AMD’s RX 9070 XT stands in sharp contrast to Nvidia’s RTX 5070 series of GPUs. Where AMD has managed to keep up, and at times even dominate the competition, Nvidia is too busy chasing its own tail – largely thanks to no real competition.
This has resulted in Nvidia stagnating, and the RTX 5070/5070 Ti coming in at a shockingly worse value when compared to the RX 9070/9070 XT series of cards. Despite these faults. Nvidia still maintains an edge in certain edge cases, and it might make real sense for someone to pay an additional $150 for Team Green.
The RTX 5070 Ti still has a few cards up its sleeve, making it sometimes more desirable than the RX 9070 XT
While the RX 9070 XT from AMD manages to trump Nvidia’s RTX 5070 Ti in almost all aspects, it still loses out in a few key areas. Nvidia still has a lot better ray tracing performance, and while AMD has managed to improve, they are still far behind. The 5070 Ti delivers 30% faster ray traced performance on average, resulting in more dynamic, realistic looking shadows and lighting.
Naturally, this level of visual fidelity depends on game to game, but Nvidia’s superior ray traced shadows and lighting really shine through in games that make good use of it – such as Alan Wake 2 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
Shadows and lighting also make a huge part of environmental detail, and having just the right amount of ray traced goodness can vastly improve upon a video game’s presentation. In particular, the boost to realism and depth perception can sometimes help spot enemies better, and confer a competitive advantage.
It’s not all roses though, as ray tracing is still a very unnecessary addition, fulfilling the niche of ‘good to haves’ instead of ‘must haves’. As such, users who don’t particularly care about RT can safely ignore the RTX 5070 Ti.
This is assuming that newer titles do not cave into the unfortunate trend of mandatory ray tracing seen in PC ports. In this case, Nvidia still maintains an advantage over Team Red, conferring more average FPS and superior 1% lows – ensuring smoother gameplay.
Regardless, AMD’s loss here is very marginal, and assuming that AMD can maintain its MSRP pricing, it still remains a better deal in most scenarios.
DLSS and compute are still dominated by Nvidia
We haven’t addressed the dark horse here – DLSS. While DLSS 4 makes use of frame generation trickery to boost performance, there can be no doubt that it is somewhat effective, and AMD’s solutions (FSR 3 and AFMF 2) are far inferior in comparison.
DLSS approximates pixels more accurately, and gives off an overall cleaner image. While FSR 4 aims to bridge the gap quite significantly, it still isn’t anywhere close to being implemented in games, and as such remains out of scope.
Other than DLSS, Nvidia still offers better compute performance, which may be useful for those using AI or LLM models. The Quadro series in particular is quite appealing for these markets.
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