I benchmarked the AMD Radeon RX 9070

On By Littum

AMD just teased the Radeon RX 9070 yesterday at CES 2025 with very little in the way of specs or even a release date. But because Team Red was demoing the Radeon RX 9070 at its booth with Call of Duty Black Ops 6 – which has a built-in Benchmark tool – I was able to get a quick look at how this next-gen GPU performs.

All told, at 4K Extreme settings with no upscaling or frame generation, the Radeon RX 9070 was able to average an impressive 99 fps, although it had the same visual errors as the Intel Arc B580 when I benchmarked it. To be clear, this graphics card is running on very early alpha drivers, and that bug will most likely be fixed by the time the card hits the market. But even on the early drivers, a solid 99fps is incredibly impressive.

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Because I ran the benchmark without upscaling, rather than the vendor-appropriate upscaling method that I use when I normally benchmark this game for graphics card reviews, I don’t have a direct comparison I can make. But even with DLSS on the ‘Quality’ setting, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super gets around 129 fps on the same graphics preset at 4K. Given that DLSS adds a 30% performance jump on the quality setting, it could put the Radeon RX 9070 on par with the 4080 Super – although I’ll have to test the 4080 Super without DLSS to know for sure.

Some of the amazing performance of this benchmark is also likely due to the CPU – the rig was running on an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, a high-end gaming CPU that was also announced yesterday. But if this is the level of performance we can expect when the Radeon RX 9070 launches later this year, it will be a great card for anyone looking for a mid-range solution.

The benchmark also provides some insight into the graphics card’s specifications, albeit limited. The Radeon RX 9070 has 16 GB of VRAM, although we still don’t know how many graphics cores or at what clock speed the card runs.

However, this is just a test and I won’t have a clear picture of how this graphics card will perform across a range of games until I get it into the lab to put it through the full suite of tests. But sneak peeks are definitely exciting.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC component queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra