I have not bought a new graphics card in about ten years, so I may be overlooking something. The 16GB versions of the RX 9060 XT and RTX 5060 Ti seem very close in gaming performance, but the 5060 Ti costs roughly $150 more wherever I look. Is DLSS significantly better, or does ray tracing justify the extra cost? Are there other reasons to choose the 5060 Ti over the 9060 XT?
4 Answers
DLSS is a little better in some situations, and Nvidia has an advantage in ray tracing and path tracing. However, the 5060 Ti usually is not powerful enough for the heaviest ray-traced games to run especially well either. Both upscaling technologies can provide a similar performance boost, so I would not pay that premium just for DLSS or ray tracing.
For gaming alone, the RX 9060 XT is the better value. The RTX 5060 Ti does not offer enough of a performance advantage to justify an extra $150 unless you specifically need Nvidia features.
Nvidia makes more sense for workloads such as Blender, local AI, video processing, engineering, or similar applications. Those programs can benefit substantially from Nvidia's CUDA support, and some AI workloads are much faster. For regular gaming, though, AMD is the stronger deal.
The 9060 XT is mainly a gaming card, while the 5060 Ti is easier to justify if you also use VR, AI tools, creative software, or other GPU-accelerated applications. VR support can be somewhat smoother on Nvidia, but the AMD card is still capable. At the current price gap, I would choose the 9060 XT for 1440p gaming and put the savings toward a faster card if possible.
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