ASUS TUF Gaming RX 9070 XT OC Review

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT has launched, and the reception has been overwhelming. With NVIDIA dropping the ball with the RTX 5070, AMD has been able to swoop in with two excellent mid-range graphics cards, claiming this part of the market for themselves. The RX 9070 XT is the stronger card of the two RX 9070 GPUs, and it offers pretty mindblowing performance at just $599.

The ASUS TUF Gaming OC range of cards is a staple of any GPU launch, and this particular RX 9070 XT variant is designed to offer better themals, a refined style, and stronger performance. However, the MSRP (manufacturer suggested retail price) models are the big competitors for the ASUS TUF Gaming RX 9070 XT OC. The RX 9070 XT is such an excellent GPU due to its performance and pricing. At $599, the RX 9070 XT is cheaper than the RTX 5070 Ti and only $50 more than the RTX 5070. Because the TUF model is a non-MSRP card, its value immediately comes into question. However, we’ll leave the speculation until we see some critical performance numbers.

In this review article, we’ll analyse the specs, architecture, design, and aesthetic of the ASUS TUF Gaming RX 9070 XT OC, along with some crucial performance numbers. We’ve tested the TUF Gaming variant of the RX 9070 XT in a wide range of games and provided several comparative graphs that showcase its performance compared to other modern cards on the market.

Specification

As we’ve alluded to, pricing is the big point of contention for the 9070 XT. With a $599 MSRP, the RX 9070 XT competes with the RTX 5070 and the RTX 5070 Ti, placing it in a fairly unique position. By outperforming both of these GPUs, the RX 9070 XT has a firm hold on the mid-range market, providing gamers with an affordable graphics card that offers excellent performance across 1440p and 4K gaming.

It is worth noting that the TUF Gaming OC model is immediately harder to sell because of its non-MSRP price tag. While there’s no doubt that the TUF Gaming OC model will enhance the RX 9070 XT’s already excellent performance, the question is by how much. The RX 9070 XT has an excellent price tag, and I can’t see many gamers justifying spending $50-$100 more to lower temperatures by a few degrees or gain a couple of extra frames.

Looking at the specs, the 9070 XT offers 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 256-bit memory bus. We’re unsurprised about the capacity, mainly because AMD is generally more liberal with its VRAM offerings. However, what is interesting to note is that AMD still uses GDDR6. NVIDIA has jumped to GDDR7, a first in the PC gaming space, but AMD seems to be sticking to the same spec of VRAM they’ve been using for the past two generations.

I don’t feel this is a limitation of the RX 9070 cards, especially as PCI-E 5.0 is a requirement, but for future generations, AMD will likely need to make the jump to GDDR7, as NVIDIA have done. As for the rest of the specs, the RX 9070 XT is relatively similar to the RX 7800 XT on paper. The former offers 64 compute units, ray accelerators, and 4096 stream processors. The ray accelerators and compute units are entirely new, specific to RDNA4, enhancing RT performance, especially when paired with AMD’s Frame Generation technology.

As mentioned above, the specs are fairly similar to the RX 7800 XT. It is worth noting that power consumption has increased with the RX 9070 XT. This card consumes a maximum of 304W versus the 263W TGP of the RX 7800 XT. I don’t think the wattage increase will require a PSU upgrade for most builders, but those sitting on the cusp of their total wattage may need to consider picking up something with a bit more juice, which AMD recommends is a 750W power supply.

Design

On the design front, the ASUS TUF Gaming RX 9070 XT OC model is a triple-fan card, utilising the familiar TUF industrial design that many of you will be used to seeing. As a triple-fan card, the TUF Gaming OC variant will offer better cooling than many other cards straight out of the gate. The two outer fans spin anti-clockwise, while the centre fan spins clockwise, reducing turbulence. The fans are also designed to stop spinning once GPU temps sit below 55°C, ensuring silent operation during lighter workloads.

The TUF Gaming OC version of the RX 9070 XT is predominantly a grey graphics card, with a lighter grey/silver colour popping up on a small strip that spans the height and width of the card on the left and right of the GPU. I’m personally a big fan of the TUF aesthetic. ASUS is one of the few manufacturers, if not the only, that provides a series of components that offer a refined industrial theme. There’s an industrial livery across the entire shroud of the GPU, which adds a bit of depth to the card while providing something a bit more interesting to look at instead of just a grey metal panel.

Around the rear of the TUF Gaming RX 9070 XT OC, you’ll find a sturdy metal backplate providing rigidity; this makes the TUF Gaming RX 9070 XT OC far less susceptible to damage if it is dropped. It also offers a much more refined feel and look versus plain metal shrouding.

The top of the TUF Gaming OC model houses a small TUF logo that lights up with RGB once the card is powered. ASUS has kept RGB to a minimum on this GPU, which fits in with the more minimalist style of a TUF PC. I understand that the lack of RGB and more pronounced look of the TUF Gaming OC variant won’t appeal to everyone, but I’m personally a fan.

