Ever heard of AMD FineWine? It’s not an actual technology developed by the chipmaker, but rather a phenomenon that describes AMD GPU’s maturing drivers since product launch that eventually gives their cards free performance boosts. As Hardware Unboxed proves, the Radeon RX 9070 XT is one such card aging like fine wine as it was seen outperforming NVIDIA’s equivalent in latest gaming tests.
FineWine Blesses RX 9070 XT
The Australian review outlet has put back a system identical to the launch day reviews, which includes AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and DDR5-6000 memory, for an apples-to-apples comparison; the data is compared against NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, with both cards listing performance figures recorded on their respective launches and the numbers attainable in present day.
Surprisingly, the Radeon card gained significantly performance uplift in certain games, with the best-case scenario seen in Spider-Man Remastered achieving a huge 27% uplift in framerates. Similar results in other games has flipped the balance between the two cards, with RX 9070 XT declaring more victories as the GeForce card ended up regressing in some cases.
Across 16 games at 1440p, the 9070 XT gained 9% more performance on average, while 5070 Ti only managed 2.5%; this caused the original review’s 2.5% deficit to flip in Radeon’s favor with a net 3% advantage. The effects in 4K are less pronounced, with both cards achieving similar uplifts, though neither card has any observable advantage. Of course, driver optimizations usually don’t just benefit a single card, so you can expect these drivers to help lower-end RDNA 4 GPUs in getting a free performance boost as well.
Pokdepinion: It’s been a while since FineWine is a thing, isn’t it?
