AMD Boosted the Radeon RX 9070 XT's Performance With New Driver Update

Benchmark showed that the performance of the Radeon RX 9070 XT was slightly behind RTX 5070 Ti. However, a new driver update has changed the playing field.

Benchmark showed that the performance of the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT was slightly behind the RTX 5070 Ti, but a new driver update made it faster. — XFX Mercury Radeon RX 9070 XT OC Gaming Edition (Image via XFX)

Nvidia graphics cards, especially their RTX 50 series, didn’t have real competition. This led to Team Green dominating the market, and its GPU prices were through the roof. That’s why the launch of the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT was such a big deal to the gaming GPU industry. It was the only GPU that could possibly challenge Nvidia’s RTX 5070 Ti or even the RTX 5080.

While the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT performed really great in games, even with ray tracing, it fell short of the RTX 5070 Ti by a tiny margin. The former was about 3-5% slower in a few titles compared to the latter. Therefore, it didn’t become the savior of the GPU market like users wanted it to be. However, that all changed yesterday (July 2) when a driver update increased the performance of the Radeon 9070 XT by up to 27% (depending on the games).

Is the Radeon RX 9070 XT finally faster than the RTX 5070 Ti? Is the new driver update really that good? In this article, we will answer those questions and many more.

Note: Some aspects of this article are subjective and reflect the writer’s opinions.

Radeon RX 9070 XT’s Performance Increased: Everything To Know

Picture of the performance improvements of the Radeon RX 9070 XT — The performance improvements of the Radeon 9070 XT (Image via Hardware Unboxed/YouTube)

AMD released a new driver update, version 25.6.3, for its GPUs. For context, in the version, 25 indicates the year, 6 the month, and 3 the revision. Therefore, this is the third driver version AMD released this month. It brings some surprising performance improvements for AMD’s new GPUs.

Steve from the Hardware Unboxed YouTube channel tested the new drivers on the Radeon RX 9070 XT. He found it to be 9% faster on average compared to the launch driver at the 1440p resolution. Keep in mind that’s just average performance improvements. In individual games like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 or Counter-Strike 2, the Radeon 9070 XT was 27% or 23% faster, respectively.

This honestly surprised many people, including us. That’s the kind of performance improvement that usually happens when a new GPU generation launches, yet a simple driver update delivered that. This shows that the launch driver was probably not ready when the Radeon GPU was released. The GPU had some untapped potential, which AMD has now provided through the new driver.

Final Thoughts

The Radeon RX 9070 XT is now actually 3% faster than the RTX 5070 Ti on average. There’s a good chance that the Radeon driver version 25.6.3 also brought similar driver improvements for the rest of the Radeon RX 9000 series. However, we cannot tell for sure without thorough testing. We will update the article when we learn more, so stay tuned.

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