ASRock Radeon RX 9070 XT Monster Hunter Wilds Edition Review - RDNA 4 Style

TweakTown Rating: 91%

Our Verdict

Although it doesn't ship with any out-of-the-box OC, ASRock's Radeon RX 9070 XT Monster Hunter Wilds Edition GPU is still impressive. With its unique and stylish design, cooling, and flagship RDNA 4 performance, it still presents a viable and affordable GeForce RTX alternative.

Pros

• Excellent 1440p and 4K gaming performance
• RDNA 4 brings massive improvements to ray tracing performance
• The new AI-powered FSR
• A more affordable alternative to the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti
• ASRock's custom Monster Hunter design looks fantastic

Cons

• Full Ray Tracing and Path Tracing performance is still a step behind GeForce
• FSR support is growing, but falls short of DLSS's widespread adoption
• No out-of-the-box OC

Should you buy it?

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Introduction

Custom graphics cards created to celebrate a particular game or product are surprisingly rare, so it's always great to see a collaboration like this. Here, ASRock, one of AMD's partners that is known for creating excellent Radeon GPUs, has partnered with Capcom to create a special Radeon RX 9070 XT Monster Hunter Wilds Edition graphics card that features a design inspired by the game's flagship monster, Arkveld. The menacing icy creature can be found on the reinforced metal backplate with a cool-toned blue and grey metallic finish, giving the GPU a unique and stylish look that goes beyond being tied to the Monster Hunter franchise.

The physical design is a custom version of the company's popular white Steel Legend series, and it looks fantastic with a darker finish. The $659 price also makes it one of the more affordable Radeon RX 9070 XT models on the market, even though it's a limited-edition custom model built for fans of the popular Monster Hunter series. It also doesn't ship with any out-of-the-box overclocked settings; however, thanks to the impressive cooling, there's definite room for some OC action to get a few extra frames.

The ASRock Radeon RX 9070 XT Monster Hunter Wilds Edition GPU is a custom version of AMD's flagship RDNA 4 GPU, the Radeon RX 9070 XT, which launched on March 6, 2025. At the time, we praised AMD's latest Radeon GPU for its competitive performance, which saw it go toe-to-toe with the more expensive GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, while also bringing much-needed improvements to ray tracing performance and the arrival of DLSS-like AI upscaling with FSR 4. In the month since the Radeon RX 9070 XT debuted, we've seen FSR 4 support expand, as well as see the long-awaited arrival of AMD's new FSR Redstone technology that introduces new RDNA 4-exclusive technologies like AI-powered Frame Generation, Ray Regeneration (which is AMD's version of DLSS Ray Reconstruction), and more features set to arrive in 2026. And with over 200 FSR Redstone compatible games, it's slowly maturing into a big selling point for picking up a new RDNA 4 GPU.

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And with that, alongside going through the very cool design and impressive thermal performance of the ASRock Radeon RX 9070 XT Monster Hunter Wilds Edition GPU, we'll also be touching on the current state of FSR Redstone in addition to seeing how AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT stacks up against the RTX 5070, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5080.

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RDNA 4 - AMD Levels the Playing Field

Below is a summary of AMD's new RDNA 4 architecture, applicable to all models.

AMD's new RDNA 4 architecture presents a massive improvement over the chiplet design that we saw with RDNA 3. Returning to the monolithic design of RDNA and RDNA 2 might sound like a regression, especially when AMD CPUs have gone in the other direction, but this isn't the case. In a nutshell, RDNA 4 is built for 2025. This GPU architecture embraces ray-tracing performance as a key pillar, lays the groundwork for neural rendering, and supercharges AI performance for the new FSR Upscaling (ML) and complex AI workloads. Throw in a revamped media engine for creators and streamers, and support for next-gen DisplayPort 2.1a displays, and RDNA 4 presents a new and revitalized direction for Radeon graphics.

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RDNA 4's overhauled Compute Unit, which houses all raster, ray-tracing, and AI hardware, has seen several enhancements over RDNA 3 and is one of the reasons the Radeon RX 9000 Series GPUs deliver impressive performance gains. The RDNA 4 Compute Unit, or CU, features an enhanced memory subsystem, improved scalar units (for raw raster), dynamic register allocation to reduce latency and bottlenecks, and increased efficiency. The improvements also mean that Radeon RX 9000 Series GPUs can ship with much higher clock speeds than their RDNA 3 counterparts, hitting close to 3 GHz in several 9070 XT models, with 9060 XT models pushing up to 3.3 GHz.

