RX 9070 XT beats RTX 5080 in Cyberpunk 2077, 3DMark after undervolting: RDNA 4 hits 3.3GHz

Overclocking legend "Der8auer" has had some hands-on time with PowerColor's new custom Radeon RX 9070 XT Red Devil graphics card and overclocked the hell out of the RDN 4 GPU with some undervolting and a 3.3GHz GPU clock and put it head-to-head against the GeForce RTX 5080.

5

PowerColor's custom RX 9070 XT Red Devil graphics card is the company's flagship RDNA 4 card, with Der8auer reporting that it features higher-quality components and a higher-end cooler. The card is so quiet that Der8auer said he thought he mixed up the OC and Silent BIOS switches, but in real-world testing both of those settings had nearly identical results (62-63C on the RDNA 4 GPU, and 85C hotspot temperatures).

Der8auer started by tweaking the fan profile settings by forcing a 49% fan speed, which is the maximum that the overclocker's ears could enjoy. Once this was tweaked, the results were instant: the RDNA 4 GPU scaled past 2970MHz (2.97GHz) and hitting as high as 3030MHz (3.03GHz) which isn't as high as PowerColor's advertised 3060MHz (3.06GHz) that it says the RX 9070 XT Red Devil is meant to hit.

The overclocker increased the power limit to 110% (around 360W power) which is when Der8auer saw 3.1GHz GPU clocks on the PowerColor RX 9070 XT Red Devil, but then he moved onto some undervolting. By undervolting the GPU voltage by 200mV, the card reached 3.4GHz (very nice to see) with Der8auer running 3DMark Time Spy but it did crash, with the overclocker noting that the PowerColor RX 9070 XT Red Devil hitting a sweet spot of around -170mV to be stable.

5

Once the RX 9070 XT was undervolted, it was benched against NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition grraphics card in both Cyberpunk 2077 and 3DMark, with the undervolted and overclocked PowerColor RX 9070 XT Red Devil beating out the RTX 5080 FE by 1FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K Ultra with RT + PT disabled.

5

Moving onto 3DMark Time Spy Extreme, the overclocked and undervolted PowerColor RX 9070 XT Red Devil once again beats the RTX 5080 FE, but this time by 2.6FPS (103.1FPS versus 100.5FPS).