GoKawiil
Tech News
Rising memory and silicon costs have pushed graphics card prices well above launch prices, with the Nvidia RTX 5070 now selling for over $800 despite its $549 launch price. This has led to advice that owners should consider reselling or repurposing older GPUs rather than discarding them, citing eBay listings where used cards like the RTX 3060 and even the decade-old GTX 1060 still fetch significant resale value.
Ray tracing is a rendering technique that simulates realistic lighting, shadows and reflections by tracing light rays, in contrast to older rasterization and screen-space reflection methods used in non-RT titles. According to Steam Hardware Survey data cited in the piece, NVIDIA's RTX 5070 is currently the most-used graphics card, indicating many PC gamers now own hardware capable of handling ray tracing. The author, who uses an RTX 5090 with DLSS 4.5 Multi Frame Generation, says gamers on older cards like the RTX 3060 or Radeon RX 6600 XT should disable ray tracing and prioritize stable frame rates instead.
A fresh round of testing pits the Radeon RX 9070 XT against the GeForce RTX 5070, replacing the earlier RTX 5070 Ti comparison now that pricing has shifted. The 9070 XT sells for roughly $730-$750 while the RTX 5070 starts near $800, giving Nvidia's card about a 9% price premium. Across games like 007 First Light, the 9070 XT posted performance leads of 36% to 46% over the RTX 5070.