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.
Discussion (14 replies)
Join Discussion →Pretty nifty.
I suppose it is too much to hope that this trickles down to the 7k series too?
if you dig into that Hardware Unboxed video, the gains on both sides were pretty even. I'd say it's more fair that the 9070 XT can compete at 1440 with the 5070 Ti, not surpass it. That's still pretty good. Too bad AMD opted out of the high end this time. I think they missed the boat there.
This was most definitely the right time that AMD could have made inroads in the high-end, with all the NV blunders in the RTX 50 series generation. In much the same way the CPU division hit it at the right time, with stagnation from Intel, this would have been the right time for AMD on the GPU side, if only they had done it.
I suspect AMD ran into a specific wall with the 9k series. Again, just a guess or if you prefer intuition, I think they did build high end prototypes and the die/chip (what's the right word) was just plain needing too much power to run at competitive speeds. If not that some other technical issue that similarly would have been a serious issue or flaw in the design - like awful memory bandwidth due to not getting the most advanced HBM.
Anyhow, all speculation off the top of my head.
Hopefully the 11k series will be designed around overcoming whatever the blocker(s) are/were and AMD has a king of the circuit board pile winning GPU.
Honestly I think price to benefit of making the high end GPU's and the price they would need to sell them at simply priced the consumer high end out in such a way that AMD didn't want to be THAT company. So they released the mid tier cards and did they very best they could. And it shows.
My theory/suspicion is that they ran into an issue with the chiplet design, whether that be communication or latency, or maybe manufacturing, or some other bottleneck related to that design, since that would have been required for anything above the 9070 XT's monolithic design. Chiplets aren't easy, and its very possible very early into the production of RDNA 4 they just encountered an error they couldn't overcome. Just a theory, though.
I would not be surprised if this is the case at all
Also
It takes a ton of resources to put together a card that’s not going to sell big numbers - mostly it’s just there as a halo product and bragging rights. Even at the margins it may get, I think AMD knows they likely wouldn’t be able to sell enough recoup what it takes to develop the reference design for the card.
A lot of folks won’t even consider AMD graphics. Because, you know, drivers
These days it would be Nvidia cards for drivers.... or for hardware malfunctions, firmware updates that are bricking cards, cards leaking coolant... and so forth...
Amd had issues but their drivers have historically been fine wine.
I don't think it's drivers anymore; that's not the reason people aren't buying. I think it's more to do with just how huge of a hold NVIDIA has on extra features in games that people associate with NVIDIA now. NVIDIA has made sure to push its features heavily, and people associate these things, like DLSS, heavily with NVIDIA GPUs. If you aren't too informed about pc hardware, you've still heard the name of RTX, and DLSS, and NVIDIA, and those names are hard-coded into the idea of "this is for gamers and gives the best experience for gaming on th pc". They are synonymous now. When people see that most people buy NVIDIA, it tells a laman 'hey, this must be good, else why is everyone else buying it, so i'll buy it too cause it's a known brand' so it has this huge knock-on effect that just snowballs.
And like it or not, having a GPU that sits at the high-end, as the FASTEST GPU, (4090/5090) also has a knock-on effect for the lower tiers, people look at that and say if they've got the fastest one up there, the rest must be good too, and bam, it gives the consumer confidence in the lower-tiers. Then tie in that DLSS upscaling is actually very good, has the best image quality, and you also get the fastest ray tracing performance in games, I mean, AMD is really climbing an uphill battle on all fronts. It's tough.
Then, on top of all that gaming stuff, NVIDIA also has a choke hold on professional apps, CUDA, productity apps like Adobe, and stuff like that, it's just faster and better supported across the board, in non-gaming situations. So you add it all up, and if it gives me better performance for gaming, better support for productivity, then well, how can you argue with that? The ONLY thing AMD can do is dominate in pricing to add better value, and they just aren't doing that. /shrug
But yeah, I really just wanted to post that I don't think it has anything to do about 'drivers' anymore, it's everything else now.
I'd say drivers for AMD - but that's mostly on the productivity side, a treadmill that they just can't seem to keep up with. The hardware's certainly capable.
For me, it'd be DLSS and RT together being both more capable and far more widely used. Gotta be a pretty rare budget-limited situation to not pay ~5% for the same bracket Nvidia GPU IMO.
If only AMD were to pull a "Ryzen" in the GPU space? By which I mean come up with a new idea or design that just blows away the competition.
I'd like to see Intel get out a higher end card too.
Also Nvidia's NVENC encoder is simply worlds better than anything AMD has put out. And when everyone wants to be a streamer on Twitch/YT/Kick/Rumble even the mid-tier Nvidia cards are just better at it.
I was just being a smartass but all you guys jumped on it literally hah
I feel like they have a design for it already. They've just been slowly dipping their toes in to the water. The B580 is a bargain for 1080 gaming.