If you’re interested in getting a mid-range GPU for your gaming PC, and the AMD RX 9070 XT is feeling a little out of reach, these could be the alternatives.
Whenever there’s a launch of a new graphics card, you’re almost immediately bombarded with technical talk about ray tracing, upscaling, and VRAM capacity. All of that is important, but what GPU you buy ultimately comes down to two things: a reasonable price and good performance. AMD’s mid-range RX 9070 XT delivers on both of those fronts, but it is hard to find at its recommended list price (MSRP) of $600. When you’re trying to choose from the best graphics card brands, finding a 9070 XT at MSRP is even more difficult, as high-end variants are significantly more expensive.
This market dynamic shoves the 9070 XT into a more premium price bracket, and it has stiffer competition in that situation. If the 9070 XT ends up costing $700 to $900, you’re better off buying the Nvidia alternative. On the other hand, there are also cards that are a tier or two down that can save you money without sacrificing too much performance.
While it may be a difficult time to upgrade your graphics card because of all this confusion, we’ll help you cut through all the chaos. We’re looking at five viable alternatives to the 9070 XT, evaluating them on real performance, their actual pricing, and tangible features.Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB
There are two versions of the 5060 Ti: 8GB and 16GB. Our previous coverage shows that 8GB of VRAM isn’t enough in most cases, especially if you play at higher resolutions with ray tracing. The 16GB 5060 Ti is the one to go for, and it’s a very decent mainstream card for 1440p gaming.
In Techspot’s comparison between the 5060 Ti and its closest competitor, the 9060 XT, the Nvidia card beat the AMD card with an average 9% lead at native 1440p. PCMag’s tests showed that it also won in content creation tasks, as it showed better performance in creator benchmarks like Blender and PugetBench. It was also faster in AI benchmarks.
However, the 9060 XT 16GB has a cheaper MSRP of $350, and real-world pricing is under $400 at the time of writing. Nvidia’s 5060 Ti 16GB has an MSRP of $380, and often costs $450 or higher. The 5060 Ti is still justifiable, especially if you care about Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling feature, AI performance, and content creation.
Hardware Unboxed’s coverage showed that the 5060 Ti delivers an average of 76 FPS at 1440p. Performance was even better in Esports titles like Counter-Strike 2, where the 5060 Ti got close to 400 FPS at 1440p with medium settings. For the price, that’s a very reasonable result for a 60-tier card. If this card meets your performance needs, it’s a great, cheaper alternative to the 9070 XT.AMD Radeon RX 9070
The AMD Radeon RX 9070 is often overlooked, mainly because it performs worse than its XT version and isn’t significantly cheaper either. However, if you find yourself in a situation where the XT version is inflated and you can get the non-XT for significantly cheaper, the regular RX 9070 is the better purchase.
Techspot’s review of the RX 9070 pinned the Radeon card as 8% slower on average at 1440p. With a bit of fine-tuning (light overclocking, undervolting, or simply dropping in-game settings), you may be able to get even closer to the performance of the XT version.
