Introduction

ASUS TUF Gaming Radeon RX 9070 XT OC is the company's top custom-design graphics card based on AMD's latest performance-segment GPU leading the RX 9000 series. The RX 9070 XT TUF Gaming uses the company's latest generation Vented Exoskeleton board design for TUF Gaming, which it debuted with its GeForce RTX 50-series. There are a couple of visual cues telling you which card this is, such as the prominent Radeon logo on top, and three 8-pin PCIe power connectors—an interesting choice, given that some of the other AMD board partners have implemented the modern 12V-2x6 with their premium RX 9070 XT cards. The Radeon RX 9070 XT is recommended by AMD for both 4K Ultra HD and 1440p gaming use-cases. With the RX 9000 series, AMD made a tactical retreat from the enthusiast segment, which means its flagship for this generation is a performance-segment part that it can concentrate its engineering efforts on.



The Radeon RX 9070 XT introduces a new naming scheme. Logically, the RX 9070 XT is the spiritual successor to the RX 7800 XT, but AMD has changed the naming scheme to help buyers better compare the SKU with a GeForce rival. The RX 9070 XT, hence, goes up against the RTX 5070 series from NVIDIA, including the RTX 5070 itself, and crosses swords with RTX 5070 Ti in some cases, at a lower price point.

The RX 9070 XT debuts the company's latest RDNA 4 graphics architecture, which comes with a design focus on maximizing performance per square mm of die-area. For starters, the new Navi 48 chip the RX 9070 XT is based on is a traditional monolithic silicon built on the 4 nm TSMC N4P foundry node, an upgrade from the previous generation, which used the latest foundry node of the time only for a centralized silicon with the number crunching machinery of the GPU, while relegating the memory controllers and Infinity Cache to chiplets built on an older node. The Navi 48 hence has a massive transistor density increase over its predecessor.

The new RDNA 4 graphics architecture comes with a design focus on uplifting the ray tracing performance of the GPU, with the company claiming a nearly 100% increase in RT performance over the previous generation, lowering the performance cost of having it enabled in your game, given that ray tracing is no longer a novelty, and is a must-have feature for today's AAA game titles. The company also worked to significantly increase the AI acceleration performance of the silicon, paving the way for the new FSR 4 performance enhancement suite. Lastly, the shader performance per CU sees a significant uplift, allowing AMD to arrive at a reasonable CU count of 64 to achieve performance in league of much larger enthusiast-segment GPUs from the previous generation. The memory size is 16 GB, across a 256-bit wide memory interface, and in a surprising move, AMD decided to stick with the older generation GDDR6 memory standard, instead focusing on significant updates to its memory management system.

The RX 9070 XT maxes out the 4 nm Navi 48 silicon it's based on, enabling all 64 compute units, which works out to 4,096 stream processors, 128 AI accelerators, 64 RT accelerators, 256 TMUs, and 128 ROPs. The GPU is able to run its engine clock at or above 3.00 GHz in overclocked scenarios, while the memory ticks at 20 Gbps, for 640 GB/s of memory bandwidth. AMD also updated its display and media engines. The media engine comes with image quality improvements for H.264 and H.265 hardware-accelerated encoding; besides support for AV1 B-frames.

The ASUS TUF Gaming RX 9070 XT OC, as we said, implements the latest generation of its TUF Gaming Vented Exoskeleton cooling solution, with striking industrial looks, and a design that exposes more of the heatsink underneath for the highest exhaust flow. ASUS offers factory overclocked speeds of 2520 MHz Game clock, compared to 2400 MHz reference Game clock. ASUS is pricing the card at an eye-watering $800, a 33% premium over the $600 AMD baseline.