AMD Radeon RX 9070 + RX 9070 XT Linux Performance
Here is the geometric mean of all the gaming/graphics benchmarks that successfully ran on all of the tested graphics cards. The Radeon RX 9070 XT performance was similar to the Radeon RX 7900 XT performance which in turn was just slightly ahead of the prior-gen GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER graphics card. The Radeon RX 9070 series meanwhile was slower than the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER or just a little bit faster than a GeForce RTX 3090.
At least with the state of the current open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack, the Radeon RX 9070 series was most often running slower than the Radeon RX 7900 series. We'll see in the Windows reviews today how it shakes out but as it stands right now it looks like more performance optimizations are needed by the RDNA4/GFX12 support for the Mesa RADV/RadeonSI drivers and AMDGPU kernel driver. We'll see what optimizations may come in the next few days and weeks for enhancing the Radeon RX 9070 series on Linux.
The Radeon RX 7900 XT launched originally at $899 and the Radeon RX 7900 XTX launched at $999 USD, so at least the Radeon RX 9070 premiering at $549 and the RX 9070 XT at $599 is more modest. It will be interesting to see how the GeForce RTX 5070 at $549 compares once NVIDIA's next Linux driver release is available.
At least for those on an RDNA2 or original RDNA graphics card, moving to the Radeon RX 9070 series can mean nice performance uplift and with open-source upstream driver support on launch day.
As the geo mean above is based on all tests that ran on all graphics cards, that does leave out the Vulkan ray-tracing tests that failed to run on the Radeon RX 5700 XT Navi 1 graphics card... So here is the geo mean if dropping the RX 5700 XT for incorporating that Vulkan RT exposure:
The Radeon RX 9070 XT falls behind the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER when incorporating the Vulkan ray-tracing workloads in addition to the other graphics benchmarks and performs similar to a GeForce RTX 3090. The Radeon RX 9070 was performing similar to the RTX 4070 SUPER with these benchmarks.
On average over the entire span of benchmarks conducted, the Radeon RX 9070 was consuming 205 Watts on average with a peak of 251 Watts. The Radeon RX 9070 XT was consuming 264 Watts on average with a peak of 311 Watts. The RX 9070 XT power consumption tended to be higher than the better performing Radeon RX 7900 XTX. Hopefully more AMD Linux driver optimizations will be here in short order.
The Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards tested at least were performing very well with their cooling. The Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 tested was running the coolest of all the graphics cards tested and the PowerColor Radeon RX 9070 XT was also operating much cooler than many of the other high-end graphics cards tested.
It's great that the AMD Radeon RX 9070 series Linux driver support is open-source and upstream ahead of launch day, but unfortunate that there still seems to be some performance left on the table. That's with the Radeon RX 9070 series launch being dragged later into Q1 than originally envisioned and thus allowing more time for driver/software optimizations to take place. In any event this is the experience you will find today if using the Linux 6.14 Git kernel and Mesa 25.1-devel. Stay tuned to Phoronix for more Linux benchmarks of the Radeon RX 9070 series as the open-source driver support matures.
Thanks to AMD for supplying the Radeon RX 9070 series review samples for launch-day Linux testing on Phoronix.
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