Raster is purely horsepower. RayTracing varies from title to title. Very demanding ones have upscaling enabled.

On the CPU front, Intel is still a viable option... but only if you go for an "older" gen. Their latest processors are very good for productivity tasks, but they fail short in gaming. Therefore, you'd be better with an i7-14700K than a Core Ultra 7 265K (in case you didn't know, they've changed names, making them more confusing than before).

AMD is the current king of gaming CPUs with their X3D chips that have more memory (cache), with the 9800X3D being the best and the 7800X3D coming in second place.

Whatever you choose, 32GB of DDR5 RAM at around 6000 to 6400MT/s should do the trick, with lower latency kits being prefered.

On the GPU side, things are a bit more muddy. Nvidia really screwed this gen in all possible ways, leaving the door open for AMD to come in and try to gain as much marketshare and goodwill from consumers as it can.The 9070XT is in the same ballpark as the 5070Ti in raster games at a much lower price point, $50 more than the 5070 you're aiming for, but it falls behind when ray tracing is enabled, as the charts shared by Jizz show. The 9070 should also be faster than the 5070 in raster, but much lower than it when it comes to RT and at the same MSRP. The main difference is that the AMD cards should have enough stock to be able to buy one, but we'll see if that's true tomorrow when they launch.

I wouldn't try to get a last gen 4000 card because Nvidia stopped the production of the mid-to-high end models back in September or October, and what's left is too expensive to make sense

In any case, given that you seem to be a person that keeps your system for as long as possible, I'd advise you to get a GPU that has at least 16GB of video RAM, because there are already games that have problems running on cards with less than that, like missing textures, stutters and other nasty issues.

I am hearing if you pair up an AMD CPU with an AMD GPU, you access AMD technologies. Not sure how much benefit you get from it but it sounds entertaining.

Based on all the feedback from both companies, AMD seems to be getting praised and Nvidia is getting heat.

Seems so far, the AMD mid range is the better option. I'll wait and see what the final product and price looks like but it's looking good for AMD.

Wow. Will we get FSR4 in PS5 games? Is it possible games already released could be patched?

The talk is it might be possible on the PS5 PRO but unlikely on based PS5 and Series X The PS5 is RDNA 1.5 and Series X is RDNA 2.0. This tech is built around RDNA 4.0. The PRO is RDNA 2.0X so it really depends what Sony has modified to allow for FSR4, however since the PRO has its own AI Upscaler, its probably alittle pointless having both and Sony would prefer to push their own tech.

Currently nothing is confirmed, just my opinion.

Damn. Well, at least things are looking up for 10th gen. I hate to say it but it's time for an early refresh, scrap this disaster and move on.

Whoever buys a RTX 5070 over the 9070 XT is a mentally challenged fanboy. The 12GB VRAM makes the card DOA; Hardware Unboxed showed that marvellously. 

Seems like AMD is the way to go this gen. Anything above a 9070 XT is stupid anyways. You don't get much in return for the insane prices, diminishing returns and all that. Well, at least when we're talking strictly about gaming that is.

So we hear, but the advantages of the 5070Ti is its 12gigs of GDDR7 while the 9070TX has 16gigs of GDDR6. Plus the 5070Ti uses alot less power to achieve similar results.