AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT vs NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti

Analysis

The RX 9070 XT ($599) and the RTX 5070 Ti ($749, launched February 20, 2025) both arrived in early 2025 with 16GB of VRAM, and they are the two cards a buyer after a high-bandwidth 16GB GPU ends up comparing. For local LLMs the capacity is identical, so the comparison comes down to bandwidth, price and software.

Both cards fit the same 46 of 99 tracked models natively at 8k context, so nothing runs on one that does not run on the other. Speed is where they differ: the RTX 5070 Ti's 896 GB/s is 40% above the RX 9070 XT's 640 GB/s, and this site's calculator turns that into a gap of about 34% on dense models, a little under the bandwidth ratio because every layer also carries a fixed cost that faster memory does not shrink. Qwen3 14B at Q4_K_M decodes at 64.4 tok/s on the NVIDIA card versus 48.1 on the AMD one, and Qwen 3.6 27B at Q3_K_M (15.15 GB) at 47.6 versus 35.9. The gap is wider on a mixture-of-experts model, GPT-OSS 20B at Q4_K_M (14.55 GB), at 199.7 versus 116.6, because the calculator charges the AMD backends a larger per-layer cost on those. Price narrows the gap less than it widens it: the RTX 5070 Ti costs 25% more ($150) for 40% more bandwidth, so by launch prices it is the cheaper card per GB/s. Neither card holds a 27B model at Q4_K_M (19.02 GB against 15.2 GB of usable VRAM); both offload it at about 10 tok/s. The software gap runs the other way: CUDA is the best-supported backend across inference tools, and the Blackwell card also runs NVFP4 builds, while the RX 9070 XT depends on ROCm 6.4.1 or newer (listed by AMD for Linux and the Windows HIP SDK) or llama.cpp's Vulkan backend.

Bottom line: For local LLMs the RTX 5070 Ti is the stronger 16GB card: about 34% faster decoding on dense models (more on mixture-of-experts) for 25% more money at launch prices, with the broader CUDA toolchain on top. The RX 9070 XT is the right choice when you want to save $150, already run an AMD system or Linux with ROCm, or use llama.cpp's Vulkan backend, where it delivers roughly 75% of the NVIDIA card's speed on dense models in this site's estimates and about 1.4 times the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB's. Street prices have moved since launch, so check current listings before treating the MSRP gap as the real one.