Radeon RX 9070 XT outpaced RTX 5090 in games, but the reason turned out to be unexpected

Recent tests, conducted by the YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed, showed an unexpected result: in some gaming scenarios, the Radeon RX 9070 XT can beat the flagship GeForce RTX 5090. However, this isn't widespread superiority—it's specific conditions tied to a CPU bottleneck.

In the experiment, both graphics cards were tested paired with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D in 11 modern games at 1440p and 4K. The main goal was to check the impact of NVIDIA driver overhead on system performance. As it turned out, Team Green's architectural approach requires more CPU involvement to process instructions, which can lead to lower frame rates in scenarios where the system is limited by the CPU rather than the GPU.

The most telling example was Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, where at 1440p, Ultra settings, and DLSS in Balanced mode, the AMD card managed to beat the RTX 5090 by 7%. With lower graphics settings, the gap widened to 11% in Radeon's favor. In Star Wars Zero Company, under similar conditions, the advantage was 1 FPS in average frame rate but reached 11% in 1% Low FPS, which reflects stability. A similar situation was seen in Forza Horizon 6, where at 1440p and Medium settings, AMD's 1% Low advantage was 16%.

Even so, in most scenarios, especially at high resolutions and maximum graphics settings, GeForce RTX 5090 maintains a significant lead. In native 4K, NVIDIA's advantage over its AMD rival averages 64%. With DLSS upscaling in Performance mode at 2160p, the gap narrows to 36%, and at 1440p with DLSS Balanced—to 19%. In demanding titles like Cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing, the RTX 5090's advantage can be more than double.

The situation where a less powerful graphics card beats a flagship arises solely under CPU-limited conditions. This happens when frame rates reach levels at which the CPU can no longer keep up with preparing data for the GPU. In such cases, the RTX 5090's extra compute power goes unused, and NVIDIA's driver overhead can lead to a slight performance drop compared with AMD's solutions. Radeon RX 9070 XT isn't a competitor to the RTX 5090 in the global sense, but it can show parity or a minimal advantage only in a narrow set of scenarios: at lower resolutions, reduced quality settings, and with upscaling, when the system is CPU-limited.

Have you ever run into a situation where a weaker graphics card ran faster than a flagship one because of CPU limitations? Share in the comments.