AMD's 'official' performance figures for RDNA 4 leak out early, with the RX 9070 XT claimed to be 42% faster than the RX 7900 GRE at 4K
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After a relatively muted 'launch' at CES 2025, AMD's next-generation GPU architecture, RDNA 4, has been left to leaks and rumours, as to how much better it's going to be compared to previous Radeon iterations. One tech site, however, is claiming that it has the real deal—AMD's own performance claims—and depending on what you were hoping for, you might be excited or disappointed.
The site in question is Videocardz and it claims AMD announced the performance figures at a press briefing, to which it wasn't invited, but managed to scoop the details anyway. We already know a fair amount about RNDA 4 and the Radeon RX 9000-series, such as the number of compute units, VRAM amount, and rough clock speed figures.
However, translating all of that into actual gaming performance is difficult to do because we don't know what other changes AMD has implemented under the GPU hood. That will eventually become clear once the new cards fully launch but for now, we'll just have to trust that Videocardz really does have AMD's performance numbers.
Starting with the RX 9070 XT, it's purportedly 42% faster than a Radeon RX 7900 GRE (RDNA 3) and 51% faster than a RX 6900 XT (RDNA 2). That's at 4K, averaged across more than 30 games, using 'Ultra' quality settings. The latter is over four years old, so one should hope the RX 9070 XT is considerably better, but a 42% mean uplift over a 7900 GRE is not to be sniffed at.
In our review of a Sapphire RX 7900 GRE, we found that the RX 7900 XT was on average just 18% better at 4K, so if this 42% increase is genuine, it marks a substantial improvement for AMD. However, the devil is in the details and the horned one in question here is ray tracing.
Videocardz has separated AMD's claimed gaming figures into standard rendering and ray-traced rendering games, and in the case of the former, the average uplift is 37%—still impressive but not quite 42%. However, averaging the improvements in the games with ray tracing puts the RX 9070 XT at 53% better than the RX 7900 GRE.
The standard RX 9070 is quite a bit slower than the 9070 XT, with an average uplift of 21% against the 7900 GRE. That's half as good as the XT version and I find that to be puzzling, given that all the rumours we've had about the two card's specifications have pointed to them being separated purely by clock speeds.
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Something clearly isn't right but exactly what's incorrect isn't known—either Videocardz's numbers are incorrect, the rumoured hardware specifications for the cards are wildly incorrect, or AMD's marketing figures have errors in them. All three scenarios could be true, as well.
One thing that really puzzles me is, if the RX 9070 XT really so much better than the 7900 GRE, why didn't AMD compare it to the 7900 XT—currently it's second most powerful gaming graphics card?
At least we don't have long to discover the truth of the matter, as the RX 9000-series is getting revealed at the end of this month, with retail sales starting in early March. One thing is certainly true, though: AMD likes to keep us guessing.
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