Early Radeon RX 9070 benchmarks are positive, though don't bank too much on them

The AMD Radeon 9X 9070 was benchmarked at this year's CES in just one game but all signs are currently quite positive, getting almost 100 fps average in 4K extreme settings in the latest Call of Duty game.

Though they were mentioned, AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 RDNA 4 GPUs didn't make the splash they were expected to at this year's CES presentation, mostly because we weren't given all that much information on them.

We know they are coming but we don't know when, we don't know what price they are launching at, and, until now, we didn't have an inkling on performance.

On the show floor, IGN managed to get hands-on, playing Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. With upscaling and frame generation turned off, the twitch shooter got an average of 99 fps, which is quite impressive. The reporter did have some sort of visual glitch while testing but this isn't uncommon, especially in unreleased tech.

The same report claims that this performance is comparable to the Nvidia Geforce RTX 4080 Super, which achieved 129 fps in their testing at quality settings, with DLSS turned on.

These early figures are definitely positive, especially if the price is right for AMD's new GPUs. However, there are few important things to note. First, Call of Duty as a series has historically performed well on AMD's GPUs, and is likely the reason this game was chosen to show off the cards this year. It doesn't take away from otherwise pretty good benchmark results but AMD and Intel can both struggle with a wide variety of games as Nvidia is the top dog in the market, and therefore often the most thought about from a consumer perspective.

We also can't account, fully, for what the rest of the rig is doing, and what kinds of environments this tech exists in at a show like this. As well as all of this, this is seemingly just a single benchmark, and anomalies do exist in testing.

However, the new tech in these GPUs is interesting. AMD's RDNA 4 architecture is built on a 4 nm process and offers better media encoding for productivity than RDNA 3/3.5, better AI performance and improved ray tracing. Being machine-learning powered, this is an attempt to bring it closer to the performance increases of Nvidia's AI-based DLSS.

Nvidia has just announced the whole new line of RTX 50 series cards which are expected to be the most powerful mainstream GPUs in the market, though AMD could offer a better alternative for budget and mid-range gamers, especially with the mighty RTX 5090 costing a headache-inducing $2000.