A launch test published on March 5, 2025 put these cards in a different order depending on the game suite. At 1440p, the RX 7900 XTX led the mostly rasterized suite, while the RX 9070 XT led the separate ray-tracing suite. The ray-tracing selection used different games and presets, with upscaling in some cases. This is a dated pair of suite averages, not a controlled measure of the effect of turning ray tracing on, or a ranking for today’s drivers.
The RX 9070 XT’s ray-tracing case comes with a definite memory tradeoff: the RX 7900 XTX has 24 GB of VRAM and the RX 9070 XT has 16 GB. A swap gives up capacity even when a target game runs faster. If a workload needs the XTX’s extra memory, keeping it preserves something useful; the larger capacity itself does not establish faster rendering.
Keep the XTX when it already handles the games you want or its extra memory is needed. The RX 9070 XT becomes worth considering when it offers a useful gain in the ray-traced games and settings prompting the change, 16 GB is sufficient, and the actual purchase cost after selling the old card is acceptable.