While the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 sits comfortably at the top of the graphics card market, not many people realistically have the cash to throw at its $1,999+ price tag. Luckily, you don’t have to lose out on 4K gaming just because you can’t afford the absolute best graphics card. Both the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti and the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT are much more affordable and deliver an extremely solid 4K gaming experience.
While prices right now are unfortunately elevated – due in large part to the heightened demand and low supply any GPU faces right after launch – the RTX 5070 Ti and RX 9070 XT are the graphics cards most people should be looking at for a high-end gaming experience.
RTX 5070 Ti vs. RX 9070 XT: Specs
Comparing two graphics cards that use entirely different graphics architectures on specs is incredibly complicated. While Nvidia’s CUDA cores and AMD’s Shading Units serve a similar purpose, they’re different enough that a direct comparison from a purely quantity perspective is essentially pointless.
The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT consists of 64 RDNA 4 compute units, each with 64 shader units, making for a total of 4,096. Each of those compute units also has two AI Accelerators and one RT Accelerator, making for 128 and 64, respectively. AMD pairs these compute units with 16GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus, which should be more than enough for modern games, though it could be stretched in the future, especially at 4K.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti also has 16GB of VRAM, but instead of opting for GDDR6, Team Green went with the new GDDR7, which is theoretically much faster. That’s also on a 256-bit bus, but because of higher memory speeds, it has higher bandwidth. The RTX 5070 Ti is built with 70 Streaming Multiprocessors – Nvidia’s name for Compute Units, with a total of 8,960 CUDA Cores, or Shading Units. That’s twice as many Shader Units per Compute Unit, something Nvidia has been pulling off since the RTX 3080 back in 2020. However, that doesn’t directly lead to double the performance.
Winner: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti
RTX 5070 Ti vs. RX 9070 XT: Performance
While on paper the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti looks far superior to the Radeon RX 9070 XT, the performance doesn’t quite work out that way. Instead, both graphics cards are excellent entry-level cards for anyone who wants to play at 4K, and are among the best graphics cards on the market for 1440p gaming.
When I reviewed the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, I expected it to be within reaching distance of the RTX 5070 Ti, falling further behind in games with a lot of ray tracing. However, I found that even in games like Cyberpunk 2077, the AMD graphics card had no problem staying within a few frames of the much more expensive RTX 5070 Ti.
There are certainly games where the Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti pulls ahead. For example, in Total War: Warhammer 3, the RTX 5070 Ti gets 87fps at 4K, compared to the 9070 XT’s 76fps. But even with Nvidia’s occasional wins, I found that the Radeon RX 9070 XT was on average 2% faster than the 5070 Ti. That’s a minor difference, but even 2% is a huge win for a card that theoretically costs 21% less.
Winner: AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT
RTX 5070 Ti vs. RX 9070 XT: Software and Features
These days, picking the right graphics card is more than just looking at what the hardware can do. Both Nvidia and AMD offer an entire suite of software features that further stretch what the graphics card can do.
The big selling point for the Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti, and really all Nvidia graphics cards, is the suite of features that now falls under the DLSS umbrella. This includes things like AI upscaling and Frame Generation, but for DLSS 4, Team Green found a way to expand the latter. Now, with RTX 5000 graphics cards, Nvidia has enabled multi-frame generation, which can use AI to generate three frames for each naturally rendered frame. This greatly improves frame rates, but it does come with a small latency cost – though that’s largely offset by Nvidia Reflex. Just like DLSS 3’s Frame Generation, you’re only going to want to enable this feature if you’re already getting a decent frame rate – at least 45, but ideally more than 60fps.
AMD also supports Frame Generation, but Team Red GPUs can still only generate one interpolated frame per rendered frame. Instead, the big improvement this time around is FSR 4, which brings AI upscaling to AMD graphics cards for the first time. Before this generation, FSR was based on a temporal upscaling method, which delivers excellent performance but could result in fuzzy images. FSR 4 uses the Radeon RX 9070 XT AI accelerators to upscale the image using a machine learning algorithm, much like how DLSS has worked since 2018. This upscaling method is much more accurate, even though it’s not quite as fast as FSR 4.
It’s also important to keep in mind that this is only the first generation of AMD’s AI upscaler, and Nvidia has been training DLSS for seven years now.
Winner: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti
RTX 5070 Ti vs. RX 9070 XT: Price
GPU pricing is a hot-button issue right now as pretty much every graphics card of this new generation is completely sold out, with many seeing incredibly inflated prices. The problem is that both Nvidia and AMD set a ‘"suggested" retail price for these graphics cards, but then retailers and third-party manufacturers are essentially free to price them however they want to. I can’t predict what GPU prices will look like in six months, but hopefully the prices start falling closer to MSRP once supply catches up with the demand.
At its launch price, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is an absolute triumph. At $599, the 9070 XT is an incredible little 4K graphics card, easily capable of running any game on the market with everything maxed out, provided you use the new FSR 4 AI upscaler. This is the price point flagship graphics cards used to launch at before Nvidia started gradually escalating prices, starting with the RTX 2080 Ti. Hopefully this means GPU manufacturers will start returning prices to sanity, but that depends on if prices normalize again.
Nvidia took a different approach with the 5070 Ti, though. While it trades blows with the 9070 XT, it has a base price of $749, a huge $150 price lift. That’s a massive difference between two graphics cards that perform extremely similarly. There are a few features that you get by going with a GPU from Team Green, like Multi-Frame Generation, but whether that’s worth it is largely going to depend on what you’re looking for and the games you actually play.
Winner: AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT
The Winner Is… the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT
While both the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti are excellent 1440p graphics cards, it’s impossible to escape the fact that AMD is able to trade blows with Team Green’s card at a much lower price. Assuming prices return to normality, the gap between the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and the 5070 Ti makes AMD’s card a clear winner.
If you’re looking to build a gaming PC for high-end 1440p gaming, or even want to stretch into 4K, it’s hard to think of a better graphics card to buy right now. Because, sure, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT doesn’t have multi-frame generation, but most people don’t have the high-refresh 4K gaming monitors that would actually benefit from it.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra.
