Thursday, July 3rd 2025
AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT Gains 9% Performance at 1440p with Latest Driver, Beats RTX 5070 Ti
In what could spell trouble for the upcoming GeForce RTX 5070 SUPER, Hardware Unboxed found that the latest Adrenalin drivers give the Radeon RX 9070 XT a 9% gain in raster performance at 1440p over review press drivers. This closes its performance gap with the current GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, which would make the card faster than any potential SKU NVIDIA intends to position between the RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti. This testing is part of a feature by Hardware Unboxed where they compared current drivers to review press drivers for both the RX 9070 XT and RTX 5070 Ti.
When averaged across 16 games, the RX 9070 XT with latest drivers was found to gain 9% performance over review press drivers; whereas the RTX 5070 Ti with the latest drivers only gained 2.5% performance over its review press drivers. This 9% gain for the RX 9070 XT puts it ahead of the RTX 5070 Ti. Both the RTX 5070 Ti and RX 9070 XT are capable of gaming at 4K with some settings turned down. Here, averaged across the same 16 games, Hardware Unboxed found that the RTX 5070 Ti gained 3% performance, while the RX 9070 XT gained 4%, and the two GPUs were evenly matched. Helping AMD's average are specific game tests where the RX 9070 XT vastly improved its performance, with "Counter Strike 2" posting a 23% improvement, and "Spider-Man Remastered" posting a massive 27%. "Hogwarts Legacy" sees an 18% gain for AMD. There's more interesting findings and insights in the Hardware Unboxed video linked below.
Sources:
Hardware Unboxed (YouTube), VideoCardz
When averaged across 16 games, the RX 9070 XT with latest drivers was found to gain 9% performance over review press drivers; whereas the RTX 5070 Ti with the latest drivers only gained 2.5% performance over its review press drivers. This 9% gain for the RX 9070 XT puts it ahead of the RTX 5070 Ti. Both the RTX 5070 Ti and RX 9070 XT are capable of gaming at 4K with some settings turned down. Here, averaged across the same 16 games, Hardware Unboxed found that the RTX 5070 Ti gained 3% performance, while the RX 9070 XT gained 4%, and the two GPUs were evenly matched. Helping AMD's average are specific game tests where the RX 9070 XT vastly improved its performance, with "Counter Strike 2" posting a 23% improvement, and "Spider-Man Remastered" posting a massive 27%. "Hogwarts Legacy" sees an 18% gain for AMD. There's more interesting findings and insights in the Hardware Unboxed video linked below.
131 Comments on AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT Gains 9% Performance at 1440p with Latest Driver, Beats RTX 5070 Ti
Of course they do have issues. No software is perfect. But there are no major issues. Drivers are stable.OpenGL is old games. Considering the small amount of games using that i understand why it's not a priority. From my own testing i've found much bigger performance deficit in older DX11 titles. Not stability problems. Just performance that should be higher given the hardware performance in DX12/Vulkan.
The reality for everyone here who isn't constantly trying to win the internet is that Nvidia and AMD drivers are about the same as far as bugs and 'stability' (whatever that means). Each launch of a new series can bring a variety of problems for all companies. While there were massive problems at launch, even Intel drivers are nominally the same as far as bugs and 'stability'.
What's the misinformation though?
Again for the rest of everyone here, there are drivers and there are features. AMD=Nvidia=Intel for drivers. Sometimes one of three might have more problems than the others relative to market share during the release of a new series. Nvidia has much better features such as super sampling and frame generation. These features have nothing to do with drivers as they require supporting hardware and game development.
You don't need 10s of drivers though, I only have 3 released on the desktop ready to install.Unstable undervolts sounds like a driver issue. Wait for new drivers, im sure it will fix it.
Honestly, do you actually go around and quote every person that says "nvidia drivers have issues" telling them they all have issues or are you just doing it to people saying amd drivers have issues? Cause clearly, you are the one that seems to be supportive of one brand over the other. Please, show me a similar reply that you made, quoting someone that said "nvidia has bad drivers" telling them how they all have bad drivers and ill eat my shoe
Here is an example. I started this thread showing improved performance from two different TPU reviews at two different times to corroborate what Hardware Unboxed found. Now you can post an article showing AMD stability problems as a counter to these performance improvements. I am willing to read or watch the link you send but again it can't be a reddit thread as there is no way to verify what's being said is true.
I know it would be quite the task to do something like that but I think there could be value in documenting and publishing this kind of information to help appropriately inform people about driver quality on top of card performance
A 5050 review is upcoming, so he'll probably use newest drivers.
Typically, my posts are about debunking the idea that one company's drivers are better than another's. Since the FUD surrounding AMD drivers was so venomous and false, some of this debunking could look like bias. Again I apologize if that seems the case to some of you here but I mainly get complaints everytime from the same three people: two TPU readers and one TPU staff member.
Apparently the scheduling hardware in RDNA 3 and earlier stall the pipeline to handle false dependencies, wasting the GPU compute hardware’s time. Nvidia and Intel use software instruction scheduling in the driver, and the software drivers do a better job scheduling instructions to not be stalled by false dependencies than RDNA 3 and earlier. This could be one reason why Nvidia and Intel could have higher driver overhead than AMD does, but the overhead pays off with less wasted GPU time. RDNA 4 fixes this scheduling problem.
Source: chipsandcheese.com/p/rdna-4s-out-of-order-memory-accesses
No immediate plans for retesting though. Maybe later in summer, also waiting for new games. It takes like two weeks of full-time work, i.e. it effectively costs a lot of money.