I currently use an RTX 3080 with a Ryzen 9 5950X and play primarily at 1440p, with no plans to move to 4K soon. After several years, the 3080 is beginning to struggle in a few games. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 regularly exceeds its 10GB of VRAM, forcing me to lower texture quality while still hovering around 60 FPS even with frame generation. In Le Mans Ultimate, played on a 3840×1080 ultrawide monitor, performance can fall below 60 FPS even with low settings and only 10–15 visible cars. Rainbow Six Siege usually runs around 140 FPS but sometimes drops to 90–100 FPS, which is noticeable in that game. I'm considering either the Radeon RX 9070 XT or GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. The cards appear fairly close in traditional performance, although some benchmarks favor the 9070 XT in Flight Simulator while others show the 5070 Ti ahead in Le Mans Ultimate. The Nvidia card would cost about €300 more locally. Is that premium worthwhile for these games, considering features such as DLSS, ray tracing, and other Nvidia technologies, or would the 9070 XT be the better value?
5 Answers
The 9070 XT is the sensible choice if the main goal is gaming. Its performance is generally close to the 5070 Ti, it has 16GB of VRAM, and €300 is far too large a premium for the Nvidia card. I’d only consider paying that much extra if you specifically value DLSS, ray tracing, or Nvidia’s other features.
Since you expect to keep the card for several years, the extra VRAM over your current 3080 is important, especially for Flight Simulator. Neither option is perfect for every workload, but a 16GB card is a much better long-term position than continuing to fight the 3080’s 10GB limit. At the prices you listed, I’d buy the 9070 XT and put the remaining €300 toward the rest of the system.
For a €300 difference, the 5070 Ti doesn’t look worthwhile. In raw performance the two cards are close, and the 9070 XT is often faster depending on the game. Save the money, spend it on another component, or keep it toward a future platform upgrade.
A €100 difference might be reasonable for someone who really wants Nvidia’s feature set, but €300 is difficult to justify when the gaming performance is so similar.
One thing to watch is that your 5950X may be limiting performance in simulation and racing games. Those titles can be heavily CPU-dependent, so a faster graphics card might not fix every low-FPS situation, especially if the GPU isn’t already at close to 100% utilization. A platform upgrade to a newer gaming-focused processor could eventually make a noticeable difference.
Moving to a newer platform, particularly one of the gaming-focused 3D-cache processors, has been on my mind. I may put some of the saved money toward that later.
The 5070 Ti makes more sense if you regularly use upscaling, ray tracing, or Nvidia-specific features such as improved reconstruction and AI acceleration. Nvidia’s software package is arguably stronger, but that doesn’t automatically make it worth €300 more at 1440p. If you mostly play at native resolution and care about value, the 9070 XT is the better fit.
AMD’s newer upscaling has also improved a lot, so the feature gap is not necessarily a deal-breaker for ordinary gaming.
I haven’t really kept up with GPU features since buying my 3080, so I’m not sure how much I’d actually use DLSS or the other Nvidia features. I mainly know frame generation from using it in Flight Simulator.