Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070XT Gaming OC 16G

We have been waiting for it, the coming of the saviour. And now it's here. The Radeon RX 9070XT has one major flaw, and that's the name, because I still think it's weird, but it's everything we'd hoped for otherwise.

We're looking at Gigabyte's slightly tuned version, which also deserves praise for its design and Gigabyte's always solid cooling. There is also a smaller version without XT in the name, but it costs only minimally less, and is not worth it for most people. It performs really well and costs a very reasonable amount of money for the performance, as well as compared to the competition, and they're in stock in most stores.

Let's get right to it: The price is around £720. Unfortunately, that's cheap. But it's especially cheap considering the card's performance is millimetres away from an RTX 5080, which costs close to double that if you're lucky, and triple if you're unlucky enough to buy it from a semi-scammer of an online store... AMD themselves use their RX 7900 GRE and Nvidia's RTX 5070 Ti as negative references, but in my opinion, in the real world you're more likely to see it as an RTX 5080 that's turned down a bit.

AMD's RX 9000 series is based on their new RDNA architecture. It may sound heavy, but it makes a lot of sense. This time they've optimised more against hardcore loads created by - and in - games. This means that efficiency has been prioritised and much better Ray-Tracing has been prioritised too, actually doubling the performance. As always with AMD, rasterization, the act of generating pixels, is something that is extremely focused on. There's also a new dual Media Engine - particularly relevant for those who stream - and 16GB of GDDR6 memory.

AMD has chosen to use AI in a very targeted way and has improved their upscaling, FSR 4, as well as their Frame Generation. As a result, the image quality has improved significantly. In fact, FSR 4 is pretty close to delivering native image quality, while at the same time providing the improved framerates that are often missing in 4K gaming in particular. For many, this will be hard to accept on principle - including me - but I've come to realise that the latest upscaling combined with various image enhancement tools is so close to the original that unless I stand still in a game and look at a small point, I simply cannot tell the difference. Unfortunately, FSR 4 has the disadvantage that it requires a programmed implementation in the individual games, but the number of implemented games will reach over 100 this year.

In addition, Path-Tracing has been utilised to get much better light rendering. We can't cover everything new, because there's a lot, but one of the most ingenious is the use of AI for error correction. If artefacts appear on the screen, the AI detects them through the Image Inspector programme and automatically sends a screen print with a description to AMD, which can then correct the problem with the next software update. You can also do it manually or just switch it off, but actively using feedback to improve the product is a great example of how proper use of AI benefits everyone.

What Gigabyte has contributed toward is their reinforced design, where a fairly solid frame makes for a wonderfully clean design reminiscent of AMD's old reference approach to graphics card design. There's dual BIOS, but in Performance mode it's so quiet it's inaudible, and uses copious amounts of coolant and Gigabyte's Hawk fans to deliver quiet but ample cooling. In practice, this means a noise of just 38 dB, which is very low frequency, and a GPU that hits - hold on - 57 degrees at full load. Power consumption was measured at 330 watts, so that's a lot of heat to be removed after all.

In addition, Gigabyte has tuned the card slightly, from 2970 MHz to 3060 MHz when boosted - it doesn't seem like much, but I prefer the manufacturer to tune the card slightly.

And now for the fun part. We tested with an X870E-based motherboard and a 9800X3D CPU.
Our counter reference is an RTX 5080 and 4K resolution, which is pretty unfair terms for a graphics card that's made for 1440p and costs half as much - but it can pretty much go all the way.

3D Benchmark

• Time Spy: 26778


• Time Spy Extreme: 12912


• Speed Way: 6372


• Port Royal: 18722


• Steel Nomad: 7244

The results are a bit muddy. Compared to an Nvidia RTX 5080, Speedway falls by 30%, TimeSpy outperforms by 1% (again, it's a very unfair comparison, double the price, and it's really the RTX 5070 Ti that's the competition). Port Royal, a hardcore Ray-Tracing test, only has an 18% difference, and I expected a lot more, and the new Steel Nomad test has a difference of only 7%.

Assassin's Creed: Shadows

• 1080p: 76


• 1440p: 69


• 4K: 52

Despite Shadows having a benchmark tool that's no help, the RX 9070XT performs surprisingly well, and even in 1440p it holds just under 70 FPS.

Total War: Warhammer III

• 1080p: 229.3


• 1440p: 152.5


• 4K: 79.6

Red Dead Redemption 2

• 1080p: 231.77


• 1440p: 169.97


• 4K: 198.00

This is where it gets really impressive. I hope that was a mistake, because we're talking 30-65% improvements.

Cyberpunk 2077

Ultra settings, Ray-Tracing Ultra/FSR 4 + Frame Generation:

• 1080p: 84.25/308.36


• 1440p: 53.58/247.06


• 4K: 23.21/137.65

Star Wars Outlaws

4K Ultra Quality, with and without FSR 4:

• 4K: 36


• 4K + FSR4: 123

Dragon Age: The Veilguard

4K Ultra Quality with full Ray-Tracing, with and without FSR and Frame Generation:

• 4K: 53


• 4K + FSR 4 + FG: 89

An excellent example, the raw performance is close to an RTX 5080, but only when multi-frame generation is used can it really pull away from the 9070XT.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6

With and without FSR:

• 1080p: 211/202


• 1440p: 194/281


• 4K: 129/210

Warhammer 40,0000: Space Marine II

4K with and without FSR:

• 4K: 50/89

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide

4K with and without FSR and Frame Generation:

• 4K: 41/98

AMD's RX 9070XT performs extremely impressively, especially when it comes to raw computing power, and Gigabyte's cooling system makes it no less impressive. Buy it before someone else.