Choosing the right graphics card upgrade is not an uncomplicated thing. This is because there are many different models, covering a wide range of budgets, and each has different features and specifications. We solved this mystery during the Amazon Prime Day sale over the summer, and even though prices dropped on Black Friday, it’s a topic worth revisiting. Especially since these prices will only enhance with the end of the year and the consequences of the memory price apocalypse.
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If you start by comparing the specifications of both cards on paper, you’ll immediately think that the GeForce RTX 5070 has an advantage over the Radeon RX 9070. It has more shaders (6144 vs 3583) and a higher boost clock (2520 vs 2510 MHz), but AMD and Nvidia GPUs work in different ways, so such a basic comparison only works for theoretical throughput.
When it comes to games, what really matters is… well… the games. So let’s start by seeing how they perform in a variety of situations, including customary “rasterization”, hybrid, and full ray tracing at the resolution where they will be most commonly used.
Overall, you can see that the RX 9070 outperforms the RTX 5070. Sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot. Traditionally, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX cards have been much better than Radeon models when it comes to ray tracing, but AMD has made huge strides in this area with its RDNA 4 GPU architecture.
We have used both graphics cards in our office in many other games and observed the same thing in them: the RX 9070 is overall faster than the RTX 5070. This is true even when the resolution is increased to 4K.
This is because despite the RTX 5070 sporting ultra-fast GDDR7 VRAM, it only has a total memory bandwidth of 672 MB/s compared to the RX 9070’s 645 MB/s. This is because it uses a 192-bit memory bus, while the AMD GPU uses a 256-bit bus.
The RDNA 4 GPU has significantly more cache, which is why it performs so well even though it has fewer shaders than the Blackwell chip.
Both GPUs can of course be overclocked, and this is one area where Nvidia’s RTX 50 series chips perform very well. This doesn’t make much of a difference in the comparison, however, as the RX 9070 is still faster overall than the RTX 5070, even if you overclock the Blackwell GPU heavily.
That said, the RTX 5070 has an ace up its sleeve in the form of DLSS 4 – the latest version of Nvidia’s suite of AI-powered technologies for scaling, frame generation, and ray tracing denoising. AMD now has something similar in the form of FSR 4, but few games support it and most just apply the previous iteration of FSR 3.
As you can see above, FSR 3 is great for increasing performance through scaling and frame generation. However, visuallyDLSS delivers excellent results, and in games that support Multi Frame Generation (or MFG, which allows for the creation of up to three additional frames), the RTX 5070 excels.
For example, in Cyberpunk 2077, the Nvidia card achieves an average frame rate of 228 frames per second, with a 1% low of 162 frames per second, at 1440p RT Ultra. All with a system latency of just 40 milliseconds. This is way exceeding the capabilities of the RX 9070.
AMD has an update planned for FSR 4 (aka Project Redstone) that may address this issue to some extent after its December 10 launch, but until then the RTX 5070 is clearly the faster product if it can apply MFG.
Another thing where Nvidia has beaten AMD is the world of content creation. If you do a lot of photo and video editing, offline 3D rendering, and other multimedia-related tasks, Radeon graphics cards are not up to the mark, and by quite a margin.
When it comes to Just However, when it comes to gaming, there is a clear winner and it is the Radeon RX 9070. It is faster than the RTX 5070 in most situations and only really lags behind the Nvidia chip when we add MFG to the equation.
But is it worth spending $50 more? I would say Yes but with a few caveats. If you don’t care about hitting over 200fps in games through framerate generation and you don’t create any content, it’s worth spending that little extra on the Radeon RX 9070 to have such a fantastic gaming graphics card.
However, if you are looking for something more versatile that can easily handle a variety of tasks and also has an excellent set of features, then the cheaper GeForce RTX 5070 will be an excellent choice.
As you can see, the answer to the question of which one to choose was not uncomplicated, but the best thing about it all is that regardless of which one you choose, you will have a very good gaming GPU in your kit that will serve you well for many years.
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