AMD has finally pulled back the curtain on its hotly anticipated RX 9070 XT and RX 9070. The two GPUs, which debut AMD’s new RDNA 4 architecture, have been at the forefront of the conversation for PC hardware over the past several months, and they might be the two most important graphics cards AMD has released in the past decade.

RX 9070 XT gaming performance

Let’s get the important bits out of the way first. AMD claims the RX 9070 XT is 26% faster than the RTX 3090 and 51% faster than the RX 6900 XT at 4K. Those aren’t great comparison points – both of those GPUs are two generations out of date – but those are the numbers AMD shared. For the base RX 9070, you’re looking at a 26% uplift over the RTX 3080 and 38% improvement over the RX 6800 XT, again at 4K.

AMD is using these older GPUs as touchstones because the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 aren’t gunning for the flagship crown like Nvidia’s RTX 5090. They’re targeting midrange gamers, and there’s a good chance that last-gen flagships will still offer better performance, albeit at a significantly higher price.

Thankfully, AMD provided some direct comparisons to the (now discontinued) RX 7900 GRE. For the RX 9070 XT, AMD is claiming a 42% uplift at 4K and 28% improvement at 1440p. For the slightly weaker RX 9070, the margins are thinner with a 21% jump at 4K and a 20% lead at 1440p.

RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 specs

Although the cards come with different performance targets, there’s a lot of connective tissue between them. Critically, both GPUs come with a 16GB frame buffer, which should be plenty for at least the next several years, even at 4K. In addition, they both support PCIe 5.0 and come with an updated media engine that supports HEVC and AV1 encode/decode.

The big differences come down to cores, with the RX 9070 sporting 12.5% fewer cores than the XT version across the board, along with lower power requirements and a lower clock speed. It’ll be interesting to see if a bit of overclocking can make up some of the performance gap between the two GPUs once they’re actually here.

And they’ll be here soon. Both models are set to launch on March 6, and as previously suggested, AMD won’t be releasing a Made By AMD (MBA) model. You’ll need to pick up a card from one of AMD’s board partners, such as Acer, Asus, ASRock, Gigabyte, PowerColor, or XFX.

AMD has set the price for the RX 9070 XT at $599 and the RX 9070 at $549, though given the lack of a first-party model, the retail price will largely come down to demand. Leaked pricing earlier this week suggested the two GPUs would be much more expensive, so hopefully, the initial batch of GPUs will sell for around the list price.

That pricing is all the more important considering the competition. Nvidia is gearing up to release its RTX 5070 at $550 any day now, and it’s the card that AMD will be directly competing with when its two initial RDNA 4 offerings are here.