AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT has delivered a surprising performance boost, especially in rendering tests, outshining NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 5080 in Vulkan and DX12 benchmarks. This shift is largely due to AMD’s optimized tech stack. 
While NVIDIA’s 80-class GPUs still dominate AMD’s RX 9070 XT in traditional gaming scenarios, AMD is closing the gap significantly in rendering applications, thanks to its focus on cooperative matrices and advanced software optimizations.
We’ve previously explored NVIDIA’s RTXNTC technology and its impact on gaming performance, particularly its ability to enhance VRAM efficiency. However, when it comes to AMD’s RDNA 4 GPUs under Neural Text Compression (NTC), the results are even more intriguing. In low-end rendering tasks, AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT manages to outperform the GeForce RTX 5080, demonstrating just how well the RDNA 4 tech stack is optimized for rendering applications.
While NVIDIA hasn’t yet released drivers supporting Microsoft’s DXR 1.2, AMD’s RDNA 4 GPUs have a unique advantage here. By integrating Vulkan’s VK_KHR_cooperative_matrix, AMD can leverage a similar technique that has been available since RDNA 3, even without the DXR 1.2 support. Under these circumstances, the RX 9070 XT outperforms the GeForce RTX 5080 in both Vulkan and DX12 testing, with AMD showing a solid 10% advantage in Vulkan and a massive 110% performance boost in DX12
. This marks a significant leap in efficiency, as it highlights the critical role of driver and software optimizations over raw hardware specs.
The key takeaway here is that GPU performance isn’t solely determined by hardware. Driver development and software optimizations play a pivotal role in how effectively GPUs can handle modern workloads. In this case, AMD’s RDNA 4 GPUs are proving that software optimizations can lead to remarkable performance boosts, even with lower-end hardware.
Furthermore, with the upcoming implementation of Neural Text Compression (NTC) in more applications, it’s clear that this technology will play a major role in the evolution of GPU performance. By drastically reducing VRAM usage, NTC is set to become a game-changer for both gaming and rendering applications, even if it takes some time to make its way into mainstream titles.