After one of the most confusing launches in PC component history, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 is finally here. AMD was originally meant to launch the GPU series back in January but just didn’t. We can all just assume what happened but I am happy to report that the GPUs are real and I have played with the RX 9070 in the flesh.
Watch the ASUS Prime AMD Radeon RX 9070 review below;
As it stands, the AMD Radeon 9070 provides the best value for money on the graphics card market. Coming in at just $549, it is in direct competition to NVIDIA’s rather lacklustre RTX 5070. The RX 9070 XT is then $599 which is great and all but for AMD, this small price gap kind of makes you want to spend the little extra for the best anyway. If we were looking at $100 – $150, then perhaps the decision would be harder to make but in my opinion, $50 should be a no brainer..
This review is covering the ASUS Prime AMD Radeon RX 9070 GPU. Before we get into it the specifics, I need to mention a cool promo. ASUS has teamed up with Gamesplanet to offer a game voucher with AMD and ASUS all in one cooler purchases. Select AMD GPUs and ASUS coolers purchased between now and the end of March will get you a games voucher which you can use on Gamesplanet to buy games. Different components will rewards you with a certain amount but you can earn up to 160 euros in total. You can visit the landing page for more information on this promo.
ASUS sent over the Prime AMD Radeon RX 9070 GPU for me to test out for this review. This is the PRIME OC GPU. The card comes with 3584 shading units, 56 Compute Cores, 56 RT Cores, 112 Tensor Cores and 128 ROPs (guaranteed, unlike the 50-series). It has a boost clock of 2590MHz, 16GB of DDR6 RAM and a max TGP of 220W. Although ASUS does recommend a 650W power supply for this card.
The card packs a 256-bit memory bus with 20Gbps of bandwidth and a 2518MHz memory clock. You’ll find one HDMI 2.1 port and 3 DisplayPort 2.1a ports on the card. It makes use of two 8-pin PCIE power connectors. Plain and simple. No bending, no heat build-up, no fires and no nonsense.
Similar to the ASUS Prime RTX 5080 Ti I just reviewed, this card follows the exact same design and it looks great. It keeps the 2.5-slot shape, the triple-cooling fan system with a 0dBA feature and is designed with a small form factor approach for smaller PC builds. The card is 312mm long, 130mm wide and 50mm thick.
Other features of this card include the triple-fan design, a dual BIOS switch, and ASUS has worked on its own tweaked version of GPU Tweak III that this card integrates with. I’ll tests that in a bit.
Overall, the card knows exactly what it wants to be. It is first and foremost a GPU leaving RGB and other fancy premium features behind. You’ll slap this into your PC and forget about it. The black outer shell looks clean and overall, I enjoy the design of the unit.
But what is a GPU if it doesn’t perform? There’s a lot riding on AMD’s new 9070 range considering it is launching into an oversaturated market of 50-series GPUs. Not to mention that AMD too has a plethora of GPUs on the market that can outperform the new series. The 7900 XTX is still one of the very best GPUs on the market.
Of course, AMD doesn’t have DLSS 4. It does have AMD FSR4, well, sort of. AMD says FSR 3.1 supported games will automatically kick FSR4 into gear when you toggle on the automatic switch in the AMD software. So you likely have a few FSR 4 games already installed on your PC and when you get this card, it will just work like magic. The game lineup is very limited to around 30 at the moment but AMD says over 75 games will have FSR 3.1 and essentially FSR4 by the end to the year.
FSR 4 promises some big things. The brand says it is the most-advanced implementation to date, combining temporal upscaling with machine learning techniques, native AA, and frame generation. Of course, you’ll need a 9000 series GPU to use it,
So I ran some tests. Before I get into them, I did make some minor changes to the GPU through the AMD software. I of course, enabled automatic FSR4 but I also applied a blanket-wide boost mode through the GPU Tweak III software that ASUS wants you to use on the card. This was just called OC Mode which increased the power limit of the GPU by 10%. Nothing too crazy.
FSR 4 was then activated by enabling it two ways. I could turn on Hyper-RX in the AMD Adrenalin software or manually enable it across supported games in the same app. If the game supported it, the toggle would appear as Super Resolution 4. However, it is easier to just keep HYPER-RX enabled because then everything seems to happen automatically. I just had to make sure that FSR 3.1 was enabled too as these games would automatically be kicked into FSR 4 mode.
