AMD may have underestimated the RX 9070

By Monica J. White Published January 8, 2025

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.