My younger brother and I have the same Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor, motherboard, and 16 GB DDR5 memory stick. The main hardware difference is that he has an RTX 5070 while I have an RX 7900 GRE. Despite the 7900 GRE's strong rasterization performance, his system reaches around 144 FPS over USB 3 at 5120 Mbit/s in H3VR on a Quest 3, while mine stays below 130 FPS. Is this mainly due to Nvidia's VR support and encoding, game-specific optimization, drivers, or something else?
4 Answers
A difference between roughly 130 and 144 FPS is relatively small, and both are already strong results for VR. The 7900 GRE can win in some games, while the RTX 5070 can win in others. If you want a clear upgrade over the 5070, something like an RX 9070 XT or RTX 5070 Ti would make more sense than destroying a perfectly usable graphics card.
Check the software side too: update the GPU drivers and chipset drivers, compare the exact in-game and headset settings, and make sure both systems are configured the same way. Also, one 16 GB memory stick runs in single-channel mode, which isn’t ideal for a gaming system, although the GPU difference is probably the main factor here.
The RTX 5070 is generally around 10% faster than the RX 7900 GRE in many games, including some rasterized workloads, so the performance difference isn’t surprising. GPU comparisons vary by title, and newer architectures can have advantages even when the specifications look close.
VR can favor Nvidia because of driver maturity, headset support, and video encoding. That doesn’t mean AMD cards are automatically bad for VR—many people have good results with them—but a particular game or streaming path may be better optimized for Nvidia hardware.
My experience with a 7900 XT on Windows was also fine, so I’d call this game and software optimization rather than simply “AMD is bad.”