Best Bang for Buck at 4K

How much do you need to spend to get the most out of your games at 4K? There’s no such thing as a true budget option, but the Radeon RX 9070 XT is—at the moment—your best, most cost-effective recourse. At $600, this graphics card is so solid for achieving playable framerates at max settings and 4K, it’s almost enough to make you forget about DLSS 4’s and Nvidia’s oft-touted multi-frame gen… almost.

AMD’s aggressive pricing gives two competing products a punch in the gut. One of those is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti at $750 MSRP, or the expected base price. The other is AMD’s own $550 Radeon RX 9070 (our review is coming soon). If the RX 9070 is supposed to be equivalent in performance to Nvidia’s $550 RTX 5070, then the extra $50 for the XT is a no-brainer for any PC gamer who wants juggle more hardcore, 4K gaming scenarios on desktop. The RTX 5070 Ti may have the edge in some games, but that hardly matters when stock issues have put that card above $800 or—in some cases—even close to $1,000.

The RX 9070 XT’s strengths all depend on whether AMD can meet demand. If stocks hold, the scalpers don’t get overwhelm supply, and you can find one at MSRP, it’s easily one of the best bang-for-buck options available this year. It may not be as flashy as a new Nvidia RTX 5080 Founders Edition, but you shouldn’t need to pay over $1,000 to play your games at 4K. If AMD is right about one thing, it’s that the focus of the market should be on mid-range GPUs, not those at the top end.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t issues. On a technical level, I had several problems running games with the prerelease version of AMD’s drivers and its Adrenalin software. I also experienced buggy visuals, frame hitching, and occasional crashes in some games that I did not experience on Nvidia’s latest cards, even with Team Green’s beta drivers. Those cards have their own litany of issues—both intended and unintended—so I’m not implying AMD is the only one with drawbacks. I tested the AMD GPUs on a system with an Intel CPU. I suspect AMD will play nicer with AMD’s chips, but that’s no excuse.

With its rough edges sanded off, I can imagine the Radeon RX 9070 XT as the sleeper hit of the GPU release season. And I hope its a sleeper hit, since, if it gets too popular, we may have yet another stock SNAFU to whine about.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT Shows Us That $50 Can Make a World of Difference

For review, AMD sent Gizmodo the XFX Swift AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT. It’s a sleek-looking, three-fan card whose aesthetic is aided by an angled edge that made it appear like a mini skyscraper inside my test PC. It is also a big, big card. XFX’s version of the XT is a 3.5 slot GPU, meaning it takes up enough room on my PC’s motherboard to exclude an entire PCIe slot. I would suggest you take a look at various GPUs from the full range of OEMs (AMD partners with a variety of card makers) to make sure your PC case has enough room for both your new graphics card and extra drives you planned to slot in.

Both the RX 9070 and 9070 XT include 16 GB of GDDR6 memory with a 644.6 GB/s bandwidth. Both cards are based on the new RDNA 4 architecture. This is compared to Nvidia’s Blackwell of the RTX 50-series, which is a port of the company’s AI training chip architecture. RDNA is made up of compute units, though these have been redesigned for the new graphics hardware compared to past cards like the Radeon RX 7900 series. These new units should support higher clock speeds than RDNA 3, and they should be more power efficient to boot.

Both the 9070 and 9070 XT work on a PCIe 5.0 bus, though the more expensive card ups its boost clock speed to 2.9 GHz. Despite housing the same memory, AMD’s two latest graphics cards are very different in most ways that matter. The $600 graphics card has 64 compute units versus the 9070’s 56. That shows up in benchmarks, where the RX 9070 XT sees sizable uptick in graphical and AI performance. Good thing, then, that the capabilities of this card are just enough to make it nearly ideal for 4K gaming at a budget.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT Manages Solid Framerates for 4K

For $600, there’s simply no comparison in performance between other GPUs for playing games at 4K. It’s certainly better than the $550 AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE from 2023, but more than that, it squeaks out playable framerates at or above the $750 Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti. I tested the card on an Origin PC Neuron 3500X config with an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K CPU and 32 GB of DDR5, 6400 MT/s RAM. It’s the same PC I used to test all the Nvidia cards, so if you’re looking to see how well AMD does combined with Intel’s latest, keep reading.

Synthetic benchmarks like 3D Mark don’t give us a good idea of actual in-game performance, though it shows us what the hardware is capable of. In that way, RDNA 4 is surprisingly versatile. In our tests with 3D Mark Steel Nomad, the RX 9070 XT scored a little less than 200 points above the RTX 5070 Ti. The same can’t be said for the card in tests that demand improved ray tracing performance. It scored 1,260 points worse in 3D Mark Port Royal and about 1,535 points worse in 3D Mark Speed Way. For AI performance, the RX 9070 XT managed to get a quantified score of 26645 in Geekbench AI, more than the RTX 5070 Ti’s 22022.

