I'm putting together a gaming PC and have noticed that an AMD Radeon card with similar performance to the Nvidia option costs around €500 less where I live. I'm not particularly interested in ray tracing or frame generation—I mainly want the highest possible FPS in regular rasterized games. Are there any important reasons to choose Nvidia anyway, such as upscaling, drivers, or other features, or would AMD offer better value for my use case?
5 Answers
For your priorities, AMD is probably the better choice. If you mainly care about traditional rasterized gaming performance, Radeon cards generally offer more FPS for the money, especially at the higher end. A card such as the RX 9070 XT would make much more sense than paying hundreds extra for a similarly performing Nvidia card.
The main thing to check is your actual resolution, refresh rate, and the games you play. At 1440p, a 9070 XT-class card should deliver very strong high-refresh performance without relying on frame generation. Just make sure your CPU can keep up in competitive games, since extremely high FPS can become CPU-limited.
There are occasional driver complaints with both brands, and Nvidia has gone through bad driver periods too, so I wouldn’t make that the deciding factor. Unless you need CUDA, professional rendering, specialized video tools, or Nvidia-specific software, save the money and put it toward a better monitor, CPU, or storage.
Nvidia still has some advantages besides ray tracing and frame generation. DLSS upscaling is usually more widely supported and often looks cleaner, while CUDA, NVENC, AI workloads, rendering software, and tools such as Nvidia Broadcast can matter for non-gaming use. If you are only gaming and don’t need those features, though, they probably aren’t worth a €500 premium.
AMD cards still support their own versions of ray tracing and frame generation, so you aren’t completely giving those options up. Nvidia is generally stronger for path tracing and has more mature software support, but an RX 9070 XT can handle regular ray tracing reasonably well. For pure gaming value, AMD is the straightforward pick.
That price difference is hard to justify. AMD’s newer upscaling has improved a lot, and if you’re already getting excellent native performance, you may not need aggressive upscaling anyway.