I'm looking to upgrade from an 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 3070 Ti.
My maximum budget is about £600 for a second-hand upgrade, although I may trade in my current card for around £250 in store credit. I've been looking at an RX 9070 XT for approximately £550–£600, while RTX 5070 Ti models seem to cost around £800 or more. I've used AMD cards before and don't mind switching, but I'm less familiar with how the current AMD lineup compares with Nvidia's.
From what I can tell, the 9070 XT and 5070 Ti offer fairly similar gaming performance in most cases. What accounts for the large price difference? Are DLSS, ray tracing, frame generation, CUDA, or other Nvidia features worth paying roughly £250 extra for, or would the 9070 XT be the better choice for primarily playing games at 1440p?
5 Answers
The Nvidia premium mainly pays for the wider software ecosystem. CUDA can matter for Blender, video production, AI work, and other productivity tasks, while DLSS and Nvidia’s frame generation are often better supported. If you’re only gaming and aren’t interested in heavy ray tracing, the 9070 XT should deliver nearly the same experience for much less money.
A used RTX 3080 Ti could also be worth considering. It has more VRAM than the 3070 Ti and can provide a noticeable uplift, especially if you sell or trade in your current card. However, if you can get a 9070 XT for around £300 after trade-in, that is a much newer and more compelling upgrade than paying heavily for a 3080 Ti.
Before buying, try lowering a few settings rather than using the ultra or experimental presets. At 1440p, high settings often look almost identical while performing better. That said, the 3070 Ti’s 8GB of VRAM is becoming a limitation in newer games, so moving to a card with substantially more VRAM would give you better long-term breathing room.
For ordinary gaming, the RX 9070 XT is generally the better value. The two cards trade wins depending on the game, and average performance is often very close. The RTX 5070 Ti has advantages in ray tracing and path tracing, along with DLSS and frame generation, but those features usually don’t justify paying £250 more unless you specifically care about them.
The 5070 Ti makes more sense if you want excellent ray tracing or path tracing, reliable frame generation, or Nvidia features for non-gaming workloads. Path tracing is much more demanding than standard ray tracing and Nvidia is still clearly ahead there, but relatively few games use it and many players choose not to enable it. For your stated use, the 9070 XT is the sensible choice, especially at the lower price.
I mainly play Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 at the moment, and I’ve actually had poor results with DLSS on my 3070 Ti. It looks jagged and glitchy to me, so I currently leave it disabled.