Recent driver updates have enabled the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT to close the gap, and sometimes pass, NVIDIA’s budget-priced top-end GPU. It’s not uncommon for a driver to unlock additional performance for either a CPU or GPU but when the better part of 10% is gained, and in this case 9%, it’s getting closer to a generational upgrade so owners of that piece of hardware are assuredly happy with what in essence is a downloadable FPS boost. AMD announced prior to the launch of its Radeon RX 9000 series that it did not intend to compete at the top-tier GPU level this time around and instead said it would focus more on providing more affordable and sensible products, and it looks like the barely 4-month old RX 9070 XT is shaping up to be an ever better option towards this goal than originally seen at launch.
While NVIDIA continues to dominate at the top-end segment of graphics cards with its RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 GPUs, the RTX 5070 Ti is a more affordable version of the former model in that it features a cut-down version of the same die with slightly slower memory. However, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is seen primarily as a direct competitor to the RTX 5070, but can absolutely trade blows when the RTX 5070 Ti and thanks to newer drivers, may actually beat it in select games. Retesting was done by Hardware Unboxes, who saw gains anywhere from three or four percent all the way up to twenty-three percent, with an overall average of around nine percent. FPS gains were mainly seen at 1440p while both cards maintained similar performance at 4K. The following slides were captured by VideoCardz.
Now, to be fair the the NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti, while there were some odd FPS losses observed during this round of retesting, it too saw some performance gains as well. As can be seen below, updated drivers for NVIDIA’s GPU provided a performance uptick at 4K for Counter-Strike 2 and Warhammer 40,000.
