I have the opportunity to trade my RTX 4070 Ti for an RX 9070 XT while paying only about £50 extra. My system runs Bazzite with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D and 32GB of RAM, and I play at 1440p. The 9070 XT appears to be somewhat faster overall and has more VRAM, while I understand that AMD tends to work well on Linux. However, I really like ray tracing and DLSS, so I'm unsure whether the extra performance and memory are worth giving up Nvidia's features. What would you choose?
4 Answers
For only around £50, the 9070 XT is a worthwhile upgrade if you don’t need CUDA. It generally offers roughly 7–10% more raster performance than the 4070 Ti, along with 4GB more VRAM. AMD’s Linux support is also usually the smoother experience. The main trade-off is that Nvidia still has an advantage with DLSS and more demanding path-traced effects.
I’d make the swap. The extra raw performance and VRAM should age better, especially in newer games and at higher settings. DLSS is better than FSR in some cases, but the quality gap usually isn’t large enough to outweigh the 9070 XT’s performance advantage. Frame generation and path tracing are the strongest reasons to stay with Nvidia, but a 4070 Ti isn’t ideal for heavy path tracing anyway.
The 9070 XT is a particularly sensible choice on Bazzite. Its ray-tracing performance is much closer to Nvidia than older Radeon cards were—often around the level of a 4070 Ti or slightly better, depending on the game. Upscaling quality with current FSR versions is also much closer to DLSS than it used to be, though DLSS remains somewhat better in some situations.
If ray tracing and DLSS are the features you use most, keeping the 4070 Ti is defensible. Nvidia still has the more mature upscaling ecosystem and better support for path-traced games. However, at 1440p and on Linux, the 9070 XT’s extra VRAM, stronger raster performance, and generally good AMD support make it the better overall value for such a small additional cost.
The difference isn’t completely one-sided. The 9070 XT is typically faster in rasterization, while the 4070 Ti can still be a little better in ray tracing depending on the title. Path tracing is where Nvidia has the clearer advantage.