I'm planning to upgrade my PC within the next few weeks, but UK GPU prices have jumped dramatically. The RTX 5070 Ti is currently around £1,000–£1,200, whereas it was closer to £800 recently. Meanwhile, the RX 9070 XT is selling for roughly £700–£830, making it anywhere from £170 to £500 cheaper.
I'm coming from an RX 5600 XT, so I haven't used ray tracing, frame generation, DLSS, or modern upscaling before. I mainly want to play at 1440p with high frame rates, possibly experimenting with 4K later. Is the RX 9070 XT the obvious value choice, or are Nvidia's software and ray-tracing features worth paying the extra money for? I'm also considering Linux, where AMD may have an advantage.
3 Answers
For gaming value, the RX 9070 XT seems like the clear choice at those prices. It has 16GB of VRAM, excellent 1440p performance, and can handle plenty of 4K gaming as well. FSR and AMD’s frame generation are available if you want them, although you may not need either for most games. Paying £200 or more extra for the 5070 Ti is difficult to justify unless you specifically care about Nvidia’s stronger ray tracing, DLSS quality, or software support.
Before committing to the XT, check the standard RX 9070 as well. It can sometimes be found around £500 and is still a huge upgrade over the 5600 XT. For 1440p it should be more than capable, especially if the XT models continue to carry a large premium.
If you’re considering Linux, AMD is an even more appealing option. Its drivers are generally much less troublesome there, and the feature gap has narrowed considerably. DLSS can look better in some situations and Nvidia still has an advantage in ray tracing, but those benefits don’t seem worth several hundred pounds for a gaming-focused build.
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