The RTX 50-series launch hasn’t gone smoothly so far. Severely limited stock, high prices, and manufacturing issues have left PC gamers frustrated. Now, Nvidia is trying to get things heading in the right direction with the RTX 5070, a GPU that it promised would deliver $1,599 RTX 4090-like performance for $549.

It doesn’t, and it was never going to. It’s about 20 percent faster than the RTX 4070 and a bare 4 percent faster than last year’s RTX 4070 Super. It’s a solid card for 1440p gaming, just like the RTX 4070, but as with the rest of the 50-series cards, Nvidia’s performance claims rely on Frame Generation rather than meaningful improvements to rendering.

At $549, the RTX 5070 will also come up against AMD’s new $549 Radeon RX 9070 and $599 Radeon RX 9070 XT when they launch on March 6th. If AMD manages to beat Nvidia’s RTX 5070 or come close to the $749 RTX 5070 Ti, that’s going to put a lot of much-needed pressure on Nvidia’s pricing.

You might want to wait a couple of days to purchase anything until we can talk about those AMD cards.

$ 550

Compact size

Great 1440p performance

Power draw isn’t significantly higher than RTX 40 series

12GB of VRAM

Definitely not RTX 4090 levels of performance

Multi Frame Generation is less effective at 4K

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9800X3D