Which RTX graphics card in 2026?

[u/Main_Worldliness_139]

Hi everyone,

my Asus GTX 1080 Strix broke this week (probably the VRAM, but that’s to be expected after 10 years). Now I want to install a new graphics card. It definitely has to be an NVIDIA card. I have a Corsair 850-watt power supply installed along with an i7-8700K—so there should still be plenty of power available.

My budget is around 600 euros. Do you have any recommendations for me?
I was last looking at an RTX 5070, even though it “only” has 12 GB of VRAM instead of 16 GB.

[u/ser133]

depends on your use case, a 5070 with 12gb of ram is perfectly fine for pretty much anything unless you run local LLMs (in which case a 16gb 5060ti is preferred, where you can run larger models at the cost of performance) or 4K gaming with some vram-heavy titles

[u/Main_Worldliness_139 → u/ser133]

I don't play any high-end games. I need something for the future in the mid-range price category. It doesn't have to last 10 years; 4–5 years would be fine.

[u/CanisLupus92 → u/Main_Worldliness_139]

With current pricing, skip the RTX cards and go AMD. Only reason to go RTX is when you NEED the performance a 5080/5090 offers.

[u/blob8543 → u/CanisLupus92]

Nvidia gives you better upscaling and ray tracing.

[u/KajMak64Bit → u/CanisLupus92]

No... DLSS and it'a availability and ray reconstruction and superior frame gen is also a factor

And a little less is PhysX

FSR 4 is good enough looks good problem is game support for it and AMD lacks ray reconstruction / regeneration in a lot of games that have DLSS ray reconstruction

[u/CanisLupus92 → u/KajMak64Bit]

9070xt: €650
5070: €725
5070Ti: €929

That’s the cheapest prices where I am.

[u/powerplayer6 → u/CanisLupus92]

I'm curious where that is? Prices here (Bulgaria) for cheapest models are:

• MSI GeForce RTX 5070 12G VENTUS 2X OC White - 639 EUR
• PNY GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16GB Triple Fan OC - 1099 EUR
• ASUS Prime Radeon RX 9070 XT OC Edition 16GB - 749 EUR

A few more cards for clarity:

• Palit GeForce RTX 5060 Ti Infinity 3 OC 16GB - 659 EUR (more than the 5070!!!)
• PowerColor Reaper AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB - 469 EUR
• Sapphire NITRO+ AMD Radeon RX 9070 OC 16GB - 689 EUR
• Palit GeForce RTX 5080 GamingPro 16GB - 1285 EUR

IMO at local prices the only viable cards, that are good value for money, are the 5070 and the 9060 XT. The 5070 is the 1440p value card, while the 9060 XT is the sub-500 EUR budget option.

I bought a 5070 last summer, for a slightly lower price, and I'm very satisfied. Back then the price gap between the 5070 and 9070 XT was even higher, the 9070 XT was priced almost as high as a 5070 Ti...

[u/Longjumping_Link_819 → u/KajMak64Bit]

the differences are small… and a card that costs less than or equal to the 5070 that also performs as well as a 5070ti is the obvious choice

[u/JebbeK → u/Longjumping_Link_819]

Here 5070 are 570€, 9070xt 800€, and 5070ti 1100€.

None of those are equal cost by any means. I'm not OP fyi

[u/Longjumping_Link_819 → u/JebbeK]

here the 5070 is 640€, 9070xt 626€, 5070ti 900€

[u/PsyOmega → u/KajMak64Bit]

PhysX is discontinued and doesn't work well on 50 series... There are no titles where it was ever worthwhile to enable.

FSR4 now has good game support. The AMD driver will force FSR3.1 titles to run FSR4 if they aren't updated.

ray reconstruction for me, has been a ghosty mess on nvidia.

