6 reasons to pick Intel or AMD for your next GPU instead of Nvidia’s RTX 50 series

The desktop GPU market has not been this exciting in ages. We were all used to seeing Nvidia launch the fastest cards every generation, and AMD playing catch-up by slightly undercutting them. While Intel’s Arc Alchemist GPUs offered a third option in 2022, the company’s new Battlemage GPUs have now become genuine alternatives for users, thanks to their excellent value proposition.

AMD, on the other hand, has been hard at work trying to revamp its ray tracing hardware, enhance its software chops with FSR 4, and focus solely on the mid-range and budget segments, leaving the high-end game to Nvidia for this generation. For most gamers and productivity users who always shop for mid-range and affordable cards, AMD and Intel might just be the better options in 2025.

6

Drastically better price to performance

The GPUs for the masses

Nvidia has an undisputed chokehold on the desktop GPU market. Its graphics cards are known for pushing the boundaries of GPU technology and consistently producing the fastest cards every generation. What Nvidia isn’t known for is prioritizing value for money or offering genuinely exciting cards in the budget segment. Its latest RTX 50 series cards are yet another in a long line of luxury GPUs.

Team Green might make sense for those who have deep pockets, but the vast majority of users shop for mid-range and budget GPUs, which AMD, and now Intel, is successfully targeting. AMD’s upcoming RX 9070 XT (yes, they’re skipping the RX 8000 nomenclature) series is widely rumored to beat RTX 5070 while being priced below $500. Obviously, you need to take these rumors with a pinch of salt, but AMD is bound to offer even more value than before to be competitive in this generation.

Intel, meanwhile, has already disrupted the budget 1440p gaming segment by launching the Arc B580 for just $250, handily beating the more expensive RTX 4060. After a long time, it feels like the budget segment is experiencing a revival of sorts. As for AMD’s mid-range battle with Nvidia, it will all depend on how well RDNA 4 fares against Blackwell in third-party benchmarks. For value shoppers, however, AMD and Intel are the clear favorites as Nvidia continues to push the high-end segment forward.

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5

More VRAM for your money

Stop settling for peanuts

Nvidia’s skimping on VRAM has become folklore at this point, as the company refuses to stack even its high-end offerings with enough VRAM in 2025. Its $999 RTX 5080 and $749 RTX 5070 still come with the same 16GB VRAM featured on the last-gen RTX 4080 Super, RTX 4080, and RTX 4070 Ti Super. For all the architectural and software leaps on Blackwell, VRAM remains a sticking point for Nvidia’s customers.

Sufficient VRAM is critical for consistent performance at higher resolutions, and if that’s important to you, you’ll have to look to AMD and Intel. Shockingly, Team Blue’s $250 Arc B580 has the same 12GB VRAM as Nvidia’s $549 RTX 5070, enabling the budget card to perform as well as it does in 1440p gaming. Even AMD has offered plenty of VRAM on its RX 6000, RX 7000, and hopefully now, on RX 9000 series GPUs.

Nvidia might claim that its Blackwell architecture and advanced frame generation technology enable lower VRAM usage, but that doesn’t excuse the company from artificially limiting lower-tier SKUs in terms of VRAM. Users who want the privilege of having enough VRAM are forced to shell out more for the higher-tier SKUs.

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4

Low power consumption so you won’t need a new PSU

Why buy power-hungry GPUs when you don’t need them?

With great power, comes great temperatures (and expensive power supplies). Nvidia’s RTX GPUs have consistently broken TDP records every generation, and the RTX 50 series is nothing new. The flagship RTX 5090 now boasts a whopping 575W TDP, with the RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 Ti coming in at 360W and 300W respectively.

If you don’t particularly need the raw power of the RTX 5090 or even the RTX 5080, you can instead go for Intel’s Arc B580, which has a TDP of only 190W, or the cheaper Arc B570 at 150W. Budget gamers presumably don’t have 850W or 1000W power supplies in their rigs, and can more easily upgrade to Intel’s new budget cards.

