AMD RX 9070 GPU is benchmarked in Black Ops 6 - and NVIDIA might well have a fight on its hands

AMD might not have revealed much about its new RDNA 4 graphics cards thus far, just the names and the barest of details at CES 2025, but before we've even learned the spec of the Radeon RX 9070, we've got a gaming benchmark to give us a good idea of how powerful the GPU is.

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It looks like Black Ops 6 runs a treat on the RX 9070, assuming IGN's findings pan out (Image Credit: Activision)

How did this happen, exactly? Well, AMD does have these RDNA 4 boards in PCs at its booth at CES 2025, and as VideoCardz noticed, an IGN writer just happened to get a chance to play Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on one of those gaming rigs equipped with an RX 9070. She sneakily ran the built-in benchmark for Black Ops 6, presumably while Team Red's PR people were distracted elsewhere.

We're told that the result was a 99 frames per second average, with Black Ops 6 running at 4K resolution with extreme details (and no upscaling or frame generation tricks involved).

That's pretty impressive when you consider that the RX 9070 here isn't using finished drivers - these RDNA 4 GPUs won't be out until, well, we don't quite know yet, except that the target timeframe is the first quarter (one rumor suggests it might be later in January, though). The graphics drivers are in alpha here, so we can expect a faster performance when everything's done and dusted and the RX 9070 is available to buy. (Or, more likely, runs out of stock and is purchasable on eBay for a hugely inflated price - hang on, best disengage cynical mode).

Caveats? Well, obviously this is just one benchmark, and also the RX 9070 was paired with a beefy AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D processor, which won't have hurt the GPU's overall performance.

A Super performance?

IGN draws a rough comparison with a test of the NVIDIA RTX 4080 Super in Black Ops 6, not a direct one, sadly, as the GeForce card used DLSS (quality mode) and hit 129 FPS on 4K extreme. Knocking off 30% for the effect of DLSS means the RX 9070 should be about on par with the RTX 4080 Super, in theory (especially when you consider those alpha drivers).

Still, before we get carried away with that idea, we must bear in mind that Call of Duty games are a strong suit for AMD graphics cards.

This is an exciting glimpse of the RX 9070, then, and remember that the RX 9070 XT will go faster still. One thing we do know about those two (purportedly) Navi 48 boards is that the XT version will have three 8-pin power connectors, rather than two, indicating it'll draw a fair bit more wattage (and performance will be boosted in line with that, of course).

Now all we need to know is the price of the RX 9070 models. Oh, and their specs, although note that in this benchmark, the 9070 is shown with 16GB of VRAM, backing up recent rumors aired courtesy of third-party board makers.

A wait and see strategy?

The good thing about the pricing is that our own personal theory is that AMD has held back with these RDNA 4 GPUs in the way it has because Team Red wanted to see how NVIDIA's Blackwell range panned out - and what price tags were attached to those RTX 5000 models.

And excitingly, NVIDIA has pitched the RTX 5070 surprisingly affordably at $549, which puts some pressure on AMD to be competitive here. Whatever the RX 9070's performance shakes out at, of course, when these models are fully tested and reviewed, AMD can still make these graphics cards winners by adjusting the relative price and value proposition compared to NVIDIA's Blackwell GPUs.

With NVIDIA's pricing stance thus far, it looks like consumers are going to fare better with this generation of graphics cards in terms of the toll exacted on wallets across the globe.