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New graphics card: Nvidia Geforce RTX 5070ti

I have just spent €802 on a PNY Triple Fan OC Nvidia  Geforce 5070ti. This is actually a good deal for a card with US sticker price of $750 taking into account Ireland's 23% VAT and the extra costs associated with living on a small island. It is also the most expensive PC component I have ever bought. I am definitely not OK with the fact that enthusiast level GPUs  cost double what equivalent tier cards cost ten years ago.  I chose this version because it is one of the cheaper variants available but it is well built and one of the faster overclocked models with a large 3 slot heatsink that keeps it cool and quiet under pressure. It has no RGB or other frills but I don't care about that. 

Initial impressions after playing around with it for about an hour: In 3D Mark, Total Warhammer 3 and Cyberpunk the card does seem quite a bit faster than the 7800Xt particularly at very high graphics settings. On the other hand the Nvidia Control panel still looks archaic. AMD's Adrenalin software is much nicer and the way CPU and GPU support was integrated in an all AMD rig was very nice. AMD Adrenalin is a lot brasher and pushier though. It tries to hard sell features like HYPER-X which is not very good and actually detrimental for most games. No-one could accuse Nvidia's control panel of hard selling anything. It looks like a 1990's era database programme. Nvidia do provide their own all singing all dancing App but it is more muted than AMD Adrenalin. 

As is customary when I upgrade GPUs I like to think about my personal GPU history. I used to use Tom's GPU hierarchy for this but it has changed over the years I am going to use Techpowerup's GPU rankings this time instead. They give a percentage power ranking for all GPUs dating back to 2008. It seems to be based on raw number crunching performance and doesn't take features like ray tracing or upscaling into account but it is still a very useful ranking. 

Anyway the earliest card on Techpowerup's list that I had was an ATI  HD 4850 that I got in 2008. Great card at the time when ATI (now owned by AMD) was trading blows with Nvidia for the graphics crown. The 4850 replaced an older Nvidia Geforce 7900GTX that isn't include on the Techpower up scale but based on texture rate the HD 4850 was about 60% faster. 

I replaced the 4850 with an ATI HD 5850 in 2011. This was an impressive 87% uplift on Techpowerup's scale and brought me into the DirectX 11 world.  Even more impressive is that I got the card for around €150 because it was an 18 month old high end card that was re-released for a much lower price  to sell off stock. 

In 2014 I went back to Nvidia with the GTX 970. This was a hugely popular enthusiast level card and despite some outcry about the memory "not really being 4Gb" it performed very well: a whopping +206% on Techpowerup's scale.  This card cost me €310. 

In 2017 I upgraded again to a GTX 1080. This was a true enthusiast level card and at the start of the crypto boom I paid €460 for it. Techpowerup ranks it 65% better than the old 970. 

That GTX 1080 served me well for over four years but by 2022 it was due an upgrade. Unfortunately the combination of crypto madness and covid supply disruptions made it very difficult to get a good GPU for a sensible price. Happily I was able to pull a stroke. My wife who is not a gamer needed a new PC so we bought a Dell XPS that just happened to have a GTX 3060ti in it. I replaced the 3060ti with a cheap and cheerful Radion RX550 that met her needs and put the Geforce card it in my gaming machine. The Dell was €1300 at a time when the street price of a 3060ti was €800 so it was a pretty good deal. I even managed to sell my GTX 1080 for almost as much as I paid for it five years previously. Techpowerup ranks the 3060ti 67% faster than the GTX 1080 but it also brings ray tracing and DLSS into play although the card wasn't really powerful enough to make the most of ray tracing. 

Onwards then to 2024 when I upgraded to an AMD RX7800XT. By this stage Nvidia had transitioned into the home of AI hardware (and the most valuable company in the world). While it continued to offer very feature rich cards to gamers the prices went through the roof for enthusiast cards and the budget end of the gaming market vanished altogether. Even though AMD has no comparable offerings to Nvidia's enthusiast cards any more the 7800XT at €467 was the most powerful card available in its price range. Techpowerup ranks it 44% faster than the 3060ti but crucially it was a 16Gb card at a time when modern games were beginning to exceed the limitations of the 3060ti's 8Gb. 

Now in 2025 my new 5070ti at a price of €802 euro is something of an extravagance given that the 7800xt would still suffice for my gaming needs. Happily I at a stage in life when I can afford to spend a bit of money on my hobbies so I decide to go for it. I also expect to sell the 7800xt for around €400 which softens the blow. I am looking forward to exploring Ray tracing, Path Tracing and Nvidia's ai powered multi - frame generation technologies. Techpowerup ranks the card as being 47% faster than the 7800xt





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