The topic My RX 9070 XT was the better GPU, but AMD’s track record pushed me back to RTX is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
This past month, my rig went through a significant GPU swap. I really like my RX 9070 XT in terms of its performance, and for the price, it’s difficult to beat when compared to other cards in the price range, and I didn’t have any plans to switch to another card. That was, until, Nvidia all but confirmed that no new RTX cards would be coming down the pipeline for 2026; the first time in about 3 decades that Nvidia hasn’t released a new gaming GPU in a 1-year span.
This, combined with AMD’s treatment of owners on previous generations of Radeon hardware, inspired me to make the jump back to RTX. Nvidia’s track record of driver and feature support is better, and for a card that will have spanned 2 years as the best in its price class, I can safely keep the RTX 5080 in my rig without worrying about being arbitrarily cut off from new features in the near future.
Locking new features to the latest hardware is something both GPU giants are no strangers to, but AMD specifically have been very strict about FSR’s support of older cards. In March, AMD released FSR 4.1, an iterative update bringing Ray Regeneration 1.1 and a better base upscaler. It remains RDNA 4-only, meaning it’s exclusive to the RX 9000 series. This is in stark contrast to Nvidia’s treatment of DLSS 4.5, which continues to run on RTX 20 and 30-series cards that are two and three generations old, despite there being a performance hit to running the newer model on these chips.
The claim is that the older AMD cards cannot handle the new upscaler, but that’s proven to be untrue on multiple levels. For instance, Sony’s PSSR 2 for the PS5 Pro, which arrived in the same window, shares the same underlying neural network as FSR 4.1. PSSR 2 runs on INT8 rather than FP8, which is the same arithmetic format that the leaked FSR 4 build uses to run on RDNA 2 and 3 hardware through OptiScaler. The INT8 version of this tech is on a mass-market console, so there’s no excuse for it not to be available for users that forked over their hard-earned cash for AMD GPUs in a time when RTX cards were often the best choice.
OptiScaler’s latest update brings FSR 4 to RX 6000 cards on current Radeon drivers, without the modified-driver workarounds earlier builds required, and with the worst of the ghosting problems sorted. RDNA 3 has been running FSR 4 this way for months. If hobbyists can get it working on hardware from 2020, AMD’s position looks to be purely for product segmentation purposes, not an engineering one like they have claimed.
And then there’s Colin Riley. Asked on X why AMD blocks FSR INT8 on older cards, the former FSR development lead responded with the classic José Mourinho “I really prefer not to speak” meme, a non-official non-answer that points to all of this being policy based. It’s not a new revelation, just more clues that point in the same direction. As someone who plans to keep my GPU for more than just one upgrade cycle, an RTX card seems like the safer bet.
Nvidia proving to be better than AMD at legacy support was not on my 2026 bingo card
Throughout the time I used it daily, my Sapphire NITRO+ RX 9070 XT had driver timeouts that had seemingly no solid cause. I spent awhile trying to diagnose the issue, and during my troubleshooting, I discovered that this is not a new thing, and spans back to previous generations of Radeon cards, and a quick search of “AMD driver timeout” on the search engine of your choice will produce many results dating back multiple years. After trying different driver versions and trying different systems entirely, installing the driver without the Adrenalin software seemed like the only way the driver timeouts ceased. I have had a couple here and there since then, but not having the Adrenalin software installed seemed to reduce them by a lot.
What’s sad is that Adrenalin’s features are good. I wanted to undervolt my card, create per-game presets, and use the overlay, but couldn’t because of the constant issues. I thought that, like Nvidia, these issues may have been launch-related, and would be weeded out slowly as the drivers matured, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
For the first time ever, AMD’s FSR 4 can properly compete with DLSS 4.
The RX 9070 XT is really a great GPU. It handles 1440p comfortably, stays competitive at 4K with upscaling, and gets official FSR 4 and FSR 4.1 support today. It costs substantially less than an RTX 5080. Buying the Nvidia card over the AMD one is, on a pure dollars-to-frames basis, a bad decision if you’re targeting those resolutions. And if you already have your card, I’d definitely hold onto it, especially with how the current landscape for PC hardware is.
I don’t think the RTX 5080 is a rational purchase in a vacuum. Based on performance, it’s a step up in raster and a significant jump in RT, but some purchasing decisions are made in spite of performance, not because of it. Sometimes, a purchase is bet on which company is more likely to still be supporting your card in 2029, and based on their previous actions, I’m not as confident in AMD as I am in Nvidia.