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The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and Nvidia RTX 5080 are some of the fastest current-gen offerings when it comes to 4K gaming GPUs. They both bundle some of the latest hardware and software features such as DLSS Multi-Frame Generation, Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF), and the fastest RT cores on gaming graphics cards. However, the cards differ widely in terms of their pricing and market position. While AMD has priced their offering competitively at $600, the Nvidia card is going for $1,000.
This raises the question: which GPU should high-end gamers get? Let's look at the 4K gaming performance of either cards to determine.
The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and Nvidia RTX 5080 are some of the highest-end GPUs in late 2025
In terms of their underlying hardware, the AMD RX 9070 XT and the RTX 5080 are quite different. While AMD uses the latest RDNA 4 architecture, which is focused more on raw rendering potential through dedicated Compute Units (CUs), Nvidia's Blackwell is a software-hardware hybrid that achieves the best performance by packaging RT, Tensor, and CUDA corez tightly together. Both have their unique pros and cons when it comes to real-life workloads.
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An apples-to-apples comparison is impossible by looking at the specs sheets for the very reason. However, let's review the on-paper offerings to get an idea of what you're signing up for.
While the RTX 5080 ships with 10,752 CUDA, 84 RT, and 336 Tensor cores, you get 4,096 Shading Units, 64 Ray Accelerators, and 128 Matrix cores. While these elements perform similar tasks, the difference in design decisions don't make them comparable. Both cards ship with 16 GB of VRAM, but the 5080 packs faster 30 Gbps GDDR7 while the RX 9070 XT ships with slower 20.1 Gbps GDDR6.
Here's a side-by-side look at the specs of the two cards:
The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT currently starts at $599, while the RTX 5080 is much costlier at $999. While the Team Red GPUs have been struggling to maintain their MSRPs, pricing has improved significantly over the past few months.
Read more: Is the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT worth buying for gaming?
Performance comparison
Here's a look at how framerates in some of the latest video games differ when it comes to playing at 4K. The GPUs were tested with the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which is among the most powerful and popular chips today. We have sourced these numbers from the YouTube channel Testing Games.
In terms of average FPS, the RTX 5080 scores 90.2 FPS while the 9070 XT gets 75.4 FPS. This makes the Nvidia card about 19.6% faster. However, in terms of value for money, the AMD card is much better. It's just ~20% slower at a 40% lower price. While the 5080 scores 0.090 FPS per $, but the 9070 XT gets 0.126. That's a significant difference.
While in terms of raw performance, the RTX 5080 is a clear winner, $999 could be prohibitively expensive for many. The AMD GPUs still gets 75+ FPS on average at the highest settings at 4K while staying budget friendly, winning it a recommendation.
