I recently upgraded to a Seasonic TX-1300 Titanium power supply and am considering a GPU upgrade from my RX 6700 XT, which struggles with stutter in the Gothic remake. I'm deciding between the RX 9070 XT and RTX 5080 for mostly single-player games at 1440p, including Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Gothic, The Witcher 3, Resident Evil 9, and heavily modded Skyrim with an ENB. I'd like to play at high or maximum settings with ray tracing where practical for the next few years. The RTX 5080 is faster, but it costs substantially more in my area, and I'm concerned about the reliability of its power connector. Would the RX 9070 XT be sufficient, allowing me to put the savings toward a future CPU, motherboard, and memory upgrade?
4 Answers
The 5080 can be a great choice if it fits comfortably within your entertainment budget and you simply want to run maximum settings without tuning anything. It’s not a bad purchase, but the price premium is difficult to justify purely for 1440p when the 9070 XT is already a substantial upgrade.
For normal ray-traced 1440p gaming, the 9070 XT should serve you well and provide a strong upgrade from the 6700 XT. It also uses standard dual 8-pin power connections, which may give you more peace of mind. The 5080 is mainly worth considering if you want maximum ray tracing, path tracing, upscaling, and frame-generation performance.
A 5080 is arguably overkill for 1440p unless you want to max everything without adjusting settings or you have a very high-refresh monitor. The 9070 XT should last well at that resolution, and the leftover budget could fund an X3D processor or a platform upgrade, which may help with CPU-limited games and heavily modded titles.
An X3D CPU is next on my upgrade list, so putting the savings toward a new processor, motherboard, and DDR5 memory sounds more useful.
At 1440p, the RX 9070 XT is usually the better value. Depending on the game, the RTX 5080 is roughly 15–20% faster, but it can cost 70–100% more. That extra money makes more sense if you specifically want the best ray tracing or path-tracing performance and don’t mind paying for convenience.
That price difference is especially large here: I can find a 9070 XT for around $1,000, while the 5080 is still over $2,000. I’m leaning toward saving the money.
If path tracing is a major priority, the 5080 is the safer choice. Otherwise, the 9070 XT’s performance should be enough for most 1440p games.