AMD just teased the Radeon RX 9070 yesterday at CES 2025 with very little in the way of specs or even a release date. However, because Team Red was demoing the Radeon RX 9070 at its booth with Call of Duty Black Ops 6 – which has a built-in Benchmark tool – I was able to get a quick peek how this next-gen GPU performs.
All told, at 4K Extreme settings without upscaling or frame generation, the Radeon RX 9070 was capable of an impressive 99fps average, even if it had the same visual bug as the Intel Arc B580 when I benchmarked it. Now, to be clear, this graphics card is running on very early alpha drivers, and that bug will more than likely be resolved by the time the card comes to market. But even on those early drivers, a solid 99fps is incredibly impressive.
Because I ran the benchmark without upscaling, rather than the vendor appropriate upscaling method that I use when I usually benchmark this game for graphics card reviews, I don’t have a direct comparison I can make. However, even with DLSS on the ‘Quality’ setting, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super gets around 129fps on the same graphics preset at 4K. Given that DLSS adds about a 30% performance jump at the Quality setting, that may place the Radeon RX 9070 on equal footing with the 4080 Super – though I’d need to test the 4080 Super without DLSS to know for sure.
Some of the amazing performance of this benchmark is likely due to the CPU as well – the rig was running on an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, a high-end gaming CPU that was also announced yesterday. But if this is the level of performance we can expect when the Radeon RX 9070 launches later this year, it’s going to be an awesome card for anyone looking for a mid-range solution.
The benchmark also gives a bit of insight to the specs of the graphics card, though it is limited. The Radeon RX 9070 has 16GB of VRAM, though we still don’t know how many graphics cores or at what clock speed the card is running at.
This is just one test, though, and I won’t have a clear picture of how this graphics card will perform across a variety of games until I get it in the lab to put it through the full testing suite. But the sneak peek is definitely exciting.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
