AMD 9070 XT alleged specs and performance leak, and could be quite power hungry [Update]

Yesterday, the VP and GM of Ryzen CPU and Radeon graphics, David McAfee, finally revealed the announcement date for AMD's RX 9070 series of cards, its next-gen discrete desktop graphics cards based on the new RDNA 4 design.

AMD was supposed to reveal these new GPUs at CES 2025 but decided to cancel that, probably last minute, as the press like ourselves were already pre-briefed with some of the materials.

On his official X handle, McAfee shared:

Since AMD and its AIB vendor partners are likely playing around with the cards internally at the moment, some leaks are bound to happen. A few hours before David McAfee posted the news above, Hong Kong media outlet HKEPC shared a couple of screenshots showing the alleged performance and specifications of a 9070 XT. It was benchmarked on Monster Hunter Wilds and managed to put up 36,102 points.

The screenshot showing the purported specs of the card on TechPowerUp's GPU-Z suggests AMD's 9070 XT will have 64 compute units (CUs) or 4096 stream processors. It will also apparently break past 3 GHz when boosting. On the memory side, the 9070 XT appears to be sporting 20 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit wide bus for a total bandwidth of 644.6 GB/s.

Meanwhile, it is hard to be sure about the graphics settings or upscaling options chosen in the Monster Hunter Wilds benchmark but whatever the case may be, the score does look impressive. It does appear that perhaps FSR and frame generation were used as 211 fps even at 1080p is a good show. But this is assuming the screenshot is not forged.

We may also now have an idea of the power requirements of the 9070 XT, at least for some of the variants. Reddit user Emotional-Rip7202 shared a photo of a supposed PowerColor Red Devil box packaging material and it shows AMD recommending a "minimum 900 watt or greater power supply" unit for the SKU.

Bear in mind though that the Red Devil is PowerColor's flagship variant and this time too it is no different. The 9070 XT Red Devil packs three PCIe 8-pin power connectors instead of two 8-pins which will be typical of the other non-premium 9070 XT variants.

With three 8-pins, the 9070 XT should theoretically be capable of consuming up to a continuous 525 watts since each 8-pin does 150 watts while the PCIe slot does 75 watts.

Update, February 14th 2025, 23,50 PST: AMD's Frank Azor has confirmed that the higher wattage requirements are mainly for overclocked premium variants and that lesser ones will ask for lower power requirements: