AMD Might Have Undervalued The RX 9070

CES 2025

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While AMD’s RX 9000 series remains shrouded in mystery, the company gave a preview of the RX 9070 at CES 2025. Although specific specifications aren’t yet available, an early benchmark shows that it performs admirably in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. The question is whether it can hold its own against some of Nvidia’s top-tier graphics cards.

At the AMD booth, the RX 9070 was tested alongside the powerful Ryzen 9 9950X3D. IGN reported on its performance in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which includes a built-in benchmarking option. Notably, this was the standard version of the card, not the XT variant, leaving us uncertain about how it compares to the flagship model.

The benchmarking was conducted without any upscaling, which eliminates concerns about the additional enhancements from FSR and allows for a clearer picture of the GPU’s capabilities. At 4K resolution with Extreme settings, the RX 9070 achieved an impressive average of 99 frames per second (fps).

This performance is noteworthy and is even compared to the RTX 4080 Super. Given that AMD states its top GPUs will only compete with the RX 7900 XT, this is an encouraging outcome. While IGN did observe some visual glitches, this is not surprising since the GPU was operating with pre-release drivers.

However, there are some caveats to consider before jumping to conclusions. This game has a history of favoring AMD in benchmarks, which might not hold true for all titles. Additionally, the powerful CPU could have played a role in this performance. Nevertheless, seeing the RX 9070, a mainstream card, come close to averaging 100 fps in 4K is a promising sign.

If it weren’t for this preliminary test, we would lack any benchmarks for the new RDNA 4 GPUs at this moment. While it’s common for new technologies to be kept under wraps without a release date, it would have been nice to see some projections. Despite Nvidia sharing some benchmarks for its new RTX 50 series — which are hard to trust at face value — AMD has remained tight-lipped about its forthcoming GPUs, with promises of more information in the near future.