Linus, wake up. The radio 9070 announced would just drop, come on!
That's right! AMD finally announced those GPUs that were first spotted in full retail packaging
weeks ago, and I can't believe I'm saying this, but it's even more exciting than I dared to hope for.
Now, we had some idea what was coming, of course. RDNA 3.5 showed solid uplift over RDNA 3 in handhelds.
We got a look at some version of the ray tracing upgrades in the PlayStation 5 Pro,
and obviously, AI was going to be a big focus.
But now, it's all coming together in a single package.
Literally. They're back to using a monolithic die. I'm talking all new RDNA 4 architecture, an enhanced media engine,
third-gen ray tracing accelerators, second-gen AI accelerators,
powering FSR4 upscaling, and 16 gigs of VRAM at 599 US dollars.
And the best part? If they've been shipping these things for months, maybe stock?
Perhaps? I'm almost afraid to jinx it. But for the first time in as long as I can remember,
a Hymdi might not have screwed up a GPU launch!
Like, I'm going to screw up this, uh,
to our Spoonster? Feels like we've been waiting forever for RDNA 4, but good things come to those who wait, right?
And personally, I'm glad that AMD let their engineers cook.
We're going to dive a lot deeper when our review goes live next week. But for now, AMD is promising some big uplifts in performance per clock,
claiming that each CU or compute unit should be about 40% faster than RDNA 3.
For those of you who are keeping score at home, 40% is a lot,
and it supposedly comes courtesy of improved scalar units and dynamic register allocation.
They've also got an enhanced memory subsystem, which will supposedly
help with the compute portions of ray tracing workloads. Now, it's too early to say if AMD has fully closed the gap with NVIDIA when it comes to ray tracing,
but it seems like they're at least promising a major improvement over their last generation
accelerators. On top of the memory stuff, they've added a second ray intersection engine to
allegedly double throughput for raybox and ray triangle testing.
There's a dedicated hardware block for ray transformation and a new hardware accelerator
feature that they call oriented bounding boxes. That's a lot of jargon, but what it pretty much
boils down to is this thing should trace your rays a lot better, and I'm pretty excited about it.
Even if the real world result doesn't quite match up with NVIDIA's latest.
I'm also excited about AMD's new AI accelerators.
Okay, I'm not that excited about it, but someone is. Maybe even you.
With only 16 gigs of VRAM apiece, the two cards that AMD revealed today won't be able to handle
larger models, but the claimed performance improvements for the models that they can handle
are pretty big. Thanks to more math pipelines and expanding the capabilities of their AI
accelerators, AMD is claiming a two times performance uplift in FP16 and four times in
Int8 compared to RDNA3. As for how that translates to real world results,
they showed some slides later comparing the 9070XT to the 7900 GRE, and it does look pretty impressive.
And who knows, maybe you'll actually use the AI features that AMD is coming out with,
like the optional image inspector, which is an algorithm that monitors game frames and looks
for image corruption during gameplay, and the AMD chat? Oh good, it's a local large language
model that can supposedly help you configure your GPU and tune it. Neat, like how you can
keep your desk setup neat with magnetic cable management from LTTstore.com. Speaking of things
looking nice, the image quality improvements to the media engine look great. If their slides are
to be believed, you could actually stream to Twitch with one of these cards without it looking
like hot garbage. Let's just hope that, along with the better encoding, that they have finally
fixed that weird 1080p hardware encoding bug. Regardless of that, they've also promised 8K
ADFPS encode and decode, support for HEVC AV1 and H264, accelerated post processing effects,
and no limit on the number of sessions or encoding streams.
Team Green, meanwhile, locks this behind their professional card paywall, so uh, good guy AMD.
