Should I upgrade my GPU for Blender or buy a separate card?
Asked by
MellowCedar42
I currently have a Radeon RX 7800 XT, an i7-14700K, and 64GB of DDR5 RAM. My system runs well, and I barely play games, but my partner wants to start learning Blender. They currently have a hand-me-down RTX 4060 from my old PC. I'm considering either upgrading my system to an RX 9070 XT and giving them the 7800 XT, or buying an RX 9060 XT for them while keeping my 7800 XT. I have about $1,200 available, though I also need to purchase a few smaller items for my setup. Which option makes the most sense?
Answers
If you really want an upgrade for yourself, you could buy the 9070 XT and let your partner continue using the 4060. I wouldn’t move them to an AMD card specifically for Blender unless their projects eventually outgrow the 4060 and you’ve checked the exact workload and VRAM requirements.
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The 4060 may actually render faster than the 7800 XT in some Blender workloads because of NVIDIA’s software support. The 7800 XT has more VRAM, which could become useful for larger scenes, but the 4060 is perfectly reasonable for learning.
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I’d let them start with the RTX 4060. Blender generally benefits from NVIDIA’s CUDA and OptiX support, and there’s no reason to buy another GPU until they know they’ll use Blender seriously.
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