The pricing for the AMD Radeon RX 9070 series appears promising, provided it remains stable.

AMD have finally confirmed pricing, dating, and specs-ing for their first RDNA 4 graphics cards. The Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT will be out on March 6th, and start from $549 and $599 respectively. While these are still relatively fat stacks o’ cash, AMD say they’ll compete with Nvidia’s RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti – and considering the latter is supposed to start at $749, with most models currently going for above $800, that could make for a tasty undercutting.

The RTX 5070 hasn’t launched yet and its $549 MSRP is dead even with that of the RX 9070, though the Radeon does have an edge in the VRAM department, with 16GB to the GeForce’s 12GB. The RX 9070 XT shares this spec, while upping boost clock speeds from 2.54GHz to 2.97GHz and adding a few more RDNA Compute Units (64 to 56 on the RX 9070). Its RT Accelerator count also comes in at 64 to the RX 9070’s 56, so expect superior ray tracing performance as well.

Obviously, in the absence of reliable benchmarks, we can’t say for now which will be best for that crucial GPU workload of Making Numbers Go Bigger. Still, I’d argue that Nvidia and AMD haven’t so much been competing on framerates these last few years as they have on those secondary technologies: DLSS, FSR, frame generation and so on. And here, the Radeon versions have been hopelessly outmatched, be it on visual quality, general performance, or even breadth of support among games.

Maybe that’s why the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT are, in some ways, most RTX-like than any Radeon GPU has been for ages. By embracing a similar flavour of AI and machine learning, they’ll be the first (and, for a while, only) cards to support FSR 4, which itself is abandoning the GPU-agnostic rule of previous versions by basing its upscaling and anti-aliasing on that very same robot brain tech. In other words, FSR is becoming much more DLSS-y. This won’t extend to copying the Multi Frame Generation component of DLSS 4, but FSR 4’s standard 2x frame gen is supposedly much sharper than stabler than that of FSR 3, while the upscaling component aims to make drastic improvements to image quality. FSR 4 will also have over 30 compatible games at launch, dozens more than FSR 3 did, and rising to 75 by the end of 2025.

Given DLSS 4 has only just launched, I think it’s probably fine if FSR 4 simply plays catch-up to DLSS on picture quality, rather than surpassing it – and for $200 less, the RX 9070 XT could be one compelling card if it can simultaneously match the RTX 5070 Ti’s core performance. Of course, GPUs are in high demand right now, and it would be unsurprising (if deeply unfortunate) for these RDNA 4 cards to suffer the same problem of price-hiked and under-stocked partner models that the RTX 50 series is buckling under. AMD, one suspects, will be crossing their fingers that the eBay reseller crowd already has their hands full with garages of RTX 5080s.