According to Hardware Unboxed, the RDNA 4 card now thrashes its rival, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, after getting outperformed at launch.

The Radeon RX 9070 XT was released with driver 25.3.1 and barely kept up with Nvidia’s offering. At the time, it lagged behind by around 2.5 per cent. But after AMD’s latest driver drop, the RX 9070 XT has clawed back 9 per cent more performance at 1440p and around 4 per cent at 4K.

Hardware Unboxed’s testing shows the card now consistently edges past the RTX 5070 Ti, leading by around three per cent at 1440p and going toe-to-toe at 4K. Not bad for a card that’s supposed to be $150 cheaper than the Nvidia equivalent, though good luck finding either one at MSRP.

Even more impressively, the RX 9070 XT  leads by double-digit margins in specific titles. In Delta Force it’s 14 per cent faster, while in CS2 and Spider-Man Remastered it blasts ahead by 23 and 27 per cent respectively. These numbers put the card solidly in the lead for rasterisation workloads.

To be fair, the RTX 5070 Ti still stomps all over the RX 9070 XT when it comes to ray tracing, but most punters running 1440p without all the bells and whistles won’t care.

At $599, the RX 9070 XT is suddenly a much more compelling proposition. If the street price can drop closer to MSRP, AMD could have a serious winner on its hands. Just don’t expect it to stay that way once the next round of Nvidia driver voodoo shows up.