Synthetic Benchmarks
As always I like to start my testing with a few synthetic benchmarks. 3DMark especially is one of my favorites because it is very optimized in both Nvidia and AMD drivers. It's nice to not have to worry about it being favored too much either way and the repeatability of the results makes it a nice chance to compare from card to card, especially when comparing with the same GPU. With the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend, I am most interested in how it compares to the RX 9070 that I took a look at and of course the competition from Nvidia with the RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti. The Acer RX 5070 was an overclocked model and this is a stock-clocked card, so it will be interesting to see if that ends up putting the two models a lot closer together.
The first round of tests were done in the older Fire Strike benchmark which is a DX11 test. There are three detail levels, performance, extreme, and ultra. The RX 9070 XT Steel Legend scored a 66762 in the base Fire Strike benchmark which put it over the RTX 4080 but a step behind the two RTX 5070 Ti’s. This was an improvement of 6.7% over the overclocked RX 9070 and 18.3% over the RTX 5070. With Fire Strike Extreme scored 33887, once again between the RTX 4080 SUPER and RTX 5070 Ti. This was 7.9% over the Acer RX 9070 and 18.2% over the RTX 5070. In the Fire Strike Extreme test, the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend scored 17294 and was in between the RTX 4080 and RTX 4080 SUPER this time. This was 7.9% over the RX 9070 and 22% over the RTX 5070.
The next two were both based on the Time Spy benchmark. One is the standard test and then there is the extreme detail level. In base Time Spy the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend scored a 29217 and is sitting above the RTX 4080 SUPER with the RX 7900 XTX above it. That was 8.3% over the RX 9070 and an impressive 31.4% over the RTX 5070. Then in Time Spy Extreme it scored a 14078 and dropped down below the RTX 4080 SUPER but is sitting ahead of the RTX 4080. That put it 8% over the RX 9070 and 32% over the RTX 5070. It was even 2.6% over the RTX 5070 Ti as well.
I did also test using the new 3DMark Speed Way which is one of their latest benchmarks and Port Royal as well. Speed Way is DX12 as well but combines more future-focused tech like Ray Tracing which up until its release where only used in feature tests, not full benchmarks. The RX 9070 XT Steel Legend scored a 6191 in Speed Way. You can see Nvidia is still doing well here with the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend behind the RTX 4070 Ti but it was still ahead of the 5070 by 6.6% and 5.6% for the RX 9070. For Port Royal, it scored 17816 and is just behind the RTX 4080 and impressively ahead of the RX 7900 XTX. This was 10.7% over the RX 9070 and 26.9% over the RTX 5070.
I also tested using the newer 3Dmark Steel Nomad benchmark. Officially this is the replacement for the Time Spy benchmark. It is a DX12 benchmark and doesn’t include ray tracing but is updated to better take advantage of modern cards. The RX 9070 XT Steel Legend scored a 6856 here and is ahead of the RTX 4080 SUPER and with a big gap between it and the 5080 sitting ahead of it. This put it over the RTX 5070 Ti and the RX 7900 XTX. The gap between it and the RX 9070 was 11.4% and 37.2% over the RTX 5070.
I did also run the RX 9070 XT Steel Legend through the 3DMark FSR 2 comparisons. This isn’t the newer FSR 3.1 or the brand new FSR 4, but it does give an example of what kind of performance difference you can see depending on what detail you have your FSR set to. It sits behind the 7900 XTX but more importantly, depending on the detail setting you can see from 80 FPS up to 177 which is a wide range. For comparison, without FSR at all it was running at 42 FPS.
