This year marks the 25th anniversary of AMD’s Radeon graphics, which began with the R100. That had hardware transform and lighting—the definition of a GPU.
Now, AMD introduced the Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 graphics cards, featuring the new RDNA 4 architecture. These cards are designed to compete with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti. The RX 9070 is priced at $550, while the RX 9070 XT’s starts at $600. The new cards offer improved performance, power efficiency, and features such as enhanced ray-tracing and AI accelerators. They will be available on March 6 through AMD’s partners.
AMD says the highlights of the new design are:
• Faster command processing
• Advanced shader programming
• Ray and path tracing
• ML-assisted rendering
• Enhanced memory compression
AMD introduced the AMD RDNA 4 graphics architecture with the launch of the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 AIBs as part of the Radeon RX 9000 series. The AIBs are designed to compete against Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti, respectively. The new AMD AIBs are expected to be available on March 6 through AIB OEMs.
AMD suggests that gamers often prefer GPUs at midrange prices, and claim that 85% of them buy AIBs that cost $750 or less, yet they still want to play games at 4K resolutions.
The notable aspect is the pricing. The RX 9070 is priced at $550, matching the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070. Pricing for the RX 9070 XT starts at $600, which is $150 lower than Nvidia’s RTX 5070 Ti.
The new AIBs with the Navi 48 GPU have 16GB of memory and various improvements for gaming graphics, including updated ray-tracing accelerators and AI accelerators. These enhancements are designed to provide fast performance and improved gaming experiences.
AMD says the GPU’s new compute unit (CU) offers enhanced memory subsystems, improved scalar units, dynamic register allocation, and increased CU efficiency and clock speeds.
The RX 7900 XT has 55.8 billion transistors, while the RX 9070 has 53.9 billion, The memory is driven off a 256-bit memory bus with an enhanced memory system that AMD says will allow faster and smoother data flow back and forth between the memory and GPU. The GPU’s boost frequency can range as high as 2,970 MHz, and the gaming clock is set at 2,400 MHz. The RX 9070 XT has 64 compute units, while the plain 9070 has 56 compute units.
The 7900 XT had 84 RDNA 3 compute units at its 2022 launch. In comparison, each RDNA 4 compute unit is designed to support higher clock speeds than its RDNA 3 predecessor.
AMD also says its new GPUs offer improved power efficiency compared to previous generations.
The new AIBs have new GPUs and new and improved ray-tracing capabilities. Improving ray tracing was a critical design goal, and AMD added a second ray-tracing engine, giving it twice the ray-tracing performance over the last-generation GPU. The GPUs have 64 ray-tracing accelerators.
The designer also added a second intersection engine, doubling the performance of ray box and triangle testing. Based on their analysis, they created a dedicated ray transform block, which increases the performance of the hardware as rays are traversed into the lower level of the BVH.
AMD has taken a new method for driving the efficiency of ray traversal, organizing bounding volume hierarchy (BVH), which they are calling oriented bounding boxes. They also incorporated better data compression too. Combined, they deliver more efficient ray traversal through the geometry and use less memory.
The new GPUs also have more AI processing. The RDNA 4’s second-generation AI accelerator has more math pipelines and supports new data types.
AMD recently revealed a partnership with Sony Interactive Entertainment called Project Amethyst. The companies have been working on ML model architecture for over a year, on ML enhancements for graphics enhancements. As a result, RDNA 4, says AMD, can efficiently process new advanced AI models much faster than was possible with previous generations of hardware.
The new GPU can, says the company, process new advanced AI models much faster, whether an AI model requires high precision with 16-bit floating point or ultra-high performance with lower precision such as 8-bit or even 4-bit, by adding more dedicated math pipelines and support for techniques such as structured sparsity. AMD claims they’ve increased peak performance per compute unit by as much as 8x compared to RDNA 3.
Twenty years ago, they showed the newest capabilities of their Radeon graphics in DirectX 9 in a demo they called “The Toy Shop.”
The company created a new demo, built with Epic’s Unreal Engine 5 and enhanced with neural radiance caching, supersampling, and denoising.
AMD has a lot of new features and improved specifications in the RDNA 4, which are summarized in the following diagram.
The peak pixel fill rate is up to 380.2 GP/sec, while the peak half-precision compute performance is 97.3 TFLOPS. Peak single-precision compute performance is 48.7 TFLOPS, and peak int4 performance is 1557 TOPS, while peak Iint8 performance is 779 TOPS. ROPS are 128.
AMD is positioning the RX 9070 boards as 4K gaming-capable AIBs.
The Radeon RX 9000-series GPUs also benefit from an exclusive super-resolution upgrade with AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4), which leverages a dynamic ML-based algorithm to improve temporal stability, better preserve detail, and reduce ghosting. FSR 4 delivers a substantial upgrade over FSR 3.1 and will be available in over 30 games at launch, with 75 titles coming by the end of 2025.
FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) history. (Source: AMD)
AMD slightly lowered the raster-intensive processing and made the ray tracing 10% faster. The AIBs will be offered by partners only—no AMD boards this time. Overclocking will vary by AIB supplier.
The series will have ROCm support, but not at launch.
The GDDR6 is running at 20 GB/sec, which AMD thinks is the best balance and performance at cost.
The die is 350 mm2, with 54 billion transistors built at TMSC in 4 nm.
The GPUs are monolithic design (not chiplets). AMD chose that route because they think it gives the best balance and performance.
At FP16, the new AIBs, says AMD, will get up to 200 TOPS, 640 GFLOPS, and 1500 TOPS at int4.
The company says AV1 compatibility is ready but not rolled out yet, so that’s likely to be a driver update. There’s no multi-frame generation now. AMD thinks multi-frame generation has minimal user benefit.
The AIB draws 304W, and AMD recommends a 750W power supply.
The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT has an SEP of US $599, while the AMD Radeon RX 9070 has an SEP of US $549.
The final pricing may be a bit iffy depending on the threatened tariffs amount and timing.
The final pricing may be a bit iffy depending on the threatened tariffs amount and timing.
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