AMD’s chief architect of gaming says not to believe the earlier performance rumors about Radeon RX 9070 “RDNA 4” GPUs as they are faster.
Frank Azor Signals Faster Raster and RT Performance of AMD Radeon RX 9070 “RDNA 4” GPUs, Calls Previous Rumors and Leaks ‘Inaccurate’
AMD purposely delayed the RDNA 4 GPU release to see what its competitor, NVIDIA, is bringing to the table. In an interview with PC World, Frank Azor, the Chief Architect of Gaming at AMD, confirmed that they made the delay according to their plan, and now they know how to approach the GPU launch.
He made some interesting points during the half-hour interview, but the most notable was what we had been waiting for. As per Frank, the early performance leaks about the AMD RDNA 4 GPUs, particularly the flagship Radeon RX 9070 XT, aren’t true. He says that the ‘pre-CES’ rumors and leaks about the RX 9070 XT performance are inaccurate and when asked whether the performance is lower or higher, he confirmed the latter to be the case.
As far as the pre-CES leaks and rumors go about the RX 9070 XT, we remember that there weren’t too many, but we have reported a couple of them. One leak suggested that the RX 9070 XT would be slightly faster than the Radeon RX 7900 GRE as was seen in the Time Spy test. Later on, we heard rumors about the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT being within 5% of the RTX 4080’s performance. Since both leaks suggest a pretty different performance capability of the RX 9070 XT, Frank could be pointing to only one of them.
He was likely deeming the former leak as inaccurate as, later on, we saw several leaks that indicated that the RX 9070 XT is on par with the RX 7900 XT and RTX 4070 Ti Super. Some suggest performance closer to the RTX 4080. Frank also said that the RX 9000 GPU lineup is now significantly better at both raster and ray tracing performance, and indicated that their 9070 cards are going against the 70-class cards, which means RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti.
Of course, Frank refused to list the details about the RX 9070 cards such as specs and pricing, but he said that the RX 9070 XT won’t be touching the $1000 mark. As he indicated that they changed the naming convention to clearly show which NVIDIA GPU they will be competing against, it’s likely that they will target the RTX 5070’s price.
The RTX 5070 is launched at $549, so a price tag of around $500 is expected. We already saw a Gigabyte RX 9070 XT Gaming OC card being listed for $529 on a Philippine retailer, which means, the Radeon RX 9070 XT reference card could go on retail for under $500. To win this fierce competition, AMD must deliver a competitive or even better raster performance because it’s unlikely that AMD will take the lead in ray tracing over NVIDIA.