Overall and Final Verdict
The Acer RX 9070 Nitro OC is both our first look at the new RX 9070 and also my first look at an Acer video card and both have been eye opening. The hype for this launch has been huge and in most ways it has met or surpassed that. The RX 9070 performed really well, especially in any of our pure raster-focused benchmarks. When I took out our in-game benchmarks that included DLSS and FSR testing the Acer RX 9070 Nitro OC outperformed the new RTX 5070 by 11% at 1440p, that gap was smaller at 1080p and 4k, but it was still impressive no matter how you slice it. AMD has made big strides when it comes to ray tracing and AI but Nvidia is still ahead in those areas. As that gap shrinks however Nvidia’s justification for a more premium price does as well. I am sad to not see AMD bringing out a flagship high-end GPU but targeting the $500 to $700 range in their product design does focus more on where there are more customers and with that they were able to improve performance while using fewer compute units, saving money to allow room for more VRAM. In the end, the Acer RX 9070 Nitro OC is capable of handling anything at 1440p you throw at it and the same goes for 4k as long as you are okay with smooth but not 120+ FPS in every game.
As far as the Acer RX 9070 Nitro OC itself, I do have some questions still that I won’t know the answer to until I test another RX 9070. The Acer RX 9070 Nitro OC struggled when it came to cooling performance. This is an overclocked card with a surprisingly large overclock over the stock speeds listed by AMD. I’m not sure how much of the heat issues come from the GPU and how much was the cooler design. But I know I wouldn’t want a card that was running as hot as this was. That also translated to the card pushing the fans at 63% when under load and it being noisy. The cards styling wasn’t too bad and it was at least a relatively compact design compared to most cards these days. As for the name, I know that Acer uses the Nitro brand in their Displays, Laptops, and PCs so it does make sense, but it does add to the confusion when Sapphire has had Nitro branded GPUs for a very long time.
As always, pricing is what can make a good video card bad or a bad video card good. AMDs launch MSRP for the RX 9070 is $549 which with the performance we have seen is impressive. At that price, the RX 9070 dominates our performance per dollar chart above by a large margin. Of course, the Acer RX 9070 Nitro OC is overclocked to 2700 MHz when the stock RX 9070 clock speed is 2520 MHz so that plays some part in things. Especially when we know the overclocked cards aren’t selling for the MSRP price point. Because I’m writing this just after the cards hit the stores we know that a majority of those overclocked cards were $630 up to $799, I haven’t seen any of the Acer RX 9070 Nitro OC available though so its price is a bit of a mystery. Overall though it looks like the RX 9070 and the RTX 5070 are selling for similar prices when it comes to those overclocked cards. Pricing going forward is still going to be fluid with tariffs and supply dictating that a lot. But even if the RX 9070 is at the same price as the RTX 5070, its overall performance still makes it the best option.
Live Pricing: HERE
