In a landscape where graphics card prices have neglected the mid-range enthusiast buyer, AMD has delivered something truly remarkable with the XFX Swift AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT White. This $599 GPU represents a return to some semblance of sanity in the GPU landscape, offering exceptional 1440P gaming performance at a price that won’t require a second mortgage. Having spent a lot of time testing this card against its contemporaries, it’s clear that AMD has created something special with its new RDNA 4 architecture and delivered a GPU that’s well worth the upgrade.
Let’s cut to the chase: the AMD RX 9070 XT is an impressive card that’s aggressively priced against NVIDIA’s comparable options. At $599, it undercuts NVIDIA’s RTX 5070 Ti by a whopping $150 while delivering comparable — and in many cases superior — performance. This aggressive pricing strategy is a welcome change and something I could not be happier to see, especially in a market where flagship cards have routinely topped $1,000 in recent years.
With AMD not releasing any consumer reference designs for either the RX 9700 or the RX 9700 XT, we were sent a partner card from XFX. Our SWIFT Class White Edition offers a striking-looking GPU that, while not as slim as some AMD reference designs—including the RX 7900 XTX—still manages to be visually interesting.
It boasts a triple-fan design, a sizable heatsink, and even a BIOS switch, all running off a dual 8-pin connection. It features three DisplayPort 2.1a ports and a single HDMI 2.1b port, providing plenty of flexibility for a modern multi-monitor setup.
“Let’s cut to the chase: the AMD RX 9070 XT is an impressive card that’s aggressively priced against NVIDIA’s comparable options.”
It may be odd to see AMD skip the RX 8000 series naming and jump straight to 9000, but this all works to align their GPU branding with their Ryzen processors, creating a more cohesive product lineup. The company has clearly decided to focus on the mainstream and high-end segments rather than competing directly with NVIDIA’s ultra-premium offerings like the RTX 5090. As someone who loved the RX 7900 XTX, with it still being a GPU we use for testing a range of use cases, time will tell how the overall 9000 series pans out, but for now, I am impressed with what I see from RDNA 4.
Speaking of RDNA 4, this is the architecture on which both the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT are built and are manufactured on a TSMC four-nanometre process. The RX 9070 XT has 64 compute units compared to the RX 9070’s 56 CUs—a 14 percent increase. This equates to 4,096 stream processors on the XT model, paired with 64 third-generation ray accelerators and 128 AI accelerators that power AMD’s new FSR 4 upscaling technology.
Clock speeds are particularly impressive, with the RX 9070 XT boasting a 2,400 MHz game clock and a solid 2,970 MHz boost clock. This is a significant advantage over the RX 9070’s 2,520 MHz boost clock and even NVIDIA’s competitors, with the RTX 5070 Ti reaching just 2,450 MHz.
Both RX 9070 series cards come with 16 GB of GDDR6 memory running at 20 Gbps over a 256-bit interface. This gives AMD a significant advantage over the RTX 5070, which only offers 12 GB of VRAM despite the identical $549 price tag. The RTX 5070 Ti matches the 16 GB capacity but uses newer, higher-bandwidth GDDR7 memory. The 9070 XT also supports most modern video formats, including encoding and decoding of AV1, H.265/HEVC, and 4K H.264.
RDNA 4 also brings a significant improvement in ray tracing performance. Previous AMD generations struggled with ray tracing workloads compared to NVIDIA’s offerings, but the third-generation ray accelerators in the RX 9070 XT and RX 9700 close this gap considerably. AMD claims RDNA 4 offers twice the ray tracing performance of RDNA 3, and our testing largely confirms this assertion.
Power consumption is rated at 304 watts, which is slightly higher than the previous generation’s equivalent card but still reasonable given the performance on offer. In our testing, the card typically drew around 305 watts under load, with temperatures remaining well controlled on partner models with robust cooling solutions. AMD has found a good middle ground for this enthusiast-level card, with it feeling in line with what we are seeing from comparable offerings like the RTX 5070 Ti.
The release of the new RDNA 4 generation of cards introduces FSR 4 (FidelityFX Super Resolution 4), which finally brings AI-powered upscaling to AMD graphics cards. Previous iterations of FSR used temporal upscaling techniques, which, to put it bluntly, couldn’t match the image quality of NVIDIA’s DLSS. FSR 4 changes that by leveraging the AI accelerators in the RDNA 4 architecture.
FSR 4 uses AI to analyze previous frames and data from the game engine to accurately upscale lower-resolution images to the native resolution. The results speak for themselves, with a significant improvement in image quality compared to FSR 3.1, especially in areas like grass, foliage, and text rendering. However, this enhanced quality comes at a performance cost, with FSR 4 typically delivering 10 to 20 percent fewer frames per second than FSR 3.1, but with significantly better visuals.
Fortunately, AMD has made FSR 4 an opt-in feature. Users can easily toggle between FSR 3.1 and FSR 4 in the Adrenalin software, allowing them to prioritize either performance or image quality based on their preferences and the specific game they are playing. At launch, the list of supported games is relatively small, with only 30 games supported. This is expected to expand to around 75 games over the year, but AMD has some catching up to do compared to DLSS, which is supported by hundreds of titles.
With all the pictures out of the way and all our out-of-the-system processes complete, we were ready to slot this GPU into our test bench and see how it compares. As we saw with our previous 50-series and most of our recent GPU reviews, we used our AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D system, paired with an ASUS ROG Crosshair Hero motherboard, running 32 GB of DDR5 G.Skill RAM at EXPO 6000. For storage, the systems are equipped with a PCI Gen 4 SK Hynix 2 TB M.2 SSD, with an NZXT 1,200-watt PSU in one and a be quiet! 1,200-watt PSU in the other. One system uses an NZXT Kraken AIO, while the other uses a Corsair Titan AIO.
