Upgrade from RX 9700 XT to AI PRO R9700, is it worth it? What are the compromises?

A user's hands-on comparison found the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 delivered roughly the same gaming frame rates as an RX 9070 XT — within 2-5% slower overall — while drawing over 400W, nearly twice the power, and had to be capped at 210-250W. The R9700 pulled far ahead with heavy path tracing enabled, roughly doubling frame rates in Cyberpunk 2077 and MechWarrior 5 Clans at 350-370W unconstrained, while a 12GB RTX 4070 Super ran about 10% slower with FSR and standard ray tracing at 190W. The tester, a software engineer of three decades, said a single R9700 with 64GB of DRAM can run Qwen3.8 27B at Q4, but two R9700s are needed for meaningful FP8 local LLM work.

Yes, though it was like 4-6 months ago here. In short, the R9700 performed about the same as an 9070 XT I had for testing wasn’t mine . The R9700 was within 2-5% slower overall FPS which you can’t tell while gaming . When using the same FSR and RT settings between the two my tests were Cyberpunk 2077 on an 120 Hz 1440p widescreen - which is about the same as 4K pixel fill . However, the R9700 was pulling almost twice the watts at over 400W You must artificially limit the R9700 to 210-250W, which you should be doing anyways for LLMs so not to waste power. All tests are with FSR frame gen because at 1440p widescreen, you’re pushing almost 4k pixels. All on Linux with just the latest kernel. No driver install needed. 9950X3D2 behemoth with 64GB DDR5 6000. With that said, the R9700 absolutely crushes Ray Tracing with the heavy Path Trading enabled - especially in Cyberpunk. MechWarrior 5 Clans showed significant improvements as well. It must be the additional GPU horsepower because it was like twice the framerates and very playable at 120 FPS. But again, at like 350-370W of power without being limited. As a comparison, my 4070 Super 12 GB performs just 10% slower with FSR and normal RT no Path Tracing . And only pulled 190W for the GPU. I ended up putting the 4070 Super back in as the R9700 was combined with a second R9700 and went into a 4U Threadripper build. Search the forums here. Plenty of comparisons. IME, as a professional software engineer for 3 decades, you really need two R9700s to get any real meaningful long term usage out of them. A single R9700 combined with 64GB DRAM can absolutely get by with Qwen3.8 27B @ Q4. But running things at FP8 with dual R9700s is a significant upgrade you can tell. I state that because I am an extremely heavy user of my local Ai with harnesses. Consider me as a worse case scenario for review where most others don’t run as much. Not to mention the work the work Radiance is doing with Swift 1.5 Qwen3.8 Next Flash, especially if you have 64GB of DRAM with dual R9700s. See below…