I'm planning to upgrade my roughly six-year-old PC and have been comparing several graphics cards on the used market. I'm not looking for an extreme high-end setup, but I regularly play modded games, often while watching videos, so extra VRAM and overall value matter to me. Which of these would be the best choice for my use case?
- Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5070 Aero OC 12GB — $725
- Gigabyte Radeon RX 7900 GRE 16GB — $480
- MSI Gaming Trio GeForce RTX 4070 Ti 12GB — $550
- Radeon RX 7900 XT OC Edition 20GB — $585
I'd appreciate advice on performance, VRAM, ray tracing, upscaling, and whether any of these prices are especially good or poor.
4 Answers
The RX 7900 XT looks like the strongest option for straightforward gaming. It is considerably faster than the RTX 5070 in traditional rendering and gives you 20GB of VRAM, which is useful for heavily modded games and higher resolutions. At $585, it is a much better deal than the $725 RTX 5070.
If you mainly care about regular gaming and don’t need CUDA, video-production features, or particularly strong ray tracing, the RX 7900 GRE at $480 is excellent value. Its 16GB of VRAM should handle most games and mods well, though the 7900 XT gives you a noticeable performance and VRAM upgrade for only $105 more.
The RTX 4070 Ti is probably the safest all-around pick from this list at $550. It offers strong performance, better ray tracing, and access to DLSS. It also makes more sense than the RTX 5070 here because the newer card is dramatically more expensive while not offering a comparable value.
Your decision mostly comes down to features. Choose the 7900 XT for maximum rasterized gaming performance and 20GB of VRAM, the 4070 Ti for ray tracing, DLSS, CUDA, or related creative applications, and the 7900 GRE if you want the lowest-cost option that is still very capable. I would skip the RTX 5070 at $725; it would need to be much closer to $500 to compete on value. It may also be worth checking the price of an RX 9070 or 9070 XT, since either could offer a newer feature set for a similar price.
I had been wondering whether the newer generation made the 5070 worth the extra money, but that price difference does seem hard to justify.