RX 9070 XT vs RTX 4080: AMD reportedly expects to beat Nvidia in rasterization and make big gains in ray tracing

Judging the entirety of the RTX 50 Blackwell series by the launch reviews of the RTX 5090 and the RTX 5080, it is clear that this generation of GeForce GPUs isn’t a major performance upgrade over the last-gen. The flagship RTX 5090 is only around 27% faster than the RTX 4090, while the RTX 5080 brings a less than 20% improvement over the RTX 4080 Super. So, it is reasonable to assume that the upcoming RTX 5070 and the RTX 5070 Ti aren’t going to be major improvements either.

So, if the RTX 5070 and the RTX 5070 Ti bring the kind of performance gain that we’ve seen with the RTX 5090 and the RTX 5080, the stage is set for AMD to handily beat Nvidia’s mid-range offerings according to the latest leak by Moore’s Law Is Dead.

Per Moore’s Law Is Dead, AMD is internally targeting the RX 9070 XT to beat the RTX 4080 (non-Super) by 3%. The target for the RX 9070 is 85% of the performance of the RTX 4080. The leaker claims that he’s seen the cards improve by 1% every month over the past few months, so AMD might actually do even better.

To put these performance targets into perspective, MLID uses Hardware Unboxed’s 4K average results for and shows the RX 9070 XT falling just behind the RX 7900 XTX. This reportedly results in less than a 10% delta between the RX 9070 XT and the RTX 5080.

For the RX 9070, the leaker suggests the GPU to beat the RX 7900 GRE and the RTX 4070 Ti, while being marginally slower than the RX 7900 XT (Available on Amazon).

More importantly, the leaker also compares the possible performance of the RX 9070/XT with the RTX 5070/Ti. In this case, MLID expects the RX 9070 XT to beat the RTX 5070 Ti by 15% while the RX 9070 should outperform the RTX 5070 by around 12%. Of course, these are just estimates and the actual numbers could look quite different. The leaker is also not considering the DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation which Nvidia is pushing hard for the RTX 50 series.

Finally, AMD also appears to have made massive gains in ray tracing, as MLID reports the RX 9070 outperforming the RX 7900 XTX and matching the RTX 4070 Super (Available on Amazon) in Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K. The RX 9070 XT apparently does even better and lands somewhere around the RTX 4070 Ti Super level.

If we take MLID’s report at face value, it seems AMD’s decision to delay the RDNA 4 release and focus on enhancing the software is paying off. If the cards actually bring the proposed performance at the leaked pricing, Team Red might wipe the floor with Nvidia in the mid-range segment.