Last month, my computer went through a major GPU change. Yo I really like my RX 9070 XT In terms of performance and price, it’s hard to beat compared to other cards in the price range, and I had no plans to upgrade to another card. That was until Nvidia almost confirmed that there are no new RTX cards would be in process by 2026; First time in about 3 decades that Nvidia hasn’t released a new gaming GPU within a 1-year span.
This, combined with AMD’s treatment of owners of previous generations of Radeon hardware, inspired me to make the jump back to RTX. Nvidia’s track record on driver and feature support is better, and for a card that will have lasted 2 years as the best in its price class, I can safely keep the RTX 5080 in my rig without worrying about being arbitrarily deprived of new features in the near future.
AMD’s development does not surpass its hardware
New FSR features can run on older hardware, but do not allow this to happen
Locking new features into the latest hardware is something both GPU giants are no stranger to, but AMD specifically has been very strict about FSR support for older cards. In March, AMD released FSR 4.1, an iterative update that brings Ray Regeneration 1.1 and a better base scaler. It’s still just RDNA 4, meaning it’s exclusive to the RX 9000 series. This is in stark contrast to Nvidia’s treatment of DLSS 4.5, which continues to run on two- and three-generation RTX 20 and 30 series cards, even though performance suffered when running the newer model on these chips.
The claim is that older AMD cards cannot support the new scaler, but that has been proven false on multiple levels. For example, Sony’s PSSR 2 for PS5 Pro, which arrived in the same window, shares the same underlying neural network as FSR 4.1. PSSR 2 runs on INT8 instead of FP8, which is the same arithmetic format used by the leaked FSR 4 build to run on RDNA 2 and 3 hardware via OptiScaler. The INT8 version of this technology is on a mass-market console, so there’s no excuse for it not to be available to users who spent their hard-earned money on AMD GPUs at a time when RTX cards were often the best option.
The latest OptiScaler update brings FSR 4 cards to the RX 6000 with the current Radeon drivers, without the modified driver fixes that previous versions required, and with the worst of the ghosting issues fixed. RDNA 3 has been running FSR 4 this way for months. If hobbyists can get it working on hardware starting in 2020, AMD’s position appears to be purely for product segmentation purposes, not engineering as they have claimed.
And then there’s Colin Riley. Asked at X why AMD blocks FSR INT8 on older cardsThe former head of development at FSR responded with José Mourinho’s classic “I really prefer not to talk” memean unofficial response that points out that this is all based on policy. It’s not a new revelation, just more clues pointing in the same direction. As someone who plans to keep my GPU for more than one refresh cycle, an RTX card seems like the safest bet.
Driver problems plagued my experience
Adrenaline has some problems.
During my time using it daily, my Sapphire NITRO+ RX 9070 XT had controller wait times that apparently had no solid cause. I spent some time trying to diagnose the problem and during troubleshooting I discovered that this is not something new and dates back to previous generations of Radeon cards, and a quick search for “AMD driver timeout” in the search engine of your choice will produce many results going back several years. After trying different driver versions and completely different systems, installing the driver without the Adrenalin software seemed to be the only way the driver timeouts would stop. I’ve had a couple here and there since then, but not having the Adrenalin software installed seemed to reduce them a lot.
The sad thing is that Adrenalin’s functions are good. I wanted to lower my card voltage, create per-game presets, and use the overlay, but couldn’t due to constant issues. I thought that, like Nvidia, these issues might have been release-related and would slowly be removed as the drivers matured, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
The RX 9070 XT is still the best value for gaming
It is an excellent GPU
The RX 9070 XT is really a great GPU. It handles 1440p comfortably, remains competitive at 4K upscaling, and gets official support for FSR 4 and FSR 4.1 today. It costs substantially less than an RTX 5080. Buying the Nvidia card instead of the AMD one is, in purely dollars-per-frame terms, a bad decision if you’re aiming for those resolutions. And if you already have your card, I’ll definitely keep it, especially given the current PC hardware landscape.
A purchase made based on everything but performance is still justifiable
I don’t think the RTX 5080 is a rational purchase in a vacuum. Based on performance, it is a step forward in plot and a significant jump in RT, but some purchasing decisions are made despite performance, not because of it. Sometimes a buy is bet on which company is most likely to still support their card in 2029, and based on their past actions, I don’t trust AMD as much as AMD. NVIDIA.