For power, this TUF Gaming RX 9070 XT OC houses three eight-pin PCI-E power connectors. The Gigabyte AORUS Elite model we looked at on launch was the same, so it’s no surprise to see it here. Ultimately, I think AMD will struggle to put more than three power connectors on a GPU, as they’ll look ridiculous. It may be worth AMD switching to the 16-pin cable or offering an alternative once power consumption exceeds 300W.

Architecture

RDNA4 powers the Radeon 9000 series of graphics cards. AMD claims RDN4 is a breakthrough for graphics architecture, with enhancements to compute units, ray tracing, and AI acceleration to improve your gaming experience.

The RDNA4 compute units drive improvements for raster and compute workloads, offering major uplifts to efficiency and, more importantly, performance. Regarding ray tracing, the RX 9070 XT uses third-generation ray tracing accelerators to improve performance in supported games. Additionally, RX 9000 also uses second-generation AI accelerators. While AMD doesn’t market the use of AI as heavily as NVIDIA, the Radeon 9000 lineup offers uplifts to AI-based performance, making them better for workstation usage.

Under the hood, AMD has also brought about improvements to their FSR technology. FSR has been notably weaker than DLSS for quite some time, mainly because it doesn’t use AI to upsample images. However, Team Red have constantly changed FSR to make it a more viable option in modern games.

FSR is also a GPU-agnostic technology, which means it works the same regardless of whether you have an NVIDIA, AMD, or Intel graphics card. FSR is coded directly into your game’s engine, making it accessible to everyone.

However, this doesn’t apply to Fluid Motion Frames. AMD’s FMF technology, with the 2.1 update, reduces ghosting and artifacts but makes gameplay much smoother by injecting additional frames between frames using interpolation.

While not as strong as DLSS and Frame Gen, FSR and Fluid Motion Frames are critical technologies for AMD, especially their more recent Frame Generation tech. As we’ll see in the performance section, Frame Generation is essential for ray tracing performance to be viable in modern games.

Performance

As always, all of our benchmarking and testing is done by our in-house benchmarker, Harry Coleman, who has worked tirelessly to gather all the data needed for our RX 9070 content. The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and a range of competitor graphics cards have been tested in our primary benchmarking system paired up with the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D to provide the best framerates possible across all of the titles we tested. The games featured in this benchmarking section provide a mix of AAA games and modern Esports titles to see how the RX 9070 XT holds up in a range of games.

Cyberpunk 2077

Settings: 4K, Shadow Quality High, Indirect Lighting High, Reflections High, Crowd Density High, Particle Quality High, Volumetric Lighting High, Motion Blur off, GTAO Quality High, Grass Quality High, Contact Shadows High VSync Off, DLSS: On/Off, Ray Tracing: On/Off, Textures: High

The first game we ran was Cyberpunk 2077, in which the resolution was set to 4K, and the rest of the settings were set to high. In this particular benchmark, the RX 9070 XT offered a highly impressive showing, sitting in fifth place with an average of 79FPS. The RX 9070 XT doesn’t quite beat the RTX 5070 Ti at 80FPS, but a 1FPS difference will be negligible. What’s impressive here is that this is a 4K benchmarking run. So, the fact that the RX 9070 XT can stay on par with the 5070 Ti is an impressive metric.

After switching on FSR, ray tracing, and Frame Generation, the RX 9070 XT jumped to 99FPS, beating out the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 4080 SUPER by a small margin. For quite some time, AMD has struggled to match NVIDIA’s ray tracing performance. Still, this benchmark indicates that their cards are becoming much stronger with the aid of FSR and Frame Gen. What’s even more impressive is that this card is just $50 more than the RTX 5070 and absolutely blows it out of the water.

Alan Wake 2

Settings: 4K, Post-Processing High, Texture Resolution High, Texture Filtering High, Volumetric Lighting High, Global Illumination Quality High, Shadow Detail High, Terrain Quality High, Ray-Tracing: Enabled, Ray Tracing Preset High, DLSS: On/Off, Frame Generation: On/Off

In Alan Wake 2, the RX 9070 XT performed reasonably well in this rasterised benchmark. With an average output of 60FPS, this run was more than playable, albeit choppy at times in certain intense areas. Again, the RX 9070 XT beats the RTX 5070 Ti by about 9FPS. Because the overall framerates are low, 10FPS is a decent jump between laggy and smooth, so the RX 9070 XT is definitely the more favourable of the two.

When ray tracing and FSR were switched on, performance significantly shifted in favour of NVIDIA. While Cyberpunk 2077 told a different story, it’s clear that without the assistance of Frame Gen, AMD falls flat with ray tracing switched on. The RX 9070 XT offered a meagre 11FPS in this benchmark, followed by the RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX at 24FPS and 28FPS, respectively.

NVIDIA graphics cards come out on top in this particular run, but with support for AMD Frame Gen at a later date, there’s a possibility we may see performance improvements.