Further AMD Radeon GPU Reading – Our Latest Content

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• SAPPHIRE Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB PULSE OC Review - AMD's Best Mainstream GPU in Years

The show's star, at least in terms of the massive improvement over what has come before, has to be the arrival of RDNA 4's 3rd Generation Ray-Tracing Accelerators. AMD is aware that game developers across PC and console platforms are embracing ray tracing, which provides a realistic depiction of lighting and related effects such as shadows and reflections. The only problem is that real-time ray-tracing is complex, requiring the right blend of raw performance and innovative technologies to enhance efficiency and deliver a playable experience.

One area RDNA 4's RT Accelerator delivers where RDNA 3's don't is the arrival of "Oriented Bounding Boxes," an innovative method of handling ray-tracing Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) data. Think of it as efficiently tracing rays through an environment and geometry with a lower memory cost and less hardware. RDNA 4's RT Accelerator also adds a second intersection engine to double the performance of specific raytracing workloads and calculations. The results can be seen in titles with heavy ray-tracing like Cyberpunk 2077, where the Radeon RX 9070 XT delivers a significant 30+% performance improvement over the previous gen flagship - the Radeon RX 7900 XTX. A card with 50% more RT Accelerators than the Radeon RX 9070 XT. The mainstream Radeon RX 9060 XT also delivers substantially faster ray-tracing performance than the Radeon RX 7600, to the point where mainstream RDNA 4 is now what you'd call RT-ready.

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RDNA 4 also fully embraces AI, with new AI accelerators that support FP8 while delivering double the FP16 and four times the INT8 performance compared to RDNA 3's AI accelerators. For gamers, this means the new AI-powered FSR Upscaling (ML) provides a massive improvement in image quality over FSR 3, which is now called FSR Upscaling (Analytical). However, AMD's custom AI model, which was trained on powerful AMD Instinct hardware, is FP8-based, so it is exclusive to RDNA 4 hardware.

AMD has also introduced its answer to NVIDIA's DLSS Ray Reconstruction and AI Frame Generation for Path Tracing with FSR Redstone's new AI-based Ray Regeneration and Frame Generation, alongside support for Neural Radiance Caching. FSR Redstone officially launched in December 2025, with support in over 200 games; however, this is mainly limited to FSR Upscaling (ML).

With improved raw performance and a massive boost to ray tracing and AI performance, RDNA 4 represents an enormous leap forward over RDNA 3. However, catching up to GeForce RTX in these areas and offering a viable DLSS alternative means early adopters will need to wait until 2026 for AMD to deliver its Path Tracing solution.

This brings us to RDNA 4's enhanced Media Engine, which offers creators and streamers a big improvement to H.264, HEVC, and AV1 encoding and decoding. NVIDIA's lead in this area has meant that few creators use Radeon hardware. With RDNA 4, AMD aims to close the gap and offer a viable alternative, especially in image quality when using popular settings in apps like OBS.

Specs and Test System

Specifications

Here's a comparison of the Radeon RX 9070 XT specs to those of the previous generation's Radeon RX 7000 and the Radeon RX 9070 Series.

As AMD's RDNA 4 flagship, the Radeon RX 9070 XT wasn't designed or built to compete with the likes of the GeForce RTX 5080 or GeForce RTX 5090, but instead the more mid-range and affordable enthusiast-class segment, where you'll find the GeForce RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti. Not delivering a successor to RDNA 3's flagship Radeon RX 7900 XTX is something we've all noticed; however, with its large 357mm die packed with 53.9 billion transistors and a 304W power rating, the Radeon RX 9070 XT still feels like a high-end gaming GPU.

With RDNA 4's complete Compute Unit overhaul and improved ray tracing performance, even though the Radeon RX 9070 XT features 24% fewer Compute Units and Ray Accelerators than the Radeon RX 7900 XT, it's able to outperform that GPU thanks to the significant gains in titles with RT enabled. With AMD changing the Radeon naming for the RDNA 4 line-up to match its GeForce RTX counterparts more closely, the Radeon RX 9070 XT's 304W power rating is similar to the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti's 300W power rating. And if you go through the benchmark results below, you'll notice that outside of a few outliers and path tracing performance, the cards perform mostly the same or within a few percentage points of each other.

