RTX 5070 vs Radeon RX 9070, same $549 launch price, which is faster

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5070 and AMD's Radeon RX 9070 launched a day apart in March 2025 at the same $549, and nineteen months later they still sit at the same price. On the numbers Tom's Hardware has published on its 2026 testbed, the RX 9070 is faster in all five 1440p games we have for both without ray tracing, by 6 to 18 percent. The RTX 5070 wins with ray tracing on, and in anything that runs on CUDA.

Both cards were run by Tom's Hardware on its 2026 GPU testbed, a Ryzen 7 9800X3D with 32GB of DDR5-6000, native resolution and no upscaling. The RTX 5070 figures come from its GPU hierarchy chart, read on 24 June 2026. The RX 9070 figures come from its RX 9070 GRE review, dated 2 June 2026. Same hardware, three weeks apart, so a gap of a few percent is within what a driver update could move.

At 1440p Ultra in Cyberpunk 2077 the RX 9070 averages 73.5 fps and the RTX 5070 69.3, a 6 percent lead. In Alan Wake 2 at 1440p Ultra it is 63.0 against 53.6, 18 percent ahead. In Black Myth: Wukong at 1440p Very High, 56.8 against 52.6, 8 percent. In Counter-Strike 2 at 1440p High, 404.9 against 356.4, 14 percent. In Fortnite at 1440p High with Lumen and Nanite, 109.1 against 94.1, 16 percent. At 4K Ultra in Cyberpunk the two are 32.0 and 31.0, effectively level, and at 1080p Ultra the RTX 5070 is the one in front, 119.3 against 115.9.

Ray tracing is the exception in games: 41.8 fps for the RTX 5070 against 37.1 for the RX 9070 at 1440p Ultra with ray tracing in Cyberpunk, 13 percent in NVIDIA's favour on Tom's Hardware's chart. Neither is a smooth 60.

Outside games the gap is larger. In the community llama.cpp scoreboards, a 7B model at 4-bit generates 127.5 tokens per second on the RTX 5070 (CUDA results) and 119.7 on the RX 9070 (Vulkan results), but reads a 512-token prompt at 5,184.8 tokens per second against 3,164.1. Blender Open Data's median OptiX score for the RTX 5070 is 6,173.5 over 914 runs, against a HIP median of 2,840.5 over 90 runs for the RX 9070, 2.2 times as much. Different software back ends and very different run counts mean these are a guide to direction, not a precise ratio.

The RX 9070 has 16GB of GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus (640GB/s) at a 220W board power. The RTX 5070 has 12GB of GDDR7 on a 192-bit bus (672GB/s) at 250W. Both are rated for a 650W power supply. The extra 4GB is the quiet advantage for AMD: it is what lets a card hold a larger local AI model or a game that fills memory. The RTX 5070's 12GB is its main weakness, and it is the reason our graphics card page notes it could not run KitGuru's Stable Diffusion XL test.

If you play at 1440p and mostly raster games, the RX 9070 is the faster card at the same price and carries more memory. If you turn ray tracing on, use CUDA tools, or render in Blender, the RTX 5070 is the better fit. Both prices are launch prices; check each page for the live Best Buy price before you decide, because shop prices move away from launch prices.

The full table of cards with price per frame is on the graphics cards page, and any two cards can go side by side on the compare page.