By undervolting, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is said to perform better than the RTX 5080.

Through rigorous undervolting, AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT is exhibiting surprising performance gains. Overclocking experts have documented notable enhancements that enable the GPU to surpass NVIDIA’s more expensive GeForce RTX 5080 in particular benchmarks. By boosting the power target to 110% and implementing a -170 mV voltage offset, Der8auer’s recent experiments with a PowerColor Red Devil RX 9070 XT showed a 10% increase in frame rate in Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K Ultra settings. With this change, the GPU was able to achieve clock speeds of 3.36 GHz instead of 2.90 GHz at stock settings, yielding 66 FPS in comparison to the RTX 5080’s 65 FPS in the same testing conditions. YouTuber Alva Jonathan used ASRock’s Steel Legend model to achieve comparable 10% performance gains on the basic RX 9070, suggesting that the undervolting phenomena is consistent across the product line.

Traditional core clock overclocking produced very little effect, according to both testing, indicating that these factory-overclocked cards are already functioning close to their architectural boundaries. The voltage needed for higher frequencies is successfully reduced by the voltage-frequency curve modifications. Memory overclocking turned out to be ineffective; when error correction techniques were pushed over stable limits, in-game performance actually decreased. Important disclaimers accompany these findings: both tested devices are high-end models with improved cooling and power delivery that retail for much more than AMD’s MSRP. The ASRock Steel Legend had a $90 markup over the RX 9070’s standard $550 MSRP, while the PowerColor Red Devil sold for $200 more than the RX 9070 XT’s $599 launch price. Despite NVIDIA’s continued advantages in ray tracing capabilities and software ecosystem, the high-end RX 9070 XT models are still about $200 less expensive than NVIDIA’s RTX 5080 while offering equivalent rasterization performance after optimization.