AMD RX 9070 XT Outshines Nvidia’s $1,000 GPU With A Catch

The AMD RX 9070 XT debuted last week, garnering mostly positive reactions from the gaming community. Anticipated to perform competitively against Nvidia’s RTX 5070 Ti, the RX 9070 XT has unexpectedly outperformed expectations, even surpassing the formidable RTX 5080, which retails for over $1,000.

Prominent overclocker Der8auer put the RX 9070 XT through rigorous testing, yielding fascinating findings. Initially, it was believed the RX 9070 XT would only compete with the RTX 5070, yet it has demonstrated capabilities that outshine both the RTX 5070 Ti and the 5080 in recent assessments. Notably, Der8auer utilized a high-end variant of the card, which he overclocked and undervolted to achieve these results.

Overclocking and undervolting a GPU can be an intricate process, often leading to rewarding outcomes—this instance certainly highlights that. Der8auer aimed to push the card to its maximum advertised clock speed of 3,060MHz for the PowerColor RX 9070 XT Red Devil. Simply overclocking was insufficient; he only achieved 3.1GHz by raising the power limit to 110%. After attempting to undervolt by 200mV, he encountered crashes. Ultimately, he stabilized the GPU by running it at -170mV, which allowed it to reach a remarkable 3.4GHz—an unprecedented frequency for many graphics cards.

The results from the overclocking and undervolting experiments were outstanding, leading the RX 9070 XT to take the top spot in Der8auer’s benchmarks, edging out the Nvidia RTX 5080 Founders Edition, albeit by a slight margin.

This performance is particularly striking given that the RTX 5080 is priced at $999 for the Founders Edition, while the RX 9070 XT starts at $599. This specific model is priced at $790 due to its premium features, making the price difference more significant than anticipated. Nevertheless, both graphics cards are currently sold out, rendering the point largely academic.

It’s worth noting that Der8auer did not employ ray tracing or path tracing during his benchmark of Cyberpunk 2077. Given Nvidia’s historical advantage in optimizing ray tracing workloads, this could mean even better performance for the RX 9070 XT. Furthermore, the RTX 5080 was tested without overclocking, which would likely have shifted the results in its favor—but nonetheless, this accomplishment serves as a solid win for AMD.