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AMD may have underestimated the RX 9070

AMD's upcoming RX 9070 was benchmarked during CES 2025, and it's promising.

AMD’s upcoming RX 9000 series is still largely a mystery, but the cards are already out there — and AMD was actually demoing the RX 9070 during CES 2025. We may not know any specs of the card at this point, but thanks to an early benchmark, we know that it does a surprisingly good job in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. Can it really compete against some of Nvidia’s best graphics cards?

The RX 9070 was available for brief testing at the AMD booth, paired with the mighty impressive Ryzen 9 9950X3D. IGN spotted it and gave it a test run in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which has a built-in benchmarking tool. Mind you, this is the non-XT model, meaning that it’s not the flagship card — but it’s unclear just how much worse it’ll be than the XT variant.

The GPU was benchmarked without upscaling, and that’s great news. It removes any doubt as to how much extra power FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) can provide and gives us a better idea of how the GPU itself performs. Running at 4K and using Extreme settings, the RX 9070 managed to maintain an average of 99 frames per second (fps).

That’s an impressive result, and IGN compares it to what the RTX 4080 Super can do. Considering that AMD itself claims that even its top GPU will only rival the RX 7900 XT, that’s a good result. It’s worth noting that IGN spotted some visual artifacts, but that’s not unexpected, given that the GPU was running on alpha drivers.

There are a couple of things to take into account here before getting too excited, though. For starters, this particular game is known to favor AMD in benchmarks, so in other titles, the performance might be different. The high-end CPU might have helped, too. But in any case, seeing the RX 9070 — which is a mainstream card — nearly averages 100 fps at 4K is promising.

If not for this test, we’d have had exactly zero benchmarks of the new RDNA 4 GPUs right now. This isn’t unusual, given that they don’t have a release date yet, but it would’ve been nice to hear some estimates. While Nvidia provided some tests for its new RTX 50-series (which are hard to take at face value), AMD kept quiet about the GPUs, promising to let us know more in the coming weeks.

The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.

The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.

Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.

"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.

I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.

However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.