AMD had several announcements and revelations at CES 2025. These included the new Ryzen 9950X3D/9900X3D desktop CPUs, Ryzen AI Max(+) APUs as well as as 9955HX3D CPUs for laptops, and more.
The company was also expected to talk a bit about its RX 9000 series GPUs (RDNA 4), which we, and the other media outlets, were pre-briefed about. However, it was a no-show there as a significant portion of the keynote that did not consist of any other announcements went to customer testimonies. Like, Dell, for example, discussed on stage how excited it was about all the potential future AI PC boom once Windows 10 support ended and people could no longer upgrade to Windows 11.
As a refresher, AMD has decided to change the naming scheme of its graphics cards (again) going from RX 7_00 to RX 90_0 mimicking that of Nvidia's. Early leaked benchmarks had suggested that the 9070 XT would perform somewhere around an RX 7800 XT or 7900 XT, or maybe somewhere in the middle 7900 GRE territory.
For reference, the 7800 XT is competes with Nvidia RTX 4070 (our full review), the 7900 GRE does so with the RX 4070 SUPER, and the 7900 XT trades blows with 4070 Ti. AMD's own slide seemed to suggest this was exactly what it was hoping for as well.
Although AMD did not discuss anything about its upcoming RX 9000 series GPUs on stage, the various AIB cards were there backstage on display,
IGN managed to sneakily run RDNA 4 in a game to see how it performed. The test run was done in the internal benchmark tool inside Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.
As you can see above, the test was done on 4K extreme preset without any upscaling/sharpening and frame generation.
On average, the RX 9070 put out 99 FPS with a 5% low of 76 and a 1% low of 60. The benchmark also confirms that the Radeon 9070 has 16 GB of VRAM which is good to see. For comparison, a Reddit user RevolutionaryCarry57 tested their RX 6950 XT (the RDNA 2 flagship) using identical settings and it did 80, 62, and 59 FPS respectively.
However, this user had a 7800X3D CPU while the AMD RX 9070 booth PC had the new 9950X3D. Regardless, it should give us a good idea about the performance since at 4K extreme, the CPU is highly unlikely to bottleneck.
Meanwhile, an X user Ryan Abdelhay took their 7800 XT for a run using the same settings paired with a Ryzen 9800X3D, currently the fastest gaming CPU, and here the 7800 XT managed 95, 76, and 72 fps respectively.
This does bode well for the more powerful RX 9070 XT if its smaller sibling is seemingly going head-on with something like the 7900 GRE, a card that currently sells for $500 or more.
Please also keep in mind that Black Ops 6 runs extremely well on AMD hardware much like some other games may prefer Nvidia. Neowin tested the title last year and we found that the 7900 XTX was easily outperforming Nvidia's more expensive RTX 4080 SUPER.
Source and image: IGN
Update, January 8, 4.31 am PT: Another Reddit user Dry-Cryptographer904 tested their 7900 XTX on the same settings and found it to output 108, 86 and 81 FPS in Avg, 95%ile and 99%ile framerate figures. The CPU in this rig is a 7600X3D.
Here's a compilation of all the scores:
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