I'm planning a GPU upgrade for 1440p gaming at high or ultra settings, mainly in AAA titles. My current system has a Ryzen 7 5700X, 32GB of DDR4-3000 memory, an ASUS B550M-K motherboard, a 750W 80+ power supply, and an old GTX 970. The RX 9060 XT 16GB and RX 9070 GRE 12GB cost about the same where I live. Since I'm still using an AM4 processor, I'm concerned that the Ryzen 7 5700X might bottleneck the faster card. Which GPU would make more sense for this setup?
3 Answers
The RX 9070 GRE is the better choice overall. It’s a higher-tier GPU and is roughly 30% faster in many situations, so the extra performance is more valuable than choosing the slower card just to avoid a possible CPU bottleneck.
Your Ryzen 7 5700X should handle the RX 9070 GRE reasonably well at 1440p, especially at high or ultra settings. At that resolution, the GPU is usually the limiting component, and any CPU limitation will depend on the specific game and frame rate target. You don’t need to avoid the faster card because of the AM4 platform.
The main argument for the RX 9060 XT is its 16GB of VRAM. Some newer games can exceed 12GB at 1440p with high or ultra textures, which could force you to reduce settings on the RX 9070 GRE. However, the 9070 GRE’s substantially higher raw performance usually makes it the better pick, and you can lower texture or a few other settings if a particular game runs into the VRAM limit.
So the 5700X shouldn’t be a major problem for 1440p gaming with the 9070 GRE?