I'm looking to upgrade from my RTX 3070 Ti after moving to a 1440p monitor. In Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, my frame rate has dropped from around 75 FPS to roughly 45–60 FPS. My system has a Ryzen 7 5800X, 32GB of RAM, and the RTX 3070 Ti.
My maximum budget is about £600 used, although I may be able to trade in my current card for around £250 in store credit. I've seen RX 9070 XT cards around £550–£600 used, while RTX 5070 Ti models are closer to £800 or more. From the gaming benchmarks I've seen, they seem to offer broadly similar performance.
I'm comfortable using either AMD or Nvidia, but I'm less familiar with AMD's current GPU lineup. Is the RTX 5070 Ti's higher price justified by features such as ray tracing, path tracing, DLSS, frame generation, CUDA, or better efficiency, or would the RX 9070 XT be the better choice for ordinary 1440p gaming?
5 Answers
For gaming alone, the RX 9070 XT is generally the better value. The two cards trade blows in regular rasterized games, and the RTX 5070 Ti usually isn’t fast enough overall to justify paying roughly £250 more. Nvidia has an advantage in ray tracing, path tracing, DLSS, and frame generation, but those benefits depend on the games you play and whether you actually want to use those features. The Nvidia card also makes more sense for CUDA-based work such as Blender, rendering, AI, or some video-production workloads.
The main reason to choose the RTX 5070 Ti is not standard gaming performance. It offers stronger ray tracing and path-tracing performance, generally better-supported upscaling and frame generation, and a much stronger software ecosystem for CUDA applications. If you only play games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and don’t care about those features, the extra money would be difficult to justify. The RX 9070 XT should provide nearly identical real-world performance for much less.
A used RTX 3080 Ti could also be worth considering. It has significantly more VRAM than the 3070 Ti and can be a meaningful upgrade after selling your current card, although it uses more power and is older than the 9070 XT. If your trade-in brings the cost of a 9070 XT down close to £300, though, that is probably the more sensible long-term purchase.
Before buying anything, try lowering a few demanding settings in the game rather than using Ultra across the board. High settings often look almost identical while improving frame rates. Also, poor-looking DLSS isn’t necessarily caused by your GPU being too old; the quality can vary by game, implementation, sharpening settings, and internal resolution. If you prefer native rendering and don’t use ray tracing, that removes most of Nvidia’s advantages for your situation.
The RTX 5070 Ti can be worth the premium if you specifically want high-quality frame generation, better ray tracing or path tracing, CUDA, or compatibility with certain creative and AI applications. It is also somewhat more efficient and may run cooler depending on the model. For ordinary 1440p gaming, however, the RX 9070 XT is the stronger price-to-performance option, particularly at £550–£600 rather than £800 or more.
I’ve tried DLSS in a few games and it looked jagged and slightly glitchy, so I currently leave it disabled. Since I mainly play Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and don’t use ray tracing, I’m leaning toward the 9070 XT, especially if the trade-in brings the cash cost close to £300.