I'm upgrading from an RX 580 8GB and am choosing between an RTX 5070 12GB and an RX 9070 XT 16GB, which cost roughly the same in the UK. My current system has a Ryzen 5 5600, 32GB of DDR4 memory, a Gigabyte B550M Aorus Elite motherboard, a 750W Silver-rated PSU, and a 27-inch 1440p 180Hz G-Sync Compatible monitor. I'll mainly be gaming at 1440p, streaming to YouTube through OBS for a few hours on weekends, and doing basic video editing. I may move to AM5 or a newer Intel platform in a couple of years, so I'd like the graphics card to remain useful for four or five years and carry over to that system. The RTX 5070 has advantages such as NVENC and CUDA, but its 12GB of VRAM concerns me for long-term 1440p use. The RX 9070 XT appears to offer significantly better raster performance and 16GB of VRAM, though I'm unsure whether AMD's streaming and editing support is noticeably worse. Is 12GB likely to become a serious limitation, how close is AMD's current encoder to NVENC for 1080p YouTube streaming, is my 750W PSU sufficient—particularly for the 9070 XT—and are there any current driver issues worth considering?
4 Answers
A decent 750W PSU should be enough for the 9070 XT with a Ryzen 5 5600. Higher wattage recommendations often assume a much more power-hungry CPU than yours. The important part is the PSU’s actual quality, age, and available PCIe power connectors, so I wouldn’t replace it solely because a retailer suggests 850W or more. The cheaper 1050W ATX 3.1 unit is only worth choosing if it is a reputable model and you already wanted to upgrade the power supply.
The old gap between NVIDIA and AMD for streaming has narrowed quite a bit with the RX 9000 series. For 1080p YouTube streaming, AMD’s encoder should be perfectly usable and is broadly competitive with NVENC. NVIDIA still has the safer choice for CUDA-dependent editing software and some ray-tracing workloads, but for ordinary OBS streaming and basic editing, that advantage probably isn’t large enough to outweigh the 9070 XT’s extra performance and memory.
For this use case, the RX 9070 XT is the stronger buy, especially if both cards are similarly priced. In most games it is roughly 25–30% faster than the RTX 5070, although some titles such as Overwatch and Fortnite can be much closer. It is also closer to an RTX 5070 Ti in overall performance, and the extra 16GB of VRAM gives it more breathing room for higher-quality 1440p settings over the next few years.
Your Ryzen 5 5600 may limit very high frame rates in some competitive or CPU-heavy games, especially if you are trying to approach 180Hz, but that doesn’t make a GPU upgrade pointless. Coming from an RX 580, the 9070 XT will provide a huge improvement at 1440p, and you can address the CPU later when you move to a newer platform. I’d choose the 9070 XT unless ray tracing, CUDA, or a specific editing application is especially important to you.
The CPU bottleneck shouldn’t be severe for typical 1440p gaming. At that resolution, the new GPU will still make a major difference, and the processor can be replaced later.