Last month my rig went through a major GPU swap. I I really like the RX 9070 XT performance-wise and price-wise, it’s hard to beat compared to other cards in its price range, and I had no plans to switch to another card. That was until Nvidia all confirmed no new RTX cards For 2026, the pipeline will descend; For the first time in nearly 3 decades, Nvidia hasn’t released a new gaming GPU for 1 year.
This, along with AMD’s treatment of owners of previous generations of Radeon hardware, inspired me to return to RTX. Nvidia’s track record with driver and feature support is better, and for a card that will last 2 years as the best in its price class, I can safely keep the RTX 5080 on my rig without worrying about being arbitrarily cut off from new features for the foreseeable future.
AMD’s development does not leave their hardware behind
The new FSR functions can work on older hardware, they just don’t allow it
Both GPU giants are no strangers to locking new features into the latest hardware, but AMD is particularly serious about FSR supporting older cards. In March, AMD released FSR 4.1, an iterative update that brought Ray Regeneration 1.1 and a better baseline boost. Only RDNA 4 remains, meaning it is 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 older RTX 20 and 30-series cards, even though those chips have a performance bump to run the newer model.
The claim is that older AMD cards cannot handle the new upgrade, but this has been proven untrue on many levels. For example, Sony’s PSSR 2 for PS5 Pro, which comes in the same window, shares the same underlying neural network as FSR 4.1. PSSR 2 runs on INT8, not FP8, which is the same arithmetic format that the leaked FSR 4 build uses 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 being available to users forking out their hard-earned cash for AMD GPUs in an era when RTX cards are often the best choice.
OptiScaler’s latest update brings cards from FSR 4 to RX 6000 up to current Radeon drivers without the need for modified driver solutions, with the worst of the earlier builds and ghosting issues. RDNA has been running FSR 4 this way for 3 months. If hobbyists can make it work on hardware from 2020, AMD’s position seems to be purely for product segmentation purposes, not engineering as they claim.
And then there’s Colin Riley. At X we asked why AMD blocks FSR INT8 on older cardsformer FSR development leader responded with a classic José Mourinho “I’d really rather not talk” memean informal answer indicating that this is all based on politics. This is not a new discovery, just more clues pointing in the same direction. As someone who plans to keep their GPU for more than just one upgrade cycle, an RTX card seems like a safer bet.
Driver issues affected my experience
Adrenaline has some problems
During my daily use, my Sapphire NITRO+ RX 9070 XT had driver interruptions for no apparent reason. I’ve spent some time diagnosing the problem and while troubleshooting I’ve discovered that it’s nothing new and that it’s from previous generations of Radeon cards, and a quick search for “AMD driver timeout” in your search engine of choice will bring up a lot of results dating back several years. After trying different driver versions and completely testing different systems, installing the driver without Adrenaline seemed to be the only way to stop the driver from timing out. There have been a few here and there since then, but not having the Adrenaline app installed has greatly reduced them.
The sad thing is that Adrenaline’s properties are good. I wanted to overclock my card, create presets for each game and use overclocking, but couldn’t due to constant issues. I thought that, like Nvidia, these issues might be launch related and would slowly be ironed out as the drivers mature, but this is not the case.
The RX 9070 XT is still a better value for gaming
It’s a great GPU
The RX 9070 XT is a really great GPU. It handles 1440p with ease, is competitive at 4K with upscaling, and gets official FSR 4 and FSR 4.1 support today. Its price is much lower than RTX 5080. Buying an Nvidia card over AMD is a bad decision based purely on dollars-to-frames if you’re targeting these resolutions. If you already have a card, I’d definitely stick with it, especially given the current landscape for PC hardware.
All-in-one buy, but performance is still justified
I don’t think the RTX 5080 is a rational buy in a vacuum. Performance-wise, it’s a step up raster and a significant jump in RT, but some purchasing decisions are made in spite of performance, not because of it. Sometimes buying is a bet on which company will still support your card in 2029, and based on their past actions, I’m not as sure as I am with AMD. Nvidia.
