I'm building a gaming PC and comparing similarly powerful AMD Radeon and Nvidia graphics cards. In my region, the Nvidia option costs around €500 more. I'm mainly interested in strong raw performance and high frame rates, and I don't particularly care about ray tracing or frame generation. Is there any compelling reason to pay extra for Nvidia, or would an AMD card offer better value?
5 Answers
If you’re gaming at 1440p and mainly want high native FPS, the RX 9070 XT is a strong choice. The non-XT RX 9070 can also be a good middle ground if it’s substantially cheaper or you want lower power consumption. Just compare prices in your area and check benchmarks for the specific games you play.
The main Nvidia advantages you might still notice are DLSS upscaling, some specialized software support, and features such as RTX HDR or Nvidia Broadcast. AMD also supports upscaling, frame generation, and ray tracing, though Nvidia’s implementations can be better supported or more polished in certain games. None of that sounds worth an extra €500 for your priorities, though.
One caveat is that the exact games matter. Competitive games can sometimes behave differently between brands, and Nvidia still tends to have broader upscaling support. But if you’re not using those features and the AMD card is €500 cheaper at a similar performance level, putting that money toward a better monitor, CPU, or simply keeping it is the sensible move.
For gaming focused on traditional rasterized performance, AMD is probably the better value here. A card such as the RX 9070 XT generally offers excellent performance for the money, while Nvidia’s premium is easier to justify if you need features like CUDA, professional software support, AI workloads, or video tools.
The answer changes if you plan to use Blender, CUDA applications, local AI, certain video-encoding tools, or other professional software. Nvidia usually has better support in those areas. For a gaming-only system, though, AMD’s performance-per-euro advantage makes much more sense at the prices you described.

That helps a lot. I’ve saved up for the build, but I’d rather not spend an extra €500 on features I probably won’t use.