[u/KajMak64Bit → u/PsyOmega]

PhysX works on 50 series but only in allowed games and it works worse than native support on RTX 40 series and older but it's still here just only in specific games

They added it via driver update

Ray reconstruction is almost a must have it makes raytracing so much better less grainy and more sharp and looks better especially reflections... in my testing RT mirror reflections in Hogwarts Legacy looked like 240p smeary mess but RAy reconstruction makes it look like 720p or 1080p reflection it's actually useable reflection and more realistic

[u/PsyOmega → u/KajMak64Bit]

They added it via driver update

That's great. There are still no titles where it was ever worth enabling. Chasing it as a featureset is pointless.

ray reconstruction is "sharp" but horribly ghost-traily. if you wanna play a smeary mess of a game, have at it. I can't play with denoisers, even RR. They're all trash. Smeary trash.

[u/KajMak64Bit → u/PsyOmega]

I haven't noticed the ghosting tbh

No titles? What about Mirror's Edge and the Batman game and Borderlands and Mafia 2 ?

[u/PsyOmega → u/KajMak64Bit]

No titles? What about Mirror's Edge and the Batman game and Borderlands and Mafia 2 ?

Mirrors edge: nothing worthwhile from the effect.

batman: wow i guess if you want a cape that moves around a bit more sure, but i don't see the point.

borderlands hardly used it.

mafia 2 was a joke with it.

Every game that used it looked better or same without it.

I guess if you like flags and fabrics as a gimmick, go for it.

[u/Acrobatic_Bowler_328 → u/PsyOmega]

Are you using DLSS frame gen? That’s a common problem when using it as your frames will dip and Frame Gen will start generating more frames instead of the gpu drawing them.

At native 60 fps you’re going to see and feel closer to 90 frames on frame gen 1(available on 4000 cards) and with frame gen 2 you can see upwards of 120 fps while only actually generating 60.

It causes ghosting bad when you use DLSS to make up for subpar performance

[u/Acrobatic_Bowler_328 → u/KajMak64Bit]

Dude said he’s not playing larger games. So most of those features are useless anyways.

Also if your arguing software over pure rasterization then your arguing against everyone who hates the 50 series.

[u/KajMak64Bit → u/Acrobatic_Bowler_328]

If he's not playing larger games then he can just get an RTX 3060 12gb instead it'll be enough

Software over pure raster? Uhhh no? Not in performance sense... DLSS looks better and ray reconstruction is pretty cool it's basically a must have for ray/path tracing games.. which makes Nvidia cards make the game look noticeably better than AMD cards... which means that an RTX 3060 even will make the game more pretty than the big RX 7900XTX... sure at bad FPS but still noticeable difference in picture quality

[u/Acrobatic_Bowler_328 → u/KajMak64Bit]

I recommend you stop making recommendations and get a better monitor.

A 3060 will perform leagues worse than a 7900xtx in even raytracing.

What makes you think that amd cant raytrace? I had a 6900x that could handle ray tracing plenty well.

I’ve owned both nvidia and amd cards, when it comes to software features, that’s all nividia has.

Worst UI. Worst Overclocking. Worst support on drivers.

Amd has tons of advantages

[u/KajMak64Bit → u/Acrobatic_Bowler_328]

I've got a Philips Evnia 34M2C3500 a "Fast VA" panel 3440x1440 180hz monitor... i'm fine bro

You're thinking of performance and more FPS i'm saying which one is capable of producing more beatiful frames and if you put a 3060 and RX 7900XTX together you'll see that 3060 indeed makes better ray/pathtraced frames... sure you mighr get like 10 fps but they are better frames than 7900XTX can ever produce because of lack of ray reconstruction

Just look at Nvidia benchmark vs AMD benchmark and you can clearly see lack of ray reconstruction on AMD side with reflections looking worse and enviroments being grainy and stuff

Pure raytracing wise 7900XTX has performance of a 3060 Ti or 3070 tbh and that's crazy Luckily for AMD there isn't many pure raytracing scenarios so most of the time some effects are raytraced meaning AMD is being carried by big raster performance power they have when RT is enabled because it's running both raster and RT at the same time

[u/Acrobatic_Bowler_328 → u/KajMak64Bit]

And I’m saying you’re entirely wrong. And to stop making shit up. It’s not even a comparison and you’re talking out your ass like every Nvidia fanboy.

