AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT performance estimates leaked: 42% to 66% faster than Radeon RX 7900 GRE

AMD reportedly held a press briefing and disclosed more information about its upcoming Radeon RX 9000-series graphics processors as well as the RDNA 4 architecture. Perhaps the most important part was the disclosure of AMD's official performance numbers of the new Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card that appeared to be significantly ahead of the Radeon RX 7900 GRE, according to the allegedly official numbers published by VideoCardz.

In fact, AMD claims that the upcoming Radeon RX 9070 XT is 42% – 168% faster than the Radeon RX 7900 GRE at a 4K resolution with 'ultra' quality settings across over 30 games. The Radeon RX 9070 XT outperforms the RX 7900 GRE by an average of 38% at 1440p and 42% at 2160p. However with certain titles that rely on ray tracing more than others — such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Hitman 3 — performance gains reach 164% –168%, again according to the numbers published by VideoCardz.

Games with ray tracing tend to see the biggest increases, emphasizing AMD's RDNA 4 advances in handling RT workloads. Titles like Cyberpunk 2077, Dying Light 2, F1 24, and Hitman 3 show the strongest performance jumps of 56% to 66%, which clearly makes the new Radeon RX 9070-series offerings strong contenders to sit amongst the best graphics cards in the coming quarters.

When it comes to the performance difference between the Radeon RX 9070 XT and the Radeon RX 9070 (non-XT), the delta averages between 16.1% at 1440p Ultra Settings and 18.3% at 2160p Ultra Settings across the tested games, according to AMD. Yet, the Radeon RX 9070 (non-XT) still delivers a 20% performance boost at 1440p and a 21% higher performance at 2160p over the Radeon RX 7900 GRE.

AMD admitted that it did not have a GeForce RTX 5070 Ti for comparison, so it did not compare its new flagship against some of Nvidia's most wanted parts of today. The company did not explain why it decided not to compare its upcoming Radeon RX 9070 XT against its existing Radeon RX 7900 XTX flagship, but stuck to the cut-down Radeon RX 7900 GRE. The latter has around 25% lower compute performance compared to the range-topping Radeon RX 7900 XTX, but also has 16GB of memory onboard, whereas the range-topping board carries 24GB of GDDR6 VRAM.

Unlike AMD, Nvidia uses upscaling technologies like frame generation to demonstrate performance improvements over the previous generation, so the red company gains some kudos. As a result, AMD has chosen to focus on native rendering performance and ray tracing, so performance gains are quite real. More details will, of course, be shared on February 28 when AMD officially presents its Radeon RX 9070-series products.