I built a fairly powerful all-AMD PC last year and mainly use it for gaming, but I've recently started learning 3D rendering in Blender. I'm wondering whether NVIDIA's advantages in rendering, CUDA support, DLSS, and driver stability justify replacing my RX 9070 XT with an RTX 5070 Ti or RTX 5080. For gaming, I'm unsure whether the performance difference would be large enough to justify the cost, especially since I may wait for the next generation of GPUs instead. My current system has a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, an RX 9070 XT Gaming OC, and 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory. The rendering is currently a hobby, although I may try to earn money from it in the future.
4 Answers
For gaming alone, I wouldn’t make the switch. The RTX 5080 is faster, but probably not enough faster than the 9070 XT to justify paying close to twice as much. If rendering becomes paid work or your current card starts limiting your projects, then NVIDIA’s performance could make the upgrade worthwhile. Until then, keeping the 9070 XT or waiting for the next generation makes more sense.
The answer depends heavily on which renderer you use. In Blender, an RTX 5070 Ti can be roughly twice as fast as an RX 9070 XT in some workloads, so the difference is much more meaningful there than it is in games. I’d compare benchmarks for the exact scenes and render engine you plan to use before buying anything.
I’m using Blender. The potential rendering improvement is definitely tempting, but I spend much more time gaming than rendering, so I’m not sure the upgrade makes sense unless I start doing larger or paid projects.
That kind of gap can vary a lot depending on the Blender version, render engine, and scene. It’s worth checking benchmarks that match your actual workflow rather than relying on one headline result.
Since you’re only getting started with 3D work, the extra GPU speed probably won’t matter much unless you’re already rendering large, complex scenes or waiting a long time for previews and final output. For typical modeling and moderate projects, your current system is already strong. More demanding assemblies may eventually justify an upgrade, but there’s no urgent reason to change cards now.
That’s helpful to hear. I’m nowhere near the kind of project scale where rendering time is seriously holding me back yet.
NVIDIA does offer useful advantages beyond raw speed, including CUDA support, strong Blender compatibility, DLSS, and generally consistent driver support. Those features can be valuable if you rely on them, but they don’t automatically make the upgrade worthwhile. If your games already run well without DLSS and your AMD issues are only occasional, I’d wait until you have a specific problem to solve.
That’s probably what I’ll do. I’d like to make money from rendering eventually, but for now it’s mostly a hobby, so I’ll keep the 9070 XT until the performance actually becomes a problem.