I'm looking to replace my RTX 3080 Ti mainly for Quest 3 VR and newer games. My system has a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, 32GB of DDR4, and a B450 motherboard. I mostly play sim racing games and occasional AAA titles, and I'd like to reach a stable 90–120Hz in VR where possible. At the moment, newer games can drop to around 60–70 FPS in VR, while demanding titles with ray tracing can fall into the 30–40 FPS range at standard resolutions.
I use a 1440p 120Hz monitor and a 4K 60Hz TV, and I'd like the next GPU to remain useful for roughly five or six years. The cards I'm considering are an RX 9070 XT for about £850–900, an RTX 5070 Ti for around £1,099, and an RTX 5080 for approximately £1,299. I'm willing to pay more for the 5080 if its extra performance, VR support, and longevity make the premium worthwhile.
My main concerns are whether AMD's current drivers and Quest Link compression issues are still a problem, whether the 5070 Ti or 9070 XT would be enough for long-term use, and whether my 5800X3D would noticeably limit any of these GPUs at Quest 3 resolutions, 1440p, or 4K. I'd especially appreciate advice from people using a Quest 3 for sim racing.
3 Answers
I went from a 3080 Ti to a 9070 XT and found it to be a solid upgrade. It also handled VR well in my experience, although my headset setup isn’t identical to yours. The card is probably the strongest price-to-performance option of the three, assuming you can buy it at a sensible UK price rather than the inflated prices you listed.
That said, don’t expect every VR title to run at a fully maxed 120Hz. Some demanding or poorly optimized games will still require reduced shadows, reflections, or resolution scaling. AMD is much more usable for VR than its older reputation suggests, but NVIDIA remains the less risky choice if Quest Link compatibility and VR encoding are your top priorities.
The 5800X3D should be fine to keep for now. One comparison from a 5080 owner showed a substantial improvement after moving from a Ryzen 5 5600X to the 5800X3D in a CPU-heavy racing game, so the fact that you already have the X3D chip puts you in a much better position.
You may still see CPU limitations in some games, particularly if you use aggressive upscaling and aim for very high refresh rates. Watch GPU utilization and frame times rather than relying only on CPU percentage. If the GPU is not being fully utilized and the frame pacing is uneven, then a platform upgrade might help, but I would upgrade the GPU first in your situation.
A total CPU utilization reading around 60% doesn’t automatically prove a bottleneck. Games can be limited by one or two CPU cores while the overall percentage remains much lower than 100%.
The RTX 5080 is the obvious performance pick if your goal is to keep the card for five or six years. It offers more headroom for demanding VR workloads, ray tracing, and future games, while also giving you NVIDIA’s DLSS and encoding support. The 5070 Ti should still be a worthwhile upgrade over the 3080 Ti, but at a high price it loses much of its value compared with either the 9070 XT or 5080.
For VR specifically, memory bandwidth and VRAM capacity matter a lot, so I would be cautious about assuming that today’s average gaming benchmarks tell the whole story. Even with a 5080, though, “max settings at 120Hz” won’t be realistic in every new release. A stable 72 or 90Hz with sensible settings may be a better target.
A used RTX 4090 could also be worth comparing if you find one at a reasonable price, but availability, warranty, power consumption, and condition make that a more complicated purchase.
UK pricing may be better than those figures suggest. It’s worth checking current prices carefully, since some 9070 XT models have appeared substantially below £850.