I’ve been saving and planning for a long time to build a PC for flight sim, and had waited patiently for the NVIDIA 5000 series cards to be released, looking at the RTX 5090 with its 32 GB of VRAM and PCIe 5…
But watching from the sidelines:
- power cable issues
- Missing ROPs, due to…
- Blackwell manufacturing issues, which I assume are fixed, or being fixed, and this might account for the…
- Lack of availability …
- Driving up prices to ridiculous and unaffordable prices.
I kept looking at the RTX 5090 Astral - with 2 HDMI ports and built-in monitoring of each of the power pins, and rationalizing the price.
Then this past week, and spilling in to public view today, stories from all the regular gaming / hardware reviewers about how NVIDIA was strong-arming them to either focus on frame generation, or lose access (bringing the objectivity of 3rd party testing in to question…). With NVIDIA focused very much on larger AI infrastructure, they seem have become adversarial towards regular PC builders and gamers.
Youtube videos today on the NVIDIA issue from Computex 2025 in Taipei:
GamersNexus
HardwareUnboxed
JayzTwoCents
When taken all together, the rough launch, hardware issues, and adversarial communication tactics makes me second guess my initial choice - and makes it harder for me to justify the insane price of a 5090.
This has me looking again at AMD RX 9070 XT, or 7900 XTX, and wondering what the rational investment is for MSFS 2024 with triple screens. The older RX 7900 XTX seems to have higher specs than the newer 9070 XT, with 24 GB of VRAM etc…
https://www.amd.com/en/products/specifications/graphics.html?product-0=AMD+Radeon™+RX+9070+XT&product-1=AMD+Radeon™+RX+7900+XTX
I welcome everyone’s advice and experiences.
I would go for the 7900XTX over the 9070XT in this case. You’ll want all that VRAM for three monitors, especially if at 1440p or 4k each.
About the only thing the 9070xt does better would be ray tracing, but he sim doesn’t really hammer on that much when activated. It’s also not world changing even if it is on.
Thanks. you are probably right, but I had spent so much time looking at the 5090 specs (PCIe 5, 32 GB vRAM, etc), comparing the various version, cooling, etc, that I had mentally committed to it pending availability and better pricing, and confirmation that the manufacturing defects were solved…
The AMD 7900 XTX seems to fit, with larger specs than the newer RX 9070, but I’m wondering if I should wait. Either for 5090s supply to appear (and the price to drop closer to MSRP), or to see if AMD will capitalize on the apparent stumbles with NVIDIA 5000 series, and release a 9070 XTX card with more VRAM…
Great time to buy a CPU, terrible time to buy a GPU.
AMD has already said they are focusing on the mid-tier and not high end cards at least for now. That’s why the 9070xt is seemingly mediocre in many respects. There may be something like a 9070xt refresh similar to the 6950xt (9075xt?), but that is just pure speculation on my part. I wouldn’t hold my breath on AMD unless you plan to at least wait until the next generation where you may see enough generational lift that a mid-tier card overtakes the 7900XTX in all areas, or perhaps they decide to get back into the high end market.
Btw, don’t worry about PCIe 5.0 right now. The 5090 doesn’t even fully saturate 4.0, so there are so no cards that would justify needing a 5.0 mobo. Heck, the 5090 barely slows down on a 3.0 connection. There’s still years to go before a 5.0 connection makes a noticable difference to the GPU.
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