The battle between AMD and NVIDIA has been going on forever, although it’s a one-sided battle in the desktop PC market, where NVIDIA has something like 95% and AMD has (almost) 1% of Intel.
But as dominant and popular as NVIDIA is, AMD supporters can always raise the value argument. Dollar for dollar, you get more value with an AMD card, and even better, you get the benefit of AMD “FineWine” that keeps your card getting better over time.
What “FineWine” meant and why it mattered
FineWine was something AMD fans started to notice during the GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture. By the way, the last AMD dedicated GPU I bought was the R9 390 from this generation. Since then, all of my AMD GPUs have gone to consoles or handheld computersbut i run away.
The R9 390 is actually a good example of FineWine. Launched in 2015, like many AMD cards, the R9 390 had a rocky start and I traded mine for an intermediate card in the form of an RTX 2060 because I wanted to play. Cyberpunk 2077 On PC, it wasn’t broken like it was on consoles. Although on paper the raw power of the RTX 2060 is no more than 390, the performance of the AMD card on my (at the time) 1080p monitor was a difficult mess, whereas the minute the AMD GPU was removed from the system, everything suddenly ran great on my 2060.
But ten years later, as you can see on this card, that game is perfectly played TechLabUK video.
A lot of this is because the developers keep patching and improving the game, but it’s something you see across the board for AMD cards in various games. This is FineWine. Years later, with constant driver updates from AMD, the cards go from being slightly worse than the NVIDIA equivalent at launch to being as good or even slightly better in the long run.
Of course, this isn’t very helpful for customers buying hardware at launch, but it’s given some AMD users longer-lasting PCs than you might think, and sold many used AMD cards at even better prices.
Why did AMD’s FineWine era work?
A little smoke and mirrors
FineWine certainly wasn’t magical. This phenomenon was the result of a mixture of factors. AMD’s architectures were in some cases a little too forward thinking for the APIs of the day. Massively parallel by focusing on computation, they only come into their own DirectX 12 and more modern games. NVIDIA’s cards at the time were better optimized to handle current games well. Over time, NVIDIA cards will make similar architectural changes, but with better timing.
Another reason for FineWine has to do with driver maturity. As a smaller company with fewer resources, AMD seems to have a hard time releasing cards with optimized drivers. So, over time, the card will begin to function as intended.
Either way, you can frame FineWine as “degrading less” over time rather than as an improvement of the card. If you put the bar down at the start, the only way is up. However, there is a third factor to consider. AMD dominates console gaming. The two main home console series have been running on AMD GPUs for two generations now, and so games are made with that hardware in mind. It also raises new titles quite a bit, though it’s hard to know exactly how much.
How AMD got past FineWine
It looks worse, but it’s actually better
With the switch to the RDNA architecture, AMD made a deliberate change in philosophy. Modern Radeon GPUs are designed to perform well right out of the gate. Day one reviews are closer to what you’d expect years later. There are still decent gains on RDNA cards with game-specific optimizations (Spider-Man on PC is a great example), but FineWine’s golden age seems to be in the past now.
This is a good thing! Products need to put their best foot forward on day one, so let’s not shed a tear for FineWine in that regard. That is, not so much AMD has not cared to improve the performance and stability of older cards over the yearsso the company is now better at what it does and therefore has less room for improvement.
- Cooling method
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Weather
- GPU speed
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2520 MHz
The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT from Sapphire features 16GB of DDR6 memory, two HDMIs and two DisplayPorts, and an over-engineered cooling unit that will keep the card cool and whisper-quiet no matter the workload.
NVIDIA kept the idea, but the formula changed
It’s all about artificial intelligence
It’s funny, but these days I think of NVIDIA cards as having great longevity. Take the amazing GTX 1080 and 1080 Ti cards. These cards only lost game-ready driver support in 2025that doesn’t make them immediately useless, it just means there’s no more optimization for those chips. What an incredible run to get a decade of relevant gaming performance from your GPU!
But that’s not really how NVIDIA feels about FineWine. Instead, the company started adding new and better features to its cards long after they were launched. Starting with Series 20, the availability of machine learning hardware means that AI algorithms for technologies like DLSSthese cards have become more performant with better image quality over time.
Although NVIDIA makes some features of its AI technology exclusive to each generation, all 10-series GPUs so far benefit from DLSS with each new generation. Compare this to AMD, which not only offers inferior versions of this new upscaling technology, but also locks in better, more usable versions to later cards. FSR Redstone.
FineWine is ethical, not a brand
On my humble RTX 4060 laptop, the release of DLSS 4.5 opened up new possibilities, most notably the ability to target 4K output resolution, which wasn’t on the table when I first took this computer out of the box. We may not call it “FineWine”, but it looks like it to me!
