I originally planned to buy an RX 9060 XT 16GB, but prices have risen to around €550 in France, which no longer seems worthwhile for a midrange card. I'm now deciding between an RX 9070 GRE for about €600 and an RTX 5070 for roughly €650. My main use is CS2 and Valorant at 1440p/360Hz, though I also play AAA games at 1440p. The rest of the system will include a Ryzen 5 9600X, 32GB of DDR5 memory, a B850 motherboard, and an 850W power supply. Would you save €50 and choose the 9070 GRE, or is the RTX 5070's extra performance and feature set worth the price difference?
4 Answers
For CS2 and Valorant at 1440p, either card should be fast enough, and your CPU will matter more when aiming for very high refresh rates. For AAA games, the choice depends on priorities: the 5070 is more attractive for ray tracing and Nvidia features, while the 9070 GRE gives you more VRAM and generally strong traditional rendering. I’d buy whichever has the better warranty and actual local pricing rather than assuming one is automatically better.
At only €50 more, I’d lean toward the RTX 5070. The cards are fairly close in standard rendering, but Nvidia has advantages in ray tracing, upscaling, and broader software support. That said, €650 is only a good deal if that is genuinely the price you can find locally.
The 9070 GRE makes more sense if it is actually around €550–€600. The RTX 5070 is not dramatically faster in regular rasterized gaming, so paying roughly 8% more for similar performance is difficult to justify unless you specifically want Nvidia’s features. Both should handle 1440p well, although 12GB of VRAM on the 5070 is worth keeping in mind.
Before choosing either, check the price of the standard RX 9070. In some shops it can sit between the GRE and RTX 5070 while offering 16GB of VRAM and stronger overall performance. If it is close to €630–€680, it may be the best value of the three. The RX 9070 XT is also worth considering if it is only slightly more expensive.
That’s what makes the decision difficult. The price gap is small in this comparison, but the 5070 doesn’t appear to offer a huge raw-performance advantage.