I remember every graphics card I ever bought. From the underpowered GeForce 6600 (non-GT) that sparked my PC building career to the overkill RX 7900 XTX that I now use to play lightweight indie games, they all have a special place in my heart. But while I’m lucky to have a powerful GPU that lets me play just about whatever I want, if I didn’t, I still wouldn’t be upgrading to one of this generation’s cards.
Nvidia’s RTX 5090 is impressive, but too expensive. The RTX 5070 Ti offers better value, but good luck finding one. AMD’s RX 9070 XT is genuinely a pretty awesome card relative to what else is out there, and the underdog fan in me wants you to buy it so that Nvidia has enough competition to do something about its pricing and AI focus… but I’m still recommending that you don’t.
Honestly, this graphics card generation just kind of sucks. Here’s why I’m holding off and why you should consider doing the same.
I refuse to reward Nvidia’s behavior
While I’m going to sling a fair bit of shade in this article, no one deserves it more than Nvidia. I’m far from the first to say it, but the RTX 50 series launch has been one of the most problematic in PC hardware history. I’ve been writing about graphics cards for over 20 years and have articles going back all that time lamenting Nvidia’s launch strategies, but this one has been shambolic even by its own dubious standards.
Beyond the driver issues, the missing ROPs, the melting power cables, and terrible availability and pricing, it’s the sheer hubris of this generation that really irks me. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stood on that stage at CES 2025 and stretched the truth to Nvidia fans. Not even in the wildest stretches of the imagination is an RTX 5090 twice as fast as an RTX 4090. Nor does the RTX 5070 offer “4090 performance at $549,” as it simply isn’t available at that price and its performance isn’t remotely comparable. Not even the RTX 5080 can claim to be faster than the 4090.
Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry
Nvidia is now making most of its money from AI, data centers, and cozying up to the latest US administration, and it feels like the company just doesn’t really care about gaming anymore. They should—and I wish they would—but they don’t. Gamers feel like an afterthought.
Just look at the performance upgrades offered by today’s cards. A few scant double-digit percentage points here and there, plus some slight ray tracing improvements. Arguably the only real boost with this generation is the DLSS 4 transformer model, but that’s AI once again. It feels like Nvidia is merely using its gaming advances to train AI for other ventures.
To me, buying any of the Blackwell graphics cards is rewarding Nvidia’s bad behavior. It’s time we gave them a collective bonk on the nose by leaving the RTX 50 series to the scalpers. Let them all languish.
AMD’s cards are only “good enough”
I have a soft spot for AMD. I love a good underdog story, and though a $200 billion company can really only be “underdogs” to multi-trillion-dollar sharks like Nvidia, AMD’s graphics division has consistently played second fiddle. They’ve had some real standout cards, though, and I enjoyed watching the RX 6900 XT get within striking distance of Nvidia’s flagship cards. Big Navi almost delivered, but not quite.
But if I remove my Radeon-tinted glasses for a second, AMD hasn’t been competitive with Nvidia for some time. Their ray tracing performance has been lackluster. Their open-source model for upscaling is admirable, but less capable than DLSS. They’ve repeatedly committed GPU pricing sins that make them less competitive than they should be. (I’m looking at you, RX 7900 XT at just $100 less than the RX 7900 XTX!)
Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry
The RX 9070 XT is the first AMD card in a long time that offers a compelling mix of strong rasterization performance, ray tracing that’s close enough to Nvidia that it doesn’t feel a generation behind, and it has FSR frame generation now. It’s upscaling tech still doesn’t match DLSS, but it’s good enough. All together, that makes the 9070 XT just about the best graphics card to buy this generation.
But “good enough” isn’t good enough. Due to availability issues, people still can’t buy it—and just over a month on from its release, the pricing has gotten almost as ridiculous as Nvidia’s. When gamers can grab an Xbox Series X, PS5, or even a Switch 2 for under $500, but you’re expecting PC gamers to pay over $1,000 for the graphics card alone, something has gone completely out of whack somewhere along the way.
It’s a problem specific to graphics cards
You know what I’m not writing about these days? How ridiculous SSD pricing has become, or how RAM is somehow outpricing consumers, or any other piece of hardware bleeding gamers dry.
Sure, if you want to buy a flagship CPU, it’ll cost you upwards of $450—but you can also get a really fast one for just $200-300, especially if you’re willing to go last generation. RAM is actually the cheapest I’ve ever seen it, and you can get multiple TBs of PCIe 4 storage for just over $100. Motherboards are a bit silly, but you can still find a capable one for less than $200. And power supplies are available for a range of budgets.
Newegg
But modern graphics cards are in a league of their own. If you want even the barest of barebones GPUs for good frame rates at 1080p, as of this writing you have very few options. Even something like Intel’s B580 will cost you closer to $400, a big jump up from its $250 launch price.
I know, I know. Some of the insane pricing is due to factors beyond the control of these companies. Graphics cards cost a lot to manufacture and historically they’ve had poor margins, plus Trump’s tariffs are not helping matters. But maybe greed is mixed in there somewhere, too?
I feel out of my mind to be celebrating the fact that AMD has a graphics card that costs the better part of $1,000 while only offering similar performance to high-end cards from 2-3 years ago (which cost a similar amount when they debuted back then).
This GPU generation is one to be skipped
I recognize that I’m in a privileged position. Not only do I have a powerful graphics card already, but there’s every chance I’ll get to test an even better graphics card in the future to replace it. I’m not your average consumer. So if you need a new graphics card to play those new games that excite you, I certainly wouldn’t begrudge you spending your hard-earned money on what you want.
But if you can skip this generation, I totally think you should. What’s on offer just isn’t that compelling. Sure, some cards are better than others, and I’m genuinely excited that AMD is properly competing with Nvidia on bang for your buck (even if it doesn’t have this generation’s equivalent of Big Navi). Yet even with external factors pumping prices ever higher, I still feel like these companies can do better.
AMD’s frame generation and upscaling should be better. Its ray tracing performance should have caught up years ago. Nvidia’s pricing is downright insulting, and the dishonest and hyperbolic marketing is just as bad. The whole graphics card industry needs a shakeup… and it’ll only come from gamers voting with our wallets.