Marvel Rivals

Settings: 4K, Graphics Quality High, Global Illumination Lumen GI- High Quality, Reflection Quality Screen Space Reflections, Model Detail High, Post-Processing High, Shadow Detail High, DLSS On/Off, Frame Gen On/Off

In Marvel Rivals at 4K high settings, the RX 9070 XT offered a substantial average of 87FPS, sitting just below the RX 7900 XTX at 88FPS, but yet again, above the RTX 5070 Ti at 82FPS. Marvel Rivals isn’t a particularly hard title to run, but we’re blown away with how well the RX 9070 XT is holding its own at 4K.

Once we switched on DLSS and Frame Gen, the RX 9070 XT surged to 177FPS, putting it in second place compared to the other cards we tested. This puts it above everything else, barring the RTX 5090, a highly impressive metric.

COD Black Ops 6

Settings: 1440p/4K, Graphics Preset Custom, Texture Resolution High, Depth of Field On, Detail Quality High, Particle Resolution High, Shader Quality High, Shadow Quality High, Screen Space Shadows High, DLSS On/Off, Frame Gen On/Off

In COD Black Ops 6, we played this title at two different resolutions: 1440p and 4K. In the 1440p run, the RX 9070 XT averaged 164FPS, yet again beating out the RTX 5070 Ti and RX 7900 XT. This is pure rasterised gameplay, so the RX 9070 XT isn’t receiving any extra help from FSR or AMD Frame Gen. Again, this is quite impressive, and seeing such solid performance at 1440p is excellent.

After increasing the resolution to 4K, performance dropped slightly, but the RX 9070 XT again proves its strength at 4K. With an average of 112FPS, it easily beats the RTX 4080 and is even on par with the RTX 5080.

Hogwarts Legacy

Settings: 4K Effects High, Material High, Fog High, Sky High, Foliage High, Post Process High, Shadows High, Textures High, View Distance High, Population High, Anti Aliasing TAA High, Windowed Fullscreen

The last AAA game we ran was Hogwarts Legacy at 4K high settings. In this benchmarking run, the RX 9070 XT hit 94FPS, 1FPS below the RX 7900 XTX and 7FPS above the RTX 5070 Ti. Yet again, the RX 9070 XT shows that it’s a powerful competitor at this resolution, easily beating out the vast majority of the alternatives. So far, it’s clear that this card is a worthwhile pickup for some buttery smooth 4K gaming.

Apex Legends

Settings: 1440p, Anti-aliasing TSAA, Texture Filtering 8X, Model Detail High, VSync Disabled, Effects High, Ambient Occlusion Quality High

In Apex Legends at 1440p, the RX 9070 XT is just below the game’s framerate cap of 296FPS. The vast majority of modern cards that we’ve benchmarked in Apex Legends at 1440p get close to the max framerate, so it’s no surprise that the RX 9070 XT, based on our other benchmarks, does so well in this title. It does lose out to the RTX 5070 Ti by 2FPS, but at framerates this high, the difference in performance isn’t going to be visible.

Fortnite

Settings: 1080p, Competitive, View Distance Far, FPS Unlimited, VSync Off, Anti-Aliasing TAA, Shadows Off, Reflections Off, Textures Low

The last game we ran to benchmark the RX 9070 XT was Fortnite. The resolution is set to 1080p, and the rest of the settings are dialled to low to ensure we can hit the highest framerates possible. The RX 9070 XT was one of the strongest cards we tested in this benchmark. With an output of 475FPS, it places second, 5FPS below the RX 7900 XTX. What’s more, this card’s 1% and 0.1% lows are still incredibly playable, demonstrating how strong the RX 9070 XT is across a massive range of games and settings.

Conclusion

ASUS TUF Gaming RX 9070 XT OC

Product Name: RX 9070 XT

Brand: ASUS

• Features
• Design
• Performance
• Value For Money

4.3

Summary

The ASUS TUF Gaming RX 9070 XT OC is a solid graphics card. It builds upon the RX 9070 XT’s already fantastic performance, uses a triple-fan shroud to enhance thermals, and offers a unique industrial design to spice up the look of your build. Across our testing, the TUF Gaming variant of the RX 9070 XT provides solid thermals and outstanding performance across various games. Additionally, the improved TUF industrial design we’ve seen with new components in 2025 is excellent. The TUF Gaming variant of the 9070 XT retains the familiar industrial livery but offers a solid colour option that blends in well with other parts. RGB also isn’t too heavy, which fits the theme of this particular model

There are, however, some caveats. The first is the price. This is a non-MSRP GPU, meaning it comes in at a price point well above the $599 mark, which isn’t ideal if you’re looking for the best-value option. I don’t think many gamers will be easily swayed by the design or thermals to spend that much extra for this card, but regardless of the price, this card will appeal to some. The other caveat worth noting is its size. This is a smaller issue, but the TUF Gaming RX 9070 XT OC is a 3.1-slot GPU, making it a rather large graphics card. Due to its gargantuan size, you’ll need to consider clearance before picking up this card.

Pros

✅ Excellent 4K performance

✅ Minimal RGB

✅ Solid thermals

Cons

❌ More expensive than MSRP

❌ Large, cumbersome design

❌ Aesthetic won’t appeal to everyone