It’s a welcome sight to see a graphics card falling in price, particularly one as capable as the AMD Radeon RX 9070. Following a limited-time price cut on this Asus Prime OC model, there’s no alternative cheaper than this particular pixel pusher.
Amazon US currently lists the Asus Prime Radeon RX 9070 for $629.99, down 16% from its “typical price of $750”. Digging a little deeper, the price of the card has been unusually high over the past several months relative to other models. Regardless, that final price remains the lowest on the storefront by some margin, and is the most cost-effective way to pick up this graphics card.
Asus Prime Radeon RX 9070
“The Radeon RX 9070 comes heartily recommended.” Read our review.
The RX 9070 features a trimmer version of AMD’s most-powerful RDNA 4 GPU, Navi 48, with 88% of the die’s total available stream processors, as well as RT and AI accelerators. You’ll find the other 12% in a Radeon RX 9070 XT, but you’ll need to spend closer to $719 to pick up that graphics card instead. In short, going with the non-XT model gives you the lion’s share of performance and better bang for your buck at these prices.
Importantly, the RX 9070 packs 16GB of VRAM. This makes the card perfectly suitable for cranking settings at FHD or QHD, and even 4K in some titles. This is a key advantage of the RX 9070, relative to 12GB alternatives like the Radeon RX 9070 GRE and GeForce RTX 5070, with the latter often commanding a similar asking price despite this memory deficit.
In our testing, the Radeon RX 9070 frequently tops performance charts when competing against its closest rivals. Take the Rainbow Six Siege results above, which demonstrate the dizzying frame rates this graphics card can produce in esports titles at both FHD and QHD.
Raster performance is strong elsewhere too, beating all its immediate competitors in the likes of Total War: Warhammer III. There is the exceptional occasion where the RTX 5070 will pull ahead, but only by a handful of frames per second.
Ray tracing performance is similarly strong, with AMD actually beating Nvidia in this respect across several games we’ve tested. Forza Horizon 6 is the most clear win for the RX 9070 in this respect, providing the smoothest ride across FHD and QHD. While the graphics card falls short of a 60fps average in the latter resolution, a dash of FSR 4 upscaling will help meet that threshold.
In short, picking up an RX 9070 at $629.99 makes far more sense than spending a similar amount on an RTX 5070. While that’s higher than the card’s initial $549 MSRP, every graphics card on the market is facing the same kind of price rises. I’d strike now while iron is hot, as we’re only likely to see this price climb for the foreseeable future.
For more graphics card recommendations, check out our picks for the best GPU to meet your needs.
