Some software bugs mar the experience but overall, AMD's 9070 graphics cards offer such a compelling mix of performance, value, and memory capacity that it's worth accepting those quibbles. Nvidia fumbled the ball with its 549 GeForce RTX 5070, and AMD's new Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT are primed to seize advantage. The RTX 5070, hitting store shelves today, is a good 1440p graphics card but a stagnant generational sidegrade at best. Enter the 549 Radeon RX 9070 and 599 Radeon RX 9070 XT, launching tomorrow. Both cards are faster than the RTX 5070, with the 9070 XT going toe-to-toe with the 750 RTX 5070 Ti in many games, and each includes an ample 16GB of VRAM.

AMD's decision to start off with mid-range RDNA 4 GPUs now seems prescient. NVIDIA's high-end RTX 5090 and 5080 are already selling well beyond their absurdly high prices, if you can find any in stock at all. And while the RTX 5070 Ti impressed us, it's already selling for close to the 5080's 1,000 launch price. Now AMD's Radeon 9070 and 9070 XT, which are set to arrive on March 6, have the chance to swoop in and deliver some serious competition. Based on early briefings from AMD, which include some impressive benchmarks (still untested by us), the RDNA 4 GPUs appear to be compelling 4K and 1,440p for discerning gamers who aren't ready to drop four figures on a video card.

CES 2025 set up an old-fashioned graphics card battle between Nvidia and AMD, even if the latter showed up a little late. We know when the new RTX 50 series GPUs will debut (at the end of January) and we now know when AMD's Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT cards will hit store shelves: March. If you want a more specific date, well, you aren't alone. But that's as much as AMD vice president David McAfee (whom we've spoken with on several occasions) is willing to share at the moment, only barely improving on the "Q1" date that was announced at CES. "Radeon 9000 series hardware and software are looking great and we are planning to have a wide assortment of cards available globally. Can't wait for gamers to get their hands on the cards when they go on sale in March!" AMD's decision to launch the Radeon 9000 series at the xx70 level has been interpreted as an unspoken capitulation to Nvidia, who has dominated more expensive tiers of graphics cards for both industrial AI applications and consumer PCs.