I bought an RX 7900 XT Merc 310 in 2023 and am considering replacing it with a newer card. I know the current generation does not offer a dramatic improvement in traditional rasterized performance unless going all the way to something like an RTX 5090, so the main reason to upgrade would be newer features—particularly DLSS versus FSR. I have heard that FSR 4 may not be as good on RDNA 3, although I also understand that FSR support and quality continue to improve.
I mainly play at 1440p across many different genres. I do not currently use 4K, VR, or ray tracing, though I wonder whether RT might become more appealing in the future. Since I am staying at 1440p, moving from 20 GB of VRAM to a card with less memory may be acceptable, although I am unsure how much VRAM ray tracing requires.
I am mainly considering an RX 9070 XT or an RTX 5070 Ti. The 5070 Ti appears to have stronger features and ray-tracing performance, but it costs roughly €400–€500 more, while some benchmarks show the AMD card matching or exceeding it in rasterized games.
There is also a practical accounting reason for the replacement: the 7900 XT was purchased by my company and is now considered depreciated. I may be able to resell it for around €500 and purchase a new card using roughly 60% of the budget, so this is not quite the same as paying the full upgrade cost personally. Given that situation, would either card be a sensible upgrade, or should I keep using the 7900 XT until a much larger performance jump arrives?
4 Answers
The 5070 Ti does give you better ray tracing and access to DLSS, but that is only valuable if you specifically want those features. Paying several hundred euros more for a relatively small rasterization gain does not make much sense, especially when you are giving up some VRAM. I would only choose it if DLSS or path tracing is an important priority.
For your actual use case, the 7900 XT is still an excellent 1440p card. If you do not use ray tracing and are not running into performance problems in specific games, the 9070 XT would mostly be a sidegrade rather than a meaningful upgrade. FSR 4 is also usable on RDNA 3, and at 1440p you may not need upscaling very often anyway.
If the company accounting situation effectively lets you sell the old card and replace it with a heavily subsidized new one, the decision becomes more reasonable. Even then, I would skip the 9070 XT unless you simply want a newer, more efficient card. A genuinely noticeable upgrade would be closer to an RTX 5080 or above, though the price may still make that poor value.
You can also experiment with how FSR is configured instead of replacing the GPU. At 1440p, FSR Quality renders internally at a fairly low resolution, so some people prefer a custom upscale ratio or native-resolution FSR when they already have enough performance. Tools that adjust the scaling ratio can improve image quality, but whether you notice the difference depends heavily on the game.
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