But also, darn it AMD! Let's take a look at the hardware. The 9070 and the 9070XT are two
surprisingly different cards. They both appear to use the same die, they're both equipped with 16
gigs of memory on a 256-bit bus, but the XT is clocked way higher at darn mere 3 GHz and pulls
a whopping extra 84 watts. On top of that, it has 8 more compute units and RT accelerators,
and 16 more AI accelerators for an extra 392 tops. All of which would be totally fine if the 9070
wasn't priced a mere $50 lower. AMD, you're doing the thing again. The 7900XT got terrible
reviews at launch because it was only $100 less than the XTX and it was way slower.
Months later, you discounted it when it wasn't selling and it picked up, but the reviews were
already out of the gate. There's still time to fix this, though. 499. Do it. Do it! Anywho,
both cards, regardless, are quite future-ready feature-wise, with PCI Express Gen 5 interfaces,
HDMI 2.1b and DisplayPort 2.1a, although it is worth noting that not all DP 2.1a ports are made
equal, and AMDs support only 54 gigabit per second compared to the 80 gigabit per second on NVIDIA's
50 series. In daily use, this is unlikely to matter much, since these cards aren't really
expected to be as powerful as NVIDIA's top GPUs, and with display stream compression, you should
still be able to run a 4K 240Hz monitor, but it is worth noting. But what should we expect
performance-wise? Well, thanks to FSR4, maybe a lot? As per usual, you're gonna have to wait
for the reviews to drop from ourselves and others next week before you pull the trigger.
If their image comparisons are real, and I don't have reason yet to believe they're not real,
the image quality has improved so much that maybe you won't mind bumping down from quality mode to
performance. AMD, like NVIDIA, is leaning on AI and neural rendering for this, and they're calling
it FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 ML-powered upscaling. This was teased almost a year ago,
and hey, it looks like it's finally here. The only issue is the lack of early support.
They've got a decent list of 30-plus games at launch, with over 75 more on the way for 2025,
and I would expect that to grow, but don't buy promises. Buy what you can use today,
because there's no telling if your favorite game will or won't end up being supported.
A feature that does support a much more sizable 1,000-plus games list is HyperRX, sort of.
It's a one-click solution that's been around for a while now and enables features like
anti-lag, boost, and FSR with Fluid Motion Frames 2.1 joining that roster and more coming soon in
2025. However, since not all of those games benefit from every single one of those features,
your performance improvements will vary on a game-to-game basis,
and not everyone is a fan of frame generation, regardless of whether those frames are
green fake frames or red fake frames. Speaking of Team Green, let's talk about availability,
because after all, who gives a single flying f*** about anything that AMD said today
if the cards can't be bought? I mean, I was super excited about the 50-series
until they were proven to be made out of unobtainium, so you'll have to forgive me for being a little
jaded, but I mean, these cards have been in the hands of retailers for months. We saw samples
at CES in early January with our own eyes. I've got one in my hand now! So when AMD says
wide availability, March 6th, 2025, there's a small, small ray of hope inside me that hasn't
quite withered and died yet and wants so desperately to believe them. So for the love of all that is
good, please, AMD, please don't f*** this up. If this is another paper launch, it'll just be my
13th reason why the GPU market right now is terrible and gamers should despair. And I don't want
another reason, like Intel's B580 came out and buoyed my spirits. It's a great budget card.
It's just that it's hard to find at or near MSRP, and then NVIDIA's 50-series has been trickling
out into the market as if each one of them is artisanally whittled out of silicon by like
one guy. Gamers want reasonably priced cards, they want them now, and AMD, guys, you've got
a real opportunity to gain actual market share here, as long as your cards aren't buggy and don't
melt. But hey, good news. AMD claims that this launch will be the best driver support they've
ever had. And considering how much they've been delayed, apparently, I actually kind of believe
that they've given the software team some extra time to cook. And they even say they've
also improved their processes. New AI-optimized internal testing, increased number of hardware
test configurations in the lab, and a new bug report tool that's loaded directly into the driver
will hopefully lead to a smoother launch experience. But will it be a little smoother or a lot
too smoother? We can't know until thousands of credit cards have been swiped and thousands of
GPUs have played thousands of games, and also output thousands of LTT segues to our sponsor.
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