AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT price, release date, and specs

AMD has finally lifted the lid on the fastest new gaming GPU in its RDNA 4 lineup, with a surprisingly competitive price, and incredible performance. In our own tests, we found that the new AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is significantly more powerful than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070, and its new FSR 4 upscaling tech looks great too.

You can head over to our full AMD Radeon RX best graphics card. AMD has historically always lagged behind Nvidia when it comes to ray tracing, but it's made up a lot of ground here, including now having full path tracing .

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT release date

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT release date is Thursday, March 6, 2025, coming just a day after the launch of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070, and shortly after the RTX 5070 Ti launch as well. AMD promises "wide availability" on this date, and there will be no AMD-made reference model, with cards instead coming from several third-party manufacturers, including Acer, Asus, ASRock, Gigabyte, PowerColor, XFX, and Sapphire.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT price

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT price is $599, which is seriously competitive for the performance on offer. That's just $50 more than the 12GB RTX 5070, and $150 less than the RTX 5070 Ti.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT specs

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT specs include 16GB of VRAM, 64 compute units, and 128 AI cores.

AMD has made several key improvements to its core GPU architecture with RDNA 4. This includes a new compute unit design, which can run at higher clock speeds than before, and which AMD also says is more efficient than its predecessor. There are 64 compute units in the 9070 XT, which is only a little more than the 60 found in the Radeon RX 7800 XT and much lower than the 80 in the Radeon RX 7900 GRE. However, while the 7800 XT clock speed only boosts to 2,430MHz, the 9070 XT can boost all the way to 2.97GHz.

That new compute unit also contains a new ray tracing core design with RDNA 4, which AMD claims doubles the ray tracing throughput per compute unit compared to RDNA 3. The new GPUs are now capable of running path tracing in games as well, which was a real struggle for the company's last-gen GPUs.

In our tests, even with frame gen and FSR upscaling enabled, the Radeon RX 7800 XT can only average 46fps with path tracing at 1440p in Cyberpunk 2077, for example, compared with 93fps for the RTX 4070 Ti and 72fps for the 4070. However, the 9070 XT averages a much healthier 92fps in this game, as we found in our own tests.

Meanwhile, new demanding games such as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle don't even run path tracing on AMD's RDNA 3 GPUs, but these settings are now available on the new GPU. There are 64 of AMD's new RDNA 4 ray accelerator cores in the Radeon RX 9070 XT, compared to 60 in the Radeon RX 7800 XT and 80 in the Radeon RX 7900 GRE.

Another key part of the spec is the 16GB of VRAM, which is the same amount found in the Radeon RX 7800 XT, and gives this card and its smaller sibling an edge over the 12GB GeForce RTX 5070. The latter might have Multi Frame Gen at its disposal, but that's no use in situations where the GPU doesn't have enough VRAM to render the original frames smoothly in the first place. In our tests, for example, we've found that 12GB is a serious bottleneck on a GPU if you max out the path tracing in a demanding game such as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

AMD also claims to have made strides in its AI performance with this new GPU architecture, thanks to a new matrix core design (like Nvidia's Tensor cores). The company cites a peak AI performance figure of 1,557 TOPS, compared to a claimed 1,406 TOPS for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti.

Until now, AMD hasn't really used its matrix cores in games, but the introduction of FSR 4 sees the company finally using machine learning and AI hardware for resolution upscaling, and it looked great when we had a chance to try it for our FSR 4 test at CES.

AMD says that FSR 4 will be ed in 30 games at launch, including Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Marvel Rivals, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, and Space Marine 2, with over 75 more games ing the new tech later in 2025.

AMD says that its new AI cores are also "neural rendering ready" and cites neural radiance cache as an example – a tech that looked really promising when we tested neural rendering in Half-Life 2 RTX at CES.

If you want to see what the 9070 XT is up against, you can find out all about the 9070 XT's nearest competition by reading our RTX 5070 review. You can also follow us on Google News for daily PC hardware news, reviews, and guides, or our community Discord to stay in the know.