Nvidia is dominating the GPU market, but there are reasons to go against the current and pick AMD. Here’s why you should consider it.
The GPU market is split between AMD and Nvidia, but it’s far from being divided in half. Nvidia has long been the ruler, reaping the rewards of better brand recognition as AMD trails miles behind.
AMD may not be winning the revenue game, but it still makes some of the best graphics cards, so it doesn’t deserve to be overlooked. Here’s why you should consider choosing AMD instead of Nvidia for your next GPU upgrade.Price
It’s impossible not to bring up pricing when discussing the whole “AMD vs. Nvidia” situation. In fact, this is one of the major reasons why AMD might be the better pick, but to reach that conclusion, we have to dig deeper than just “Nvidia is expensive and AMD is cheap,” because that’s simply not true.
The truth is that both sides of the conflict are generally expensive these days. Truly affordable GPUs stopped being a thing even before the GPU shortage. Still, the shortage that made the prices of graphics cards soar to previously unseen heights (sometimes over 300% above the recommended list price) seems to have opened the floodgates and unleashed a worrying trend in GPU pricing.
While I wouldn’t call AMD’s latest generation of graphics cards “cheap,” it’s undeniably cheaper than Nvidia, which adopted a pretty ridiculous pricing strategy in this generation. Let’s take a look at AMD’s RX 7900 XTX, RX 7900 XT, and their Nvidia counterparts, the RTX 4080 and the RTX 4070 Ti.
RX 7900 XTX: $980 on
RX 7900 XT: $800 on
RTX 4080: $1,200 on
RTX 4070 Ti: $800 on
Price is one thing, but it’s meaningless if you don’t count performance, so let’s talk about that for a second.AMD holds up well
In our own testing in 1440p gaming, we found that the RTX 4080 performs the best of all four cards, but the frames per second (fps) margin between the Nvidia card and the RX 7900 XTX is small (159 frames per second, or fps, versus 155 fps). Many of us would rather save $200 than have an extra 4 fps, but of course, that’s an oversimplification of the performance gap between AMD and Nvidia.
Nvidia has something that AMD doesn’t — superior ray tracing and DLSS. DLSS 3, to be more specific, generates entire frames instead of pixels, and it’s only available on RTX 40-series cards. AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) can’t quite compare just yet, and FSR 2.0 is also available on Nvidia cards, making this technology a nonissue for Nvidia owners.
The RTX 4070 Ti is also slower than the RX 7900 XT, but it becomes less of a clear choice when you take DLSS 3 and improved ray tracing into account. On the other hand, AMD’s RDNA 3 GPUs still handle ray tracing better than the previous generation, so it’s not like it’s going to be unplayable — far from it.