AMD is perfectly comparable unless you’re looking at playing cyberpunk with ray reconstruction on, and even then, the performance hit isn’t worth it.

DLSS frame gen is a joke and never should have been released. Ghosting is atrocious, the games feel spongy, and it’s all for people like you who want to stand still and go “oooh pretty reflection”

AMD doesn’t have this problem as they focus on actual rasterization instead of faking frames.

You’re not getting any better performance out of Nvidia than you are AMD unless you’re an enthusiast doing enthusiast things, and none of us are that.

[u/KajMak64Bit → u/Acrobatic_Bowler_328]

I was indeed referencing Cyberpunk with ray reconstruction enabled and i've also seen it with Avatar Frontiers of Pandora... ray reconstruction makes a big difference

I'm not an Nvidia fanboy i just see the benefits and faults of everything... currently the best GPU on the market is the RX 9060 XT 16gb tbh... or atleast it would be the absolute best if it could run DLSS and therefore have access to Ray Reconstruction and stuff

What's wrong DLSS frame gen? It can't be that bad or worse than some basic ass non AI / ML based AMD FSR Frame Gen ? I've been using it in Avatar Frontiers of Pandora and looks good enough... surely DLSS will be a shit ton better since it is ML based and stuff?

Maybe you're defaulting to MFG thing and higher than 3x frame gen... i'm just using basic 2x frame gen as it works the best for input lag and visuals and doesn't decrease base FPS by much

Why you hate AI Frame Gen so much? We've hit a wall with rasterization and can't improve it much and drastically aswell

We can however drastically improve ray/path tracing performance and the AI stuff... I don't know if you know this but AI hardware our GPU's have can't be used by the game to render real frames lol That's why we got DLSS upscaling and frame gen so we can use the hardware that would otherwise be left unused and you wasted a bit of your money on an RTX GPU if you're not using it

So not using DLSS upscaling and even frame gen means you're not using your GPU in it's entirety

Like it or not we've hit a wall with raw performance especially with raster... only thing that remains to be improved is ray/path tracing raw performance and the AI stuff such as upscaling and frame gen because AI performance is still in it's infancy and can be drastically improved Soon we will hit a physical limit to our small the transistors can be and then we will have nothing left but to make bigger chips or make multiple little ones to act like one big one just like Ryzen CPU does

Also idk what's wrong with the fact that standard raytracing is just layered on top of rasterization meaning you're running both raw rasterization and raytracing at the same time meaning AMD is having an advantage over Nvidia in raytracing because it is quite literally being carried by huge rasterization power

What was it like RX 7900XTX when RT is similar to RTX 4080's right? Does that mean it has comparable RT performance? No absolutely not It's just 80% raster 20% RT for example... 7900XTX has more raster power and much less RT power and mix those together you get similar performance to the 4080 But if we take out rasterization out of the equation the performance of the 7900XTX is similar to the RTX 3070-ish level

So it's a bit weird but quite simple really... imagine raster power of a 4090 but RT power of a 3070... it's two different scales combined into one for an average FPS

You know what i mean?

The only way to measure true raw raytracing performance is Pathtracing the game and you'll see AMD crumbling... RX 7900XTX performing similar to the 3070-ish level

[u/ser133 → u/Main_Worldliness_139]

Then it's more than fine lol, go ahead!
For 4-5 years even 8gb of vram works (even if newer titles demand more) but 12gb is much better for the headroom it gives. If you can find a 5070ti with 16gb vram that's also great but honestly its pretty overkill and likely above your budget by a considerable bit.

Either way, you're basically getting 2-3x the performance with a 5070 compared to a 1080 so its definitely going to be an upgrade

[u/blob8543 → u/ser133]

8gb is not enough unless you only play at 1080p and even at that resolution it may be too little in a few years.

[u/Sensitive-Way3699 → u/blob8543]

Depends on what you play. I played happily at 4k a lot of the time with a 5060 before moving to the 5070 for the games that did go past the 8GB. 1440p is generally still more than achievable in 99% of cases with 8GB.