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Nvidia’s latest graphic 50 series RTX cards have been all the rage, because which they are nearly impossible to find even at the very expensive retail price. Giving companies like AMD an opportunity to exploit by taking on Nvidia and maybe grab a little bit of market share. AMD is attempting to do just that with their new Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT cards. What does this mean for gamers? Will there finally be competition for Nvidia?
Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT
The new AMD Radeon RX 9070 is built on the AMD RDNA 4 architecture and features 56 compute units, 16GB of GDDR6 memory, and a 256-bit memory interface with 64MB of Infinity Cache for enhanced bandwidth efficiency. It operates with a game clock of 2.1 GHz and a boost clock of up to 2.5 GHz.
The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is a significant upgrade over the non-XT 9070 card. This one packs serious power with 64 RDNA 4 compute units, while the memory specs remain the same: 16GB of GDDR6 memory with a 256-bit memory interface. The card also runs at a 2.4 GHz game clock, reaching speeds of up to 3.0 GHz boost clock.
While specs always sound nice, in real terms, the new graphic cards significantly increased performance over the previous generation, or so AMD claimed during its launch. The XT version should hopefully compete with the Nvidia RTX 5070 range at a significantly lower price point.
Pricing and availability
Pricing has always been AMDs Achilles heel and it is also a bit of a problem with this launch, but only partially. The AMD Radeon RX 9070 will retail at $549, which in the Indian context will be around R66,000 roughly, and the XT, which is $599 would be around R72,000 approximately, depending on the strength of the dollar versus the rupee. The pricing for the XT version of the card is actually very competitive. However, the performance and price differences between the 9070 and 9070 XT make it very hard to recommend the 9070.
AMD is also determined to ensure that the card is not scarce like its Nvidia counterpart. Sources inside the company have confirmed that the card will be available en masse starting this week. For context, the Nvidia 5070 Ti is on sale on Amazon for around R1,35,499. The 9070 XT will be almost half the price.
Pros and cons
Pricing versus performance is a definite advantage here, which is a tick mark in AMD’s court. The other significant tick is availability. Just the fact that these cards will be available to gamers today makes a huge difference and is another pro. There is a caveat here, though. AMD hasn’t built a reference card like Nvidia usually does, and this means they can’t enforce the suggested retail price. If manufacturers and distributors get greedy, we could see these cards sell for significantly more than the mentioned price. Given the theoretical volume of available cards, this might not happen, but if it does, gamers might have to wait a couple of months for the surge pricing to die down, which will be annoying.
Historically, AMD has also had a few issues with its driver support, and hopefully, this time will be different. AMD has said on several occasions that this will be different this time around. This pro is in limbo until we see actual proper driver support.
The limited availability in terms of AI and other industrial applications, which usually focus on CUDA cores, in my opinion, is a huge con here. As a power user, I would like to have my card have a dual purpose play games when I want to or AI generate an inappropriate poster of Jar Jar Binks if I wanted to. However, this is not an issue for most gamers and for a pure gaming card this is a fantastic deal.
Should you buy one?
There are several reasons why Nvidia is usually chosen over AMD. With the new graphic cards, AMD has mitigated some of these problems but has not addressed all of them. However, in a time when the alternatives are grossly overpriced and/or unavailable, the Radeon 9070XT might just offer an edge—but only for gamers.
Any new gaming computer built in the near future has no reason to go in for a subpar, similarly priced Nvidia card when you could go in for this kind of performance. That said, there is a place for Nvidia for users who want to engage in on-site AI or work with specific 3D modelling software, as there is no real alternative right now. Most AI was built on CUDA cores, and it is going to be a mainstream work graphic card for a few years at least. So yes buy one if all you are going to do is game.
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