Quick answer

Buy the RTX 5070 for gaming. Tom’s Hardware’s 1440p averages put it 31% ahead, and on September 13 