New Video Cards From A Variety Of Vendors
We’ve been waiting to see actual benchmarks for the AMD Radeon RX 9700 and RX 9700 XT and surprisingly it is today that they’ve been revealed; traditionally releases have been happening the day after the PCPer Podcast goes live on YouTube. RDNA 4 uses third generation hardware to handle ray tracing and the benchmarks confirm the superiority of hardware over software. You will also see the effectiveness of FSR 4, which will let you crank up graphics options at 1440p with quality upscaling and retain decent performance. There are a number of reviews to go through, since AMD doesn’t have the equivalent of a Founders Edition you’ll have to see how each vendor implements their own tweaks to the RX 9700 and RX 9700 XT.
Sebastian had a chance to review the Sapphire NITRO+ versions of both cards, and the XT version uses a 12VHPWR connector, one of the best he has ever seen even, while The FPS Review tried the XFX Quicksilver RX 9700XT which uses two PCIe 8-pin power connectors. This is worth paying attention to as you can avoid the less than popular new PCIe power connector if you want. Josh also tried out the Quicksilver variant in his review. The variety of designs also means the prices will vary depending on which model you go with.
The performance is reassuring, with the RX 9700 XT performing noticeably better than the previous 7900 XT and while it doesn’t quite reach a performance level where it is competing with the RTX 5070 Ti it is certainly closing the gap. The RX 9700 XT is a bit less expensive than the NVIDIA alternative, but that depends on the model you pick up. The base price of $599 is quite attractive, however the XFX Quicksilver RX 9070XT Magnetic Air Edition will be at least $709 and the SAPPHIRE NITRO+ RX 9070 XT will be at least $730. That is a huge price variation and comes dangerously close to the MSRP of the RTX 5070 Ti.
The price comparison is hard to predict however, as availability of Blackwell borders on the pathetic and what is available is nowhere near the $749 MSRP. If AMD can actually provide a solid supply of cards at close to MSRP then they could claim a fair amount of market share for this generation.
One thing to take note of while you are going through reviews, when the The FPS Review tested the SAPPHIRE NITRO+ Radeon RX 9070 XT in Cyberpunk 2077 with Ray Tracing Overdrive, aka Path Tracing, the RX 9070 XT beat the 5070 Ti and tied it in Ultra Ray Tracing. That’s not to say any of these cards provided a solid 60FPS but it is an interesting blip in the results. There were also interesting results with Alan Wake 2, so it could be that we will see the performance gap close as AMD’s drivers mature for RDNA4.
