I'm trying to avoid overspending on a graphics card and have roughly $870 available in Egypt. The current prices I'm seeing are about $760 for an RTX 5070 12GB, $740 for an RX 9070 16GB, and $585–$680 for an RTX 4070 12GB.
My main uses are gaming—from indie titles to AAA games—programming, productivity, game development, Blender, 3D modeling, and graphic design. I'm not a professional yet, but I plan to learn more advanced computer graphics and continue developing games, so creative and development workloads matter at least as much as gaming performance.
The RX 9070 seems to offer the strongest gaming performance and more VRAM, while Nvidia cards generally have better CUDA support and can be much faster in applications such as Blender. Online benchmarks have been inconsistent, so I'm unsure whether the RTX 5070's software support justifies its higher price over the RTX 4070 or RX 9070.
3 Answers
The RTX 5070 also gives you DLSS and Nvidia’s upscaling and frame-generation features, which can help at 1440p. It may not have the RX 9070’s raw performance, but you should still be able to play current games at high or ultra settings and use DLSS Quality when needed. For a card you want to keep for several years, the combination of gaming features and application support makes the 5070 a well-rounded option.
The RX 9070 is probably the better choice if gaming is the priority, but Blender changes the recommendation. Nvidia cards are dramatically faster in Blender because of CUDA and the way the renderer is optimized. If you’re using Blender regularly, I’d lean toward the RTX 5070 unless you’re only doing occasional renders. It’s also worth checking whether your other graphics and development software supports CUDA or Nvidia hardware acceleration.
I do use Blender, although I’m not earning money from it yet. Nvidia’s broader software support may end up being more important for me than the RX 9070’s extra gaming performance.
For your mix of workloads, the RTX 5070 seems like the safest overall buy. The RX 9070 has more raw gaming power and 16GB of VRAM, but Nvidia has a much stronger ecosystem for Blender, CUDA-based tools, and many creative applications. The RTX 4070 is worth considering if you can get it near the lower end of your price range, but at $680 it’s harder to justify next to the newer 5070.
I initially considered the 4070 because it’s cheaper, but I’m worried that GPU prices may rise again. Since I plan to keep working on these projects long term, the 5070 may be the better investment.
That sounds like a reasonable trade-off. I was mainly concerned about losing raw performance by switching from AMD, but the software and rendering advantages seem more useful for my actual goals.