Team Red always remained an underdog whenever NVIDIA pulled its newest GPU lineup out of its pocket. For years even after offering competitive performance in different budget segments for slightly lower prices, AMD has struggled to gain a decent share of the GPU market.
While there doesn’t seem to be another player that can challenge NVIDIA at its current state, including Intel, which failed regardless of how impressive the B580 looked at the launch, AMD is the market’s only hope at the moment, especially with its recently introduced RDNA 4 lineup.
Here’s how the GPU market is shaping up for PC gamers in 2025.
RDNA 4 May Not Be Remarkable but Enough to Crush the Competition
The time when AMD revealed that the small 357mm2 of RX 9070 XT’s NAVI 48 die consisted of 53.9 billion transistors, it already impressed us with how it stacks up against its competitors like the GeForce RTX 5080, which uses a slightly bigger die of 378mm2 but has 15.4% fewer transistors (53.9 billion vs 45.6 billion).
If going into the architecture details does not feel interesting to you, then you should probably take a quick look at how RX 9070 XT offers a huge advantage compared to its direct competitors from NVIDIA. It’s not just the architectural improvements but how practical the specs of the RX 9070 XT are.
With 16 GB of VRAM capacity, the RX 9070 XT simply takes the lead over the RTX 5070, which even though isn’t AMD’s target for this GPU, is in reality the closest GPU in terms of price. Technically, the 12 GB of VRAM and that too with superior GDDR7 memory on the 5070 isn’t bad for most titles but once you see how the GPU starts to throttle the performance when the RT is turned on in games like Cyberpunk 2077, you will no longer want to keep that GPU.
It’s a shame that in 2025, NVIDIA isn’t moving forward past 12 GB of VRAM on the 70-class card and even though the RX 9070 XT doesn’t offer more VRAM than the RX 7900 GRE, the extra 4 GB is enough of a head room for intensive titles at higher resolutions.
We all know how the RX 9070 XT has crushed the RTX 5070, even though it isn’t its direct competitor. However, when we talk about the $500-$600 price range, a $50 price gap doesn’t seem too big to not consider the 9070 XT as a competitor to the RTX 5070.
AMD Still Needs to Go Aggressive with GPU Pricing
The Radeon RX 9070 XT beat the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti fair and square in terms of value offered for the price. The latter is only slightly faster but requires you to pay $150 more for the base editions. Considering the current state of the RTX 5070 Ti, you are paying around $250-$400 more than the base price of the Radeon RX 9070 XT.
But this won’t probably stay like this for long! Once the RTX 50 series floods the market in the near future, AMD will no longer be able to keep its hold as strong as it can now for a $150 price difference. There is no doubt that the RX 9070 XT’s raster performance is impressive against RTX 5070 Ti but enthusiasts have been actively taking the RT performance into account for a long time and the latter still manages to beat the 9070 XT convincingly.
Not to mention, the DLSS 4 and Frame Generation definitely give it a slight edge over AMD’s GPU, and AMD will need to keep the price aggressive at least for this generation. The Radeon RX 9070 XT is quite decent for $599 but a price tag of $549 or at least $579 will be excellent.
The Radeon RX 9070 definitely needs to go down to $499 as it just feels like the RX 7700 XT against the RX 7800 XT for $50 less. Historically, AMD has always suffered even when it matched its competitor’s performance for a 10-20% lower price, and shedding a few bucks more won’t hurt AMD a lot.
FSR 4 is in a Good State, and Hopefully, it Shouldn’t Keep AMD Behind for Too Long
The stability difference between FSR 4 and FSR 3.1 can be night and day in some instances. Going from 3.1 to 4.0, FidelityFX Super Resolution is finally competing with the DLSS 4, offering well-defined textures, less ghosting, better anti-aliasing, and almost no shimmering.
Since FSR trails DLSS technology from the very beginning, AMD hasn’t been able to catch up with all the improvements Team Green offers with every new generation. FSR 4 is a huge step up from FSR 3.1 and is very much comparable in visual quality even with Transformer model DLSS 4. Even though the DLSS Transformer model is still one step ahead, the FSR 4 has successfully beaten the DLSS CNN model.
Currently, the FSR 4 technology is only available on RDNA 4 GPUs but might come to RDNA 3 GPUs later. At the moment, AMD still has a lot to work to do to help developers integrate FSR 4 technology in their games. At the time of launch, there are just over 30 games that will support it while NVIDIA has a bigger lead with 75+ games that can leverage DLSS 4’s capabilities.
Needs a Bit of Push in Ray Tracing and AMD GPUs May Finally Take Over
Ray Tracing is NVIDIA’s weapon of choice to dominate the GPU market. Since the Turing series, NVIDIA has improved its RTX GPUs to the point when its mid-range cards can successfully play games with close to 60 FPS with Ray Tracing on Ultra. It still takes advantage of DLSS and Frame Generation to compensate for the performance losses but overall, it has never seen the face of defeat since 2018.
It’s refreshing to see that the RX 9070 XT is actually way better than RX 7900 XTX in RT performance even though the latter takes a lead in pure raster benchmarks. Moreover, it’s incredible to see the RX 9070 XT compete directly with the RTX 5070 with RT on at both 1440p and 4K while taking a huge lead in raster performance.
Still, the RTX 5070 Ti is significantly ahead of the 9070 XT in RT, which must push AMD to close the gap in performance. This is the only way through which AMD can convince the NVIDIA GPU users to finally switch to Radeon GPUs when upgrading. However, it’s not happening in 2025 but 2026 or 2027 seems a possibility considering how NVIDIA is ignoring the gaming GPU market as it continues to generate massive profits off the data center GPUs.