Jumping into our synthetic and AI benchmarks, the AMD RX 9700 XT comes out strong, delivering results that put it ahead of the RTX 5070 Ti and even trading blows with last generation’s RTX 4080—a $1,199 card at launch. In 3DMark Time Spy, it scored an impressive 29,563, well ahead of the 22,732 seen on the RTX 5070 Ti or the 28,418 recorded on the RTX 4080. The card also performed well in our creative testing, delivering solid Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve performance that matched or exceeded what we saw with equivalent NVIDIA cards.
One area that disappointed me was our AI tests, where NVIDIA consistently outperformed both the RX 9700 XT and RX 9700. Now, don’t get me wrong, the AMD cards fared well overall, but they simply fell behind, with the RTX 5070 Ti winning in all text generation tests. Given NVIDIA’s level of commitment to AI workflows in recent years, this result is unsurprising, but still disappointed to see it on a card that is so well equipt otherwise and offers more RAM in comparison to the RTX 5070 Ti.
Jumping into our gaming benchmarks, the results are impressive overall, especially in rasterized (non-ray-traced) performance, with the RX 9070 XT consistently delivering strong results in most of our tests. At 4K resolution, it trades blows with NVIDIA’s more expensive RTX 5070 Ti, sometimes winning and sometimes losing by small margins.
Looking at the performance of Cyberpunk 2077, I was shocked at how well the RX 9070 XT scored across the board. At 1080p, the GPU delivered more than 4 percent better performance at the same settings compared to the RTX 5070 Ti. This level of performance remained consistent at both 1440p and 4K, with the XFX Swift AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT consistently delivering better scores in rasterized testing. It fell behind by around 13 percent in ray-traced workloads, with NVIDIA still leading in this area.
What is more impressive is how well the XFX Swift AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU handles frame generation and upscaling, delivering 72 frames per second at 4K with FSR 3—a more than playable level of performance that maintained a level of fidelity nearly indistinguishable from non-upscaled gameplay.
Granted, with no equivalent to the DLSS 4 multi-frame generation found on NVIDIA cards, the RX 9070 XT did not reach the frame rates seen on the RTX 5070 Ti with DLSS 4 enabled, but I would argue the fidelity at 72 fps was clearer compared to the 214 fps the RTX 5070 Ti produced. I am even more interested in seeing how full FSR 4 implementation will look in the title, but I will have to wait for that update.
The results were consistent with most of the games we tested on the RX 9070 XT, with the card delivering solid performance across our suite of games when looking at rasterized gameplay. At 1080p, the RX 9070 XT performed well across the board, placing just behind the RX 7900 XTX in games such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Watch Dogs: Legion, and Returnal. This level of performance continues into 1440p and even 4K, with the RX 9070 XT delivering 60-plus frames per second in almost all the games we tested, trading blows with the RTX 5070 Ti in nearly every title.
Ray tracing performance, while improved, still varies depending on the title. While it delivered much better results than we have seen in the past from a mid-range AMD card, it still falls behind in some titles, with the 5070 Ti performing better in Cyberpunk 2077 with DLSS disabled and Black Myth: Wukong being nearly unplayable without frame generation enabled.
I would say Black Myth: Wukong is currently the best showcase for NVIDIA, with the game delivering a better frame generation experience with DLSS compared to FSR and ray tracing performance at all resolutions being a major advantage for the RTX 5070 Ti over the RX 9070 XT. Thankfully, this was the only game where we saw this level of variance between the two cards, so while it is an outlier, it does highlight how FSR still has work to do to compete with DLSS.
With everything considered, the XFX Swift AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is a striking GPU that feels like a return to form for the enthusiast-level graphics card—one that can play modern games with few compromises. The card’s main competitors are the RTX 5070 ($549) and RTX 5070 Ti ($749) from NVIDIA, and to put it bluntly, this is hands down the better offering at this price range. In our testing, the 9070 XT consistently outperforms published benchmarks of the standard 5070, often by 10 to 15 percent, while trading blows with the more expensive 5070 Ti and even beating it at times.
“With everything considered, the XFX Swift AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is a striking GPU that feels like a return to form for the enthusiast-level graphics card…”
Even when looking at other GPUs from AMD, the 9070 XT represents a significant upgrade over previous-generation cards. It outperforms the RX 7900 XT by approximately 17 percent on average, despite the latter launching at $899 just two years ago, and even comes close to matching the performance of the flagship RX 7900 XTX.
This makes it an attractive upgrade option for users with older graphics cards looking to make the jump to 4K gaming. With the new features of RDNA 4, especially FSR 4, there is realistically no reason not to consider the RX 9070 XT if you are looking for an enthusiast GPU that hits the sweet spot between performance and price. Combine that with modern encoders and enough performance to handle modern video editing and content creation, and the RX 9070 XT delivers in all the areas that count—especially at this price point.
The XFX Swift AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT represents a return to form for the graphics card market, delivering exceptional AAA 4K gaming performance at a price that actually feels reasonable in today’s inflated market. With improved ray tracing capabilities, new AI-powered upscaling technology and consistent performance across a wide range of games, it’s the most compelling high-end graphics card we’ve seen in years.
While NVIDIA still has some advantages in ray tracing performance and AI workloads, the 9070 XT’s significant price advantage makes these differences much easier to overlook. For the vast majority of gamers looking to play at 4K resolution, the RX 9070 XT offers the best balance of performance and value currently available.