AMD also has some noticeable updates to its software while I am on the topic. The new overly menu is intuitive and lets you start recording a video, take a screenshot, check your performance metrics and more. I actually really enjoyed using the software. I could also tweak the many various settings on the overly including FSR 4, to see if it was enabled in the game, the sharpness of the FSR, change game filters, you name it. I think the new overly is a much needed revamp and people are going to love it.
I then ran my usual tests. I used my usual PC with the following components. I turned my PC fans and cooler to performance. For these tests, I wanted to see just how powerful the ASUS PRIME AMD Radeon RX 9070 was when it came to raw performance while at the same time, see how far the card’s new FSR4 features could go and how much visual compromise games take to get higher frames.
In all honestly, I am not a fan of AI frame gen and upscaling to any degree, be it AMD or NVIDIA but AMD’s FSR is hard to stomach at times. Games start to look real noisy with artefacts on moving objects and dirty visuals all over the place. Well, that is with FSR 3 and prior versions. So I was very keen to see how this new 9000-series exclusive FSR4 feature worked.
Considering I had the RTX 5070 with me, I also compared the card to this AMD RX 9070 during some tests. The 5070 is currently the same price so it was interesting to see where it held up and especially, how clean upscaling was compared to the two. Find Gigabyte Radeon RX 9070 Gaming OC here. and the ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 5070 review here.
Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t have FSR 4 so I just went with the best possible comparison here. The RX 9070 ran FRS 3 on balanced with path raytracing enabled. The closest setting for the RTX 5070 here would be the multi frame gen X4 and even then, the card didn’t reach the same performance. However, I need to note that FSR 3 in this case is quite an eyesore in comparison to multi frame gen. The result is blurry and noisy.
During my tests, the ASUS PRIME AMD Radeon RX 9070 kind of peaked at 57C during Steel Nomad stress test. I tried to get the GPU to get warmer than that but it didn’t want to budge. This is after about 30 minutes of constant use. Fans peaked at 1420RPM with a max power draw of 238W. Clock speed fluctuated around 2700MHz and went up to 2800MHz with the added 10% GPU power limit increase. .
I was impressed by how the card handled its thermals. 57C with a near silent 33dBa fan is a match made in heaven. I won’t lie, I didn’t expect this. Previous AMD GPUs have had somewhat higher thermals with much louder fans. I could really see myself using this GPU knowing it is generating less heat and noise than most weaker GPUs on the market. Even the RTX 5070 ran at around 3-5 degrees more across the GPU card I reviewed.
Then we have the FSR 4 tech. It was actually really good. Visuals are so much cleaner than FSR 3. There’s no visible clouding around moving objects, particle effects finally look like particle effects and the sheer level of quality is a world beyond what we are used to.
The tech also brings its game when it comes to performance. 4K games were a breeze for this Radeon 9070. Granted, Raytracing does have some hiccups but generally speaking, the card absolutely blew the RTX 5070 out of the water. Again, something I didn’t expect. Not for this price tag.
I think the biggest achievement here is the leap AMD has taken from FSR 3 to FSR 4. We have better visuals and fantastic performance. There’s no multi-frame-gen but the card didn’t need it. FSR 4 does this already. When looking at tests like Monster Hunter and Ratchet and Clank, the frames are achieved on this 9070 and in certain circumstances, performance is higher.
Of course, we need to take into consideration the price and performance of this card. This is really a remarkable GPU to costs just $549. I had my doubt but AMD has delivered a product that might be hard to pass up on if you’re looking for 4K on a budget. Last generation, 4K on a budget resulted in an expensive card with pretty crappy FSR visuals and performance. This generation, it is the complete opposite.
Granted, we have to consider that FSR 4 is new and games are very limited. If anything, I even struggled to find titles to benchmark in my review. But like DLSS 3, we will slowly get there over time.
As for the ASUS factor of this GPU, the Prime OC is a great card. Its performance was good, cooling was excellent and I have no complaints. Again, this card is a steal in the market considering the current landscape.
The ASUS Prime Radeon RX 9070 retails from R17, 299 in South Africa. Visit the ASUS website to find out more about the ASUS Radeon RX 9070 PRIME OC here.
ASUS Prime Radeon RX 9070
Summary
The ASUS Prime AMD Radeon RX 9070 is an excellent card. For its asking price, it goes above and beyond anything you can get on the market. It turns budget 4K with shoddy FSR upscaled visuals into premium 4K on a budget. This is the comeback that AMD needed and they brought a fierce competitor with it. Granted, FSR 4 is very limited in games but this library will only grow over time.