In our benchmarks with Cyberpunk 2077, the RX 9070 XT managed to effectively match the RTX 5070 Ti’s performance across our 4K tests without FSR, and managed similar results comparing DLSS 4 and FSR 4. It was a few frames shy of the 5070 Ti’s performance at 1080p, but it was still fully playable regardless. In Horizon Zero Dawn: Remastered, AMD’s $600 GPU topped Nvidia’s sub-premium graphics card by a bare few percentage points, with or without AI upscaling at both 1080p and 4K.

It’s not all good news. A game like Black Myth: Wukong notoriously plays worse with AMD cards than Nvidia’s, and that remains true even when enabling FSR. At the highest settings and 4K, I couldn’t manage to break 25 FPS with AMD’s upscaling, whereas the 5070 Ti could hit 52 FPS on average in benchmarks.

Let’s ignore static benchmarks for a moment and analyze the RX 9070 XT by how it does in recent games. In Avowed, playing in the most intensive region—the Emerald Stair—I was averaging 50 to 53 FPS at 4K and ultra settings. In Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, I was sitting at around 55 FPS during the game’s opening siege without FSR. With upscaling, I was getting around 80 FPS.

There were some games that performed even better than Nvidia’s latest. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was an excellent experience at 4K, managing above 60 FPS despite the wild swings in performance typical of that game. I could not match that with either the RTX 5070 or RTX 5070 Ti. It’s as amazing as Peter Parker and Miles Morales themselves.

Then came other issues that made some titles unplayable. I experienced strong performance in Hogwarts Legacy, only to get random drops in FPS for no rhyme or reason, whether outdoors or indoors. I also had a very glitchy time trying to play Dragon Age: The Veilguard thanks to continuous frame hitching that made the opening area of the game unplayable. The problems I encountered were only in a select few titles, and I chalked them up to a driver issue. Still, AMD didn’t offer me an idea what the issue may be in time for this review. We’ll be sure to check back to see if these issues get resolved in non-beta drivers.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT Could Use More FSR 4 Support

AMD’s latest release not only needs to compete with Nvidia on specs and rendering performance, but it needed to hit back against Nvidia’s upscaling tech. The answer is FSR 4, AKA FidelityFX Super Resolution. The new version of AMD’s upscaling tech is exclusive to the RDNA 4 cards, since it uses the GPU’s new AI accelerators baked into the architecture. This is supposed to offer less artifacting, less ghosting, and higher details for each upscaled frame.

The difference between running games with FSR 2 and FSR 3 is stark. The uplift in a FSR 2-supported game like Alan Wake II is many times less impressive than on a game like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. For the latter, FSR 4 on balanced settings was how I could get it to play at 4K, ultra settings, and ray tracing turned up to high settings at or above 60 FPS. That was something I struggled to do on Nvidia’s latest graphics cards.

While FSR 3.1 and earlier models were far more hardware-agnostic, FSR 4 depends on RDNA 4. In that way, it’s now a direct competitor with the exclusive nature of Nvidia’s DLSS models. Earlier AMD Radeon cards won’t get access to FSR 4, either. The problem is, currently there are just over 30 games that support FSR 4. There are some big-name titles in there, like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, but the list is small compared to the around 75 games that supported DLSS 4 at launch. Nvidia has been adding more and more support to games over that time.

FSR support can be the make-or-break between whether a game is truly playable or not. Depending on what you were looking to play at max settings and 4K, owning a AMD or Nvidia GPU could be the difference between getting playable framerates or not.

AMD Isn’t Releasing Its Own Multi-Frame Gen Any Time Soon

AMD has said it has “tested” a multi-frame gen model but that it doesn’t find it practical and that players don’t see a need for it. While Nvidia has certainly gone out of its way to puff up the idea of “fake” frames as the future of gaming, multi-frame gen is still a great way for gamers with less-expensive PCs to make the most of their high-refresh rate monitors. DLSS—and FSR frame gen for that matter—work best when you’re at or near 60 FPS already. That’s why the RTX 5070 proved a disappointment. It simply doesn’t meet the needs of gamers who want to play at 4K. However, it’s more than capable of hitting solid framerates at 1440p. There’s a sick thrill of using DLSS 4 to push 60 or 70 FPS to 150 or higher. You won’t get that with AMD’s latest GPUs.

AMD’s graphics card costs $50 more than the RTX 5070 and the RX 9070 at its base price, effectively making both those cards superfluous in one fell swoop. Then the question is, whether to get the RTX 5070 Ti or the RX 9070 XT? Well, it may simply come down to availability. We won’t know what time has in store for AMD’s latest, but we can tell that unless something drastic happens, Nvidia’s GPUs will continue to suffer from inflated prices and stock issues.

If you’re gunning for a new GPU now, and you can’t wait for Nvidia’s stock woes to end, the RX 9070 XT isn’t just a stopgap—it’s the 4K upgrade you wanted. Will you miss out on DLSS 4 and the potential to do over 100 FPS in some games? Yes, you will. At a $150 to $300 discount compared to inflated GeForce prices, that sounds like a fair trade.