RX 9070 vs RTX 5070 with FSR 4 and DLSS 4: RX 9070 is reportedly even faster now than at launch

We've often heard the term “fine wine” in relation to AMD’s GPU drivers which tend to afford additional performance gains as more driver updates are rolled out. Hardware Unboxed has tested the RX 9070 and the RTX 5070 with the AMD FSR 4 and Nvidia DLSS 4 enabled, respectively, and using the latest drivers. The result of the comparison shows that the Radeon RX 9070 has indeed aged like fine wine, as the performance delta between the GPUs is now even more than at the RX 9070’s launch.

HU reports that, in the 23 tested games at 1440p, the RX 9070 was around 13% faster than the RTX 5070 at native resolution, without using FSR 4. This is quite interesting, as the RX 9070 was only 4% ahead of the RTX 5070 on average in HU's launch review. Our testing also has the RX 9070 only 7% ahead of the RTX 5070.

In other words, through driver and game updates, the RX 9070 has become an even better deal than the RTX 5070, especially now that you can get the GPU at or close to the official $549 MSRP, like the RTX 5070.

Moreover, it appears DLSS doesn’t help the RTX 5070 much in this comparison, as the RX 9070, equipped with FSR 4, retained the 13% performance lead at similar settings. For instance, using DLSS 4 and FSR 4 in the “Quality” mode, the RX 9070 enjoyed an average FPS of 106, while the RTX 5070 landed at 94 FPS. This 13% delta also remained the same in the Balanced and Performance FSR 4/DLSS 4 profiles.

Here, we have to mention that the set of games tested by HU was a mix of titles utilizing rasterization and ray tracing. If, for example, HU had tested only RT performance, the RTX 5070 would have been faster than the RX 9070. Similarly, we also need to keep in mind that the library of games supporting DLSS 4 is larger than the FSR 4 one.

Then, there are also other DLSS 4 features like image quality and Multi-Frame Generation that could be the biggest draws for some gamers.

All things considered, if you want the best performance and value for your money, the RX 9070, with and without FSR 4, is a much better product. This is especially true when you consider the 4 GB extra VRAM compared to the RTX 5070’s 12 GB buffer. Games are becoming increasingly VRAM-limited for budget/mid-range GPUs. So, 16 GB of VRAM will go a long way in future-proofing your purchase.