Meanwhile, AMD’s RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 are rumored to feature a 260W, nearly identical to that of the RTX 5070’s 250W, but both of them will most likely be cheaper than Nvidia’s offering. If power bills are particularly high in your area, or you don’t prefer higher GPU temperature and the hassle of upgrading your PSU, AMD and Intel are looking much better right now.

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3

Productivity users need not spend a bomb

Gaming isn’t the only thing AMD and Intel are good at

Users who are more concerned with running rendering, encoding, and other creative workloads can also benefit from the unique value proposition of AMD and Intel graphics cards this generation. Intel’s Alchemist GPUs were already decent productivity GPUs, but their less-than-ideal pricing and high power consumption made them less attractive options. Battlemage has vastly improved power draw over Alchemist, along with advanced hardware, more VRAM, and lower pricing.

AMD, on the other hand, is also planning to deliver massive gains over RDNA 3 with its “built from the ground-up” RDNA 4 architecture. Productivity users will be looking forward to AMD’s enhanced media encoding and AI capabilities, thanks to dedicated hardware that we haven’t seen previously on RDNA 3 or RDNA 2.

Whether you’re limited by VRAM or AI chops in your creative workloads, you can legitimately consider AMD and Intel GPUs instead of paying a premium for Nvidia’s relatively expensive offerings.

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2

RDNA 4 is going big on ray tracing and AI

Huge ray tracing and frame generation leaps incoming

AMD’s inferior ray tracing has been a major reason consumers haven’t rewarded the company with more sales over the years. As much as the company improved its hardware and software, Nvidia’s more advanced and mature tech remained far ahead. Even AMD’s flagship GPUs suffer in heavily ray-traced games compared to Nvidia’s high-end GPUs.

This might finally change in 2025 as AMD plans to announce its RDNA 4 GPUs sometime in March. For the first time, AMD has brought the bulk of the complex calculations for real-time ray tracing to its new dedicated RT cores. Previously, AMD’s ray accelerators accounted for the hardware component for ray tracing, but the bulk of the calculations still happened on its general-purpose cores.

This will help pull the RX 9000 series GPUs way ahead of RDNA 3 in terms of ray tracing performance. AMD has also announced that its next-gen FSR 4 will heavily feature AI and ML-based upscaling and frame generation, further bringing it closer to Nvidia’s ray tracing and upscaling capabilities.

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1

Intel Arc isn’t an afterthought anymore

Team Blue isn’t going anywhere

It’s not just AMD that has made hardware and software leaps a priority this generation. Intel has not only shown massive jumps in ray tracing performance compared to its best Alchemist cards (Arc A750 vs. Arc A770), but also improved a lot on the driver side of things. The drivers are more mature and there were no issues in our Arc B580 testing on the software side.

Intel isn’t slowing down with its Arc division anytime soon and plans to launch even more powerful GPUs in the near future. From being out of the consideration set completely a few years ago, Intel Arc GPUs are now genuine options for budget gamers who want truly interesting but affordable GPUs for existing or new gaming builds. Things aren’t perfect, however, since the Battlemage GPUs still have a few major downsides.

There is a significant performance overhead on pairing the Arc B580 or Arc B570 with older or budget CPUs, especially in more CPU-bound games. This is something budget gamers should be aware of, since if they’re not planning a full system upgrade involving a newer CPU, their older CPU might lead to poor GPU performance compared to, say, the RTX 4060 or RX 7600. Another lingering issue with Arc GPUs is a lack of proper VR support, so if that matters to you, then you’ll have to look elsewhere.

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It’s refreshing to see real competition in the GPU space

Needless to say, competition is good for consumers. As Nvidia, AMD, and Intel rely on their strengths and force the others to offer more value than ever before, consumers will benefit, and the GPU industry, as a whole, will move forward. Barring a few performance issues, Intel is currently doing great in the budget segment, and AMD is confident of dominating the mid-range segment with its upcoming RX 9000 GPUs.

Nvidia is still in the lead, whether you look at market share, mind share, or cutting-edge performance, but more and more consumers are looking for affordable GPUs for both gaming and productivity. If Intel and AMD succeed in making a significant dent in Nvidia’s dominance, the market might reconsider the high GPU prices that have plagued consumers for multiple generations.