RT is not gimmicky anymore. More and more games REQUIRE support for RT and needs to be somewhat fast to not hinder the performance which RDNA4 absolutely delivers. RDNA3 works and supports it, but it's so so. Latest Indiana Jones requires RT and so does Doom The Dark Ages. I've not played Indy yet, but Doom, my god it looks good and still runs insanely fast because they really optimized the engine well.
I had intention to skip all of it and just stick with RTX 3080, but said f**k it and bought RX 9070 XT. If "I'm just gonna wait" was valid for RX 5000, 6000 and 7000 series, that doesn't quite apply to 9000 series anymore. Significantly improved ray tracing to a point it's really not an issue unless game is so badly written it only runs good on GeForce. Significantly improved FSR4 which really looks absolutely amazing even on Balanced which I never used with FSR 2.2 or 3.1 because it looked like ass with that preset. AMD was greatly lacking in these two departments and they really upped the whole thing. RX 9000 also supports improved video encoding as well as full AV1 support which is nice.
Where AMD actually really shines is the software, ironically. For how new RX 9070 XT is, I've not had any issues with anything. All games I've played just worked. I've not used Radeon since HD7950 so I only read about all the issues people had with RX 5000/6000/7000 series. I've not had any of those issues with RX 9070 XT. The part that really impressed me software wise was how feature rich Radeon software is compared to NVIDIA Control Panel or newer NVIDIA App. NVIDIA Control Panel was horrid back in 2006 and it's still horrid today. NVIDIA App on the other hand fixes some of the issues, but actually lacks features compared to old panel.
Like forcing FXAA is just entirely gone now which is stupid. AMD offers forcing MLAA which is useful for older games if needed.
Overclocking tool in NVIDIA App is sooooooooo dumb. It's automatic, takes about 1 hour to do. If anything at any point goes wrong, it's another 1 hour ordeal. You've cleaned the driver? Tough bud, 1 hour OC. Sure it's "noob" friendly, but so stupid. AMD offers you full control for GPU, memory, power target and fans, including exporting and importing profiles. So so cool and allows me to not require MSI Afterburner.
Next thing is the in-game Overlay. I can invoke FULL Radeon control panel from within a game. Overclocing, image quality, special features, I don't have to leave the game at all to do it. NVIDIA App doesn't have that and only offers few visual tweaks as part of the shaders thing.
My favorite features are actually Radeon Chill and AFMF. Radeon Chill because it DRAMATICALLY lowers power consumption while not compromising gameplay. I play all game with Radeon Chill now with range between 100-240 fps (on 240Hz monitor) with included AFMF. We're talking sub 200W power draw while playing ray traced games on max settings at crazy smooth framerates. It's insane how smooth it is, I can't perceive the changes in framerate because it's so seamlessly changing during gameplay and AFMF is filling the visual gap at the bottom 100 which is effectively still 200fps smoothness wise (Overwatch 2 drove me crazy with its 60fps main menu, with AFMF it's 120 fps and it's so smooth on the mouse). And of course AFMF, by no means perfect as it has some artifacting on HUD elements, but it just works in all games and together with Radeon Chill it's all buttery smooth while consuming so little power. Slight artifacting stops bothering me after 5 minutes.
When you combine all the things, Radeon is just whole different, so much better experience than I ever had with GeForce. RTX 3080 was good, but this is just so much better and it's almost entirely because of software side of things and not as much hardware itself. It's so good it'll be incredibly hard to go back to NVIDIA for me no matter how much framegen and DLSS they throw around and how amazing their RT is. The fact it has no Radeon Chill like feature is suddenly an issue for me and lacking agnostic AFMF and requiring games to specifically have framegen built-in means I'm entirely at mercy of game devs and NVIDIA. Here, AMD is like "here's the shit, it works great in 95% of cases and works in any game". I like that. And AMD is planning on software upgrades to RT and FSR4 to make them even better so it's really great times ahead and I hope they'll do some "Ai" magic on AFMF too. Version 2.1 is already really good, I can only imagine how good AFMF 2.5 or 3.x might be...
I have few followers on my blog and that's it, so I can hardly be called influencer, but I can't praise enough RX 9070 XT. It's SO good. Could it be priced lower? Sure. But I'm not mad on what I got for the price.
