The AMD Radeon RX 9070 has been “benchmarked” by a major gaming publication, and while the results are already said to be “impressive,” with some saying that it’s on par with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER and others alluding to 20% faster performance than the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, owners can expect the GPU to deliver even higher numbers when it officially rolls out, according to new statements that David McAfee, AMD’s corporate vice president and general manager of its Client Channel Business, and Frank Azor, the chief architect of gaming solutions and gaming marketing at AMD, shared during a recent roundtable with journalists.
“All these performance leaks, well, it is accurate for the way the driver performs on the card right now,” McAfee mentioned before going on to clarify that the GPU is “nowhere near where the card will actually perform once we release the full performance driver.”
IGN, which published its findings with the Radeon RX 9070 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 yesterday (i.e., “an impressive 99fps average…at 4K Extreme settings without upscaling or frame generation”), has been told by many readers that it doesn’t understand how to benchmark GPUs properly, with some settings said to have been set incorrectly.
Journalist: Are you guys cool with partner leaks? Everyone’s going to know the specs just by seeing the cards.
McAfee: I think you’ll see static demos of cards. Everybody loves a good wall of boards. And I think you’ll see that from all of our partners in their spaces. I don’t think you’ll see any live demos, or you better not see any demos from partners — I’ll put it that way. But, you know, power connectors, things like that, TDPs, I think you’ll see a lot of that stuff out there.
Azor: By the way, if you do see demos out there, just know that they don’t have the production [software] driver.
McAfee: All these performance leaks, well, it is accurate for the way the driver performs on the card right now. It is nowhere near where the card will actually perform once we release the full performance driver.
Journalist: Did that also factor into your decision?
Azor: It’s not a readiness issue.
McAfee: We have in house the full performance driver. We intentionally chose to enable partners with a driver which exercises all of the, let’s call it, thermal-mechanical aspects of the card, without really running that risk of leaking performance on critical aspects of the of the product. That’s pretty standard practice.