This Sapphire RX 9070 XT just hit a new low price at Amazon UK
RTX 5070 Ti performance at a discount.
The Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB is AMD's best value graphics card for 1440p gaming, but they've been extremely expensive since they debuted this spring. Now, one option has broken the £600 barrier following a nearly £100 discount, which is a fair price for performance between Nvidia's RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5080 cards. Best of all, this particular card is made by Sapphire, our favourite AMD board partner.
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Sapphire Pulse RX 9070 XTNow £599.99 (was £697.96) |
In the Digital Foundry review at the time, Rich noted how the 9070 XT has offered a real leap in performance against the previous generation. Its numbers put it ahead of some of AMD's top-class predecessors - the RX 7900 XT and flagship RX 7900 XTX - in some instances, which is excellent for a more moderately-priced card. This comes alongside being much more capable in ray-tracing - an area where AMD has traditionally struggled.
To run through some numbers - in Alan Wake 2 at 1440p - the 9070 XT achieved 40fps in a seriously demanding title that put it eight percent faster than AMD's RX 7900 XTX, and even 12 percent brisker than Nvidia's similarly-priced RTX 5070. It gets even more impressive in Cyberpunk 2077 - a game that's traditionally been an Nvidia playground by this point. Here, the RX 9070 XT yielded a 51fps average at 1440p, putting it a full eight percent quicker than the 5070, and even 24 percent ahead of the RX 7900 XTX.
The 9070 XT yields a strong generational uplift against the 7900 XT in games without ray-tracing enabled, and pushes even higher against Nvidia's choices. For instance, in F1 24, the 173fps at 1440p puts it on par with the 7900 XT while miraculously also being just three percent behind the RTX 5080, and 14 percent ahead of the RTX 5070 Ti. Forza Horizon 5 sees the 5070 Ti peg back a little, taking a small 2fps lead over the 9070 XT, although it’s worth remembering the ~£100 price differential between the two cards.
Don't forget, you also get the powers of AMD's FSR4 upscaler, which is a much more potent performer than the older FSR3 in our testing with it able to extract more detail in focused areas, such as on clothing and particle effects. It comes with a small performance overhead against FSR3, hence the slightly lower frame rates, but is nonetheless well worth enabling in supported titles.
For the £600 asking price, the 9070 XT still represents solid value for a capable GPU for 1440p and even 4K workloads. We haven't seen these cards stay available at this price for long, so it's worth taking a look if you're in the market for a graphics card upgrade.