Wukong6. Cyberpunk 20777. Final Fantasy XVI8. Forza Horizon 59. Ghost of Tsushima10. Horizon Forbidden West11. The Last of Us Part 112. A Plague Tale: Requiem13. Senua's Saga: Hellblade 214. Starfield15. Total War: Warhammer III16. Performance Summary (12-Game Average)17. Cost Per Frame Analysis18. Ray Tracing: Alan Wake II19. Ray Tracing: Black Myth: Wukong20. Ray Tracing: Cyberpunk 207721. Ray Tracing: F1 2422. Ray Tracing: Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart23. Ray Tracing: Returnal24. Ray Tracing: Shadow of the Tomb Raider25. Ray Tracing: Star Wars Outlaws26. Ray Tracing Performance Summary27. AI & Productivity Benchmarks28. Clock Speed29. GPU Temperatures30. Memory Temperatures31. Acoustics32. Power Draw: 1080p33. Power Draw: 1440p34. Power Draw: 2160p (4K)35. Performance per Watt: 1080p36. Performance per Watt: 1440p37. Performance per Watt: 2160p (4K)38. Total System Power Draw39. Closing Thoughts40. View All Pages

Here we present frame rate figures for each graphics card, averaged across all 12 games on test today. These figures can disguise significant variations in performance from game to game, but provide a useful overview of the sort of performance you can expect at each resolution tested.

Overall then, there's no doubt the RX 9070 delivers impressive rasterisation performance. At 1440p it averages 89fps, putting it bang in line with the RTX 4070 Ti Super, so it holds a strong 15% advantage over the RTX 5070. I do want to stress at this point that we highly recommend reading/watching other reviews where possible – some of the performance swings versus Nvidia are quite pronounced, so there will be varying results depending on what games are tested. Even compared against prior RNDA 3 GPUs, though, the 9070 is delivering pretty much 7900 XT performance, while it's 18% faster than the 7900 GRE.

Up at 4K, we're now looking at a 16% gain over the 5070 on average, while performance is still pretty much dead level with the 4070 Ti Super and 7900 XT. It's also 20% faster than the 7900 GRE, pretty much in line with AMD's claims.

Just to take a closer look at performance versus the 5070, here we can see the 9070's relative performance compared to its GeForce competitor. I didn't see a single instance where the RDNA 4 GPU proved slower, though five of the twelve games tested saw single digit improvements. While Forza Horizon 5 and Ghost of Tsushima are clear outliers, if we remove them from the average, the 9070 only goes from being 15% faster to being 11% faster, so it doesn't really affect the outcome in any meaningful way.

At 4K, we generally saw the 9070 scale slightly better than at 1440p, though it does vary from game to game. The Last of Us Part 1 delivered the biggest win over the 5070, with a 32% margin in favour of the Radeon GPU.

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