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Although RDNA 4 uses a more efficient TSMC 4nm node than the previous RDNA 3 generation, it definitely feels like AMD has used this extra headroom to push clock speeds into the 3+ GHz territory, with some OC models shipping with three 8-pin power connectors that can draw up to 340W. As a non-OC model, the ASRock Radeon RX 9070 XT Monster Hunter Wilds Edition doesn't ship with a factory overclock and sports two 8-pin power connectors.

Outside of the improved ray tracing performance, the other area where RDNA 4 makes significant gains is AI, with the flagship Radeon RX 9070 XT delivering up to 1557 TOPs of INT4 and 779 TOPs of INT8 performance. And with FP8 support, the new AI-powered FSR Upscaling (ML), formerly known as FSR 4, gives the RDNA 4 lineup exclusive access to Super Resolution and Frame Generation technology that delivers competitive image quality and performance when stacked up against NVIDIA's DLSS.

Kosta's Test System

Physical Design and Cooling

In Monster Hunter Wilds, Capcom's latest entry in the popular series, Arkveld is known as the 'White Wraith' and is a large winged Wyvern with almost ice-like scales, fur, and armor plating. Arkveld is one of the key monsters in the game, and one of the most menacing players take out in their monster-hunting adventures. Using a single monster for the design of the ASRock Radeon RX 9070 XT Monster Hunter Wilds Edition GPU was a smart move, as it gives the card character and a unique look thanks to the mix of blues and greys.

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The reinforced metal backplate features art depicting Arkveld, and the card's metal frame adds a premium touch to the construction that rivals that of more premium Radeon RX 9070 XT offerings. In addition, the metal shroud and frame, which include vents for airflow, this custom GPU also includes ASRock's latest Striped Ring Fans, a nickel-plated Copper Base, 2oz Copper PCB, a high-density fin stack, and phase-change thermal pads. The fans also include a 0dB silent mode for when temperatures drop below a certain threshold.

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The ASRock Radeon RX 9070 XT Monster Hunter Wilds Edition is sturdy, robust, and well-built. There's also some RGB on the side (which you can turn off with the dedicated LED Switch), with Arkveld's name lighting up when you power on your rig. Although relatively large due to the triple fan design, 298mm length, and 2.9-slot thickness, there's no denying that this is one unique-looking Radeon RX 9070 XT that will definitely please Monster Hunter fans as well as those who want a GPU that doesn't look like every other card on the market.

The Games and Tests

PC gaming spans a wide range of genres and styles, from indie games with simple 2D graphics to massive 3D worlds lit by cutting-edge real-time ray tracing. With that, each gamer's needs and requirements vary. High refresh rates and reduced latency are more important than flashy visuals or playing at the highest resolution possible for those who live and breathe fast-paced competitive games. For those who want to live in a cinematic world and become a key player in an expansive narrative, ray tracing and high-fidelity visuals are a stepping stone toward greater immersion.

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Our chosen benchmarks cover various games, engines, APIs, and technologies. For the Radeon RX 9070 XT, all tests are run at 4K, 1440p, and 1080p, and include results for performance-boosting Super Resolution technologies like FSR Upscaling (ML) (formerly called FSR 4) - including the new AI-powered FSR Frame Generation. In many ways, FSR 4 numbers are more important than native rendering; however, our benchmark results are still sorted using 'raw performance' or native rendering.

Here's the breakdown of games, settings, and what's being tested.

Games and Settings Benchmarked

Path Tracing Games and Settings Benchmarked

Gaming Performance Analysis

Average Gaming Performance - 4K Results

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Although not as powerful as something like the GeForce RTX 5080, the Radeon RX 9070 XT is still a graphics card that we'd consider built for 4K gaming - especially now, with the arrival of FSR Upscaling (ML) or FSR 4. AMD's new upscaling technology delivers fantastic results in 4K when using the Quality preset, and with it available in most of the games that we benchmarked for this review, and the results you see above, the average 97 FPS figure puts performance pretty much on par with the more expensive GeForce RTX 5070 Ti.

That said, DLSS 4 is available in more titles and offers better image quality than FSR, but AMD's new AI approach closes this gap significantly with the Radeon RX 9070 XT. With performance similar to the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, the Radeon RX 9070 XT is a much more capable 4K gaming GPU than NVIDIA's popular GeForce RTX 5070. The ASRock Radeon RX 9070 XT Monster Hunter Wilds Edition is 20% faster than the GeForce RTX 5070 Founders Edition at this resolution; however, it is 18% more expensive than NVIDIA's popular mid-range offering. On the other side of the RTX 5070, the GeForce RTX 5080 is, on average, 20% faster than the Radeon RX 9070 XT when it comes to 4K gaming.

Now there are some individual benchmarks worth highlighting. For example, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 runs 21% faster on the ASRock Radeon RX 9070 XT Monster Hunter Wilds Edition GPU than it does on the RTX 5070 Ti. A result that actually makes it slightly faster than the GeForce RTX 5080. The flipside is that Counter-Strike 2 runs noticeably faster on the RTX 5070 Ti, with the Radeon RX 9070 XT's performance closer to the baseline GeForce RTX 5070. Outside of these two anomalies, you're looking at two GPUs that perform roughly the same, except for titles with heavy ray-tracing. NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5070 Ti still has the edge with Cyberpunk 2077 running 20% faster when playing with the 'Ray Tracing Ultra' preset.

Average Gaming Performance - 1440p Results

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At 1440p, the Radeon RX 9070 XT delivers impressive triple-digit performance, averaging 133 FPS and reaching a respectable 1% low of 95 FPS. Once again, the average performance falls just a little short of the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, but it's not like you'll be able to tell the difference between Cyberpunk 2077 without ray tracing running at 126 FPS versus 128 FPS. At 1440p, there's not a lot separating the Radeon RX 9070 XT from the mid-range and enthusiast GeForce RTX 50 Series lineup. Here, the ASRock Radeon RX 9070 XT Monster Hunter Wilds Edition GPU is around 15% faster than the GeForce RTX 5070 and 16% slower than the GeForce RTX 5080.

Like the 4K results, performance across our benchmark lineup varies, with AMD the clear winner in games like Call of Duty, while falling short in heavy RT titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and F1 25. The good news is that, unlike previous versions, the new AI-powered FSR Upscaling, exclusive to RDNA 4, delivers impressive results at 1440p, making it something you should enable with the Quality preset wherever it's available. And the difference it can make can be pretty dramatic in ray-traced games, with F1 25 running almost 50% faster with FSR 4 or FSR Upscaling (ML) than without.

Average Gaming Performance - 1080p Results

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Although a beast at this resolution, the ASRock Radeon RX 9070 XT Monster Hunter Wilds Edition GPU is not what we'd consider a card you'd pair with a 1080p gaming display. And with that, these results showcase that the Radeon RX 9070 XT scales well across all three major resolutions, delivering average performance roughly on par with the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti while eclipsing the baseline GeForce RTX 5070.

Benchmarks - 3DMark Synthetic Tests

3DMark offers a suite of synthetic benchmarks built to test GPUs in various scenarios. 3DMark Steel Nomad is a cutting-edge DirectX 12 benchmark that uses modern rendering techniques to push GPUs to their limits. The 'Light' version tests at 1440p, while the main Steel Nomad benchmark tests pure native 4K rendering. Port Royal is a benchmark focused exclusively on real-time ray tracing for lighting effects, including reflections, shadows, and more.

The synthetic Steel Nomad benchmarks for the Radeon RX 9070 XT continue to deliver some strange results, with the 1440p-based Steel Nomad Light dropping to near RTX 5070 levels, and the 4K-based Steel Nomad score sitting slightly higher than the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. This means the 4K-based result is more indicative of in-game benchmarks without ray tracing, where you're most likely to see the Radeon RX 9070 XT and the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti trade blows.

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Although we haven't yet tested the RDNA 3 flagship Radeon RX 7900 XTX on our new gaming benchmark rigs, as highlighted in our previous reviews of Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics cards earlier in 2025, the Radeon RX 9070 XT is AMD's fastest pure ray tracing GPU release so far. In fact, the ASRock Radeon RX 9070 XT Monster Hunter Wilds Edition GPU's score of 17,810 is 19.3% higher than the GeForce RTX 5070, which is an impressive result. As expected, the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti pulls ahead here, but only by 10%. That said, the Radeon RX 9070 XT and RDNA 4's improvements to ray tracing performance do begin to crack when faced with Path Tracing or Full Ray Tracing.

Benchmarks - 4K Gaming

Benchmarks - 1440p Gaming

Benchmarks - 1080p Gaming

FSR Redstone - Upscaling, Frame Generation, Ray Regeneration

Exclusive to RDNA 4 and the Radeon RX 9000 Series of desktop graphics cards, AMD's latest version of FSR - dubbed FSR Redstone - now encompasses a full suite of AI-powered rendering technologies that finally closes the gap between FSR and NVIDIA DLSS. AMD FSR Upscaling (ML), also called FSR 4, is powered by a new ML-based algorithm that delivers a dramatic improvement in image quality when upscaling from lower resolutions to 1080p, 1440p, or 4K.

FSR Frame Generation (ML) upgrades AMD's Frame Generation technology for the RDNA 4 generation with a new AI approach powered by a neural network that improves image fidelity and reduces image artifacts, such as ghosting. FSR Ray Regeneration (ML) is an AI-powered denoiser, similar to DLSS Ray Reconstruction, built for ray tracing. FSR Radiance Caching is best described as FSR Upscaling for ray tracing calculations. It accelerates ray tracing by leveraging AI with a Neural Radiance Cache to infer complex lighting calculations as they occur, reducing GPU load.

With FSR Redstone's release in December 2025, there aren't many titles that take full advantage of the full suite of new AI technologies, with the first game to support FSR Radiance Caching on track for sometime in 2026. And when it comes to FSR Ray Regeneration (ML), it's currently only supported in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. This is why this game is included in the 4K results above: it not only runs faster with FSR Upscaling (ML) and FSR Ray Regeneration (ML) when ray tracing is enabled, but the ray-traced reflections also look noticeably better.

When it comes to the new FSR Frame Generation (ML), we noticed that image quality improved compared to previous versions; however, playing F1 25 didn't feel quite as smooth or responsive as DLSS 4 Frame Generation. Considering the technology was only a few weeks old at the time of testing, odds are we'll see improvements and updates as we head into 2026 and more FSR Redstone titles become available.

Path Tracing Performance

Path Tracing takes real-time ray tracing and applies the concept of ray-traced effects to everything - global illumination, shadows, reflections, indirect lighting, and more. With multiple bounces, it's a hardware-intensive, cutting-edge look at the future of PC gaming, only possible thanks to AI tools and technologies. With RDNA 4 dramatically improving ray-tracing performance over RDNA 3, GPUs like the Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB are capable of rendering stunning Path Traced visuals; however, it's more proof of concept than practical.

Path Tracing might be the future, but right now, high-end path tracing or full ray tracing is limited to the GeForce RTX 50 Series. Looking at performance in Cyberpunk 2077 and DOOM: The Dark Ages at 1440p, the ASRock Radeon RX 9070 XT Monster Hunter Wilds Edition GPU falls short of the GeForce RTX 5070, with less impressive image quality. Dropping the resolution to 1080p is enough to make the Radeon RX 9070 XT a capable entry-level path-tracing GPU; however, until the full suite of FSR Redstone technologies is available in games with Full Ray Tracing, GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs will continue to have the edge.

Temperature and Power Efficiency

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With temperatures in the low 60s, the ASRock Radeon RX 9070 XT Monster Hunter Wilds Edition GPU's thermal performance is decent, with enough headroom for some overclocking to further boost performance. And with a relatively conservative fan curve, the overall noise levels of this custom GPU are low when in an enclosed case. As a non-OC model, the 300W of power used for 4K gaming means that, even when it's not overclocked, the Radeon RX 9070 XT is less efficient than an overclocked GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, which uses, on average, 30W or so less.

Final Thoughts

ASRock's Radeon RX 9070 XT Monster Hunter Wilds Edition GPU is a looker; it features impressive build quality and cooling and offers a stylish, custom version of AMD's flagship RDNA 4 graphics card. With the Radeon RX 9070 XT now out well and truly into its first year on the market, it's clear that the architecture's improvements to ray tracing, alongside upgrading FSR Upscaling to a new and improved AI model (which is exclusive to RDNA 4 GPUs), have helped deliver a competitive alternative to the GeForce RTX 50 Series. Although DLSS still has the advantage regarding game support and image quality, the difference is no longer as big as it used to be - and in the months following the Radeon RX 9070 XT's launch, FSR adoption has continued to grow, albeit slowly.

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And with the arrival of FSR Redstone in December 2025, the following year should see more support arrive as engine support and driver-based overrides add to the list of 200+ games that you can enable the latest and greatest version of FSR. Of course, even when you look at the raw performance of the Radeon RX 9070 XT Monster Hunter Wilds Edition GPU, ASRock has delivered an affordable alternative to the more expensive GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, as the overall performance of these two GPUs when gaming at 1440p or 4K is more or less within a few percentage points.

And if you've been eyeing a Radeon RX 9070 XT and are a fan of Capcom's Monster Hunter series, there's the bonus of picking up a card that not only looks stylish but also presents metallic blues and greys unlike anything else on the market.