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If ever a new GPU family has been all about the money, it’s AMD’s RDNA 4, otherwise known as the new Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT. At last we have official pricing from today’s live stream, so here goes. The Radeon RX 9070 will be $549 and the Radeon RX 9070 XT is yours for $599. Hurrah!
That is both better and very much in line with our worst fears, which were based on a leaked slide from AMD pointing out that 85% of graphics cards sell for under $700 and which lined up with some Microcenter listings showing the XT model slotting in at $699 with the non-XT at $649.
The better bit is obviously the $100 discount versus those $699 and $649 rumours. In our heart of hearts, we were hoping the XT might come in at $499 and really blow a massive hole in Nvidia’s RTX 50 line up, undercutting the RTX 5070 at the same time as massively out performing it.
That was probably never realistic. As it is and going on AMD’s data for both raster and ray-tracing performance, the XT probably lines up either side of the RTX 5070 Ti for those two performance metrics while coming in fully $150 lower.
$599 isn’t exactly chump change. But it’s still something of a hallelujah moment for gamers starved for anything even remotely resembling good value in the graphics card market.
On the other hand, the small price gap between the two GPUs is as expected and that makes the XT just 9% more expensive. However, for that 9% more money, the XT gives you 4,096 shader cores versus 3,548 for the non-XT. That’s a 15% uplift. But wait, the XT also has a boost clock of 2.97 GHz versus 2.52 GHz for the non-XT, that’s another 18% advantage.
All told, AMD puts the 9070 XT’s raw single-precision shader throughput at 48.7 TFLOPS, with the non-XT at 36.1 TFLOPS. That works out to a computational advantage of 35% for the XT for just 8% more cash.
Of course, the real-world frame rate gap will likely be a bit smaller than the TFLOPS performance. But the non-XT still looks like a bum deal. There was a time when you got more frames per dollar on lower-end GPU, but sadly those days seem to be behind us.
At least they do according to the official MSRPs. Unfortunately, of late graphics card MSRPs are proving about as relevant to real-world prices as fusion reactor is to cost-effective home heating. So, it’s hard to say how much more the XT will actually cost when it hits store shelves, presumably for about three picoseconds before selling out.
For the record, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT go on sale on March 6, just one day after Nvidia’s RTX 5070 is released on March 5. It’ll be interesting to see if any of them are available at MSRP and if so for how long.
There are tentative reasons to be hopeful about GPU supply, at least from Nvidia following its most recent earnings call where the company said it expects revenues from gaming graphics to improve “as supply inceases.”
On a closing note, it says something about how bananas the GPU market has become that a $599 graphics card might be seen as an unambiguous value proposition and something of a saviour for mainstream gaming. But, apparently, that’s where we are.
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Kurt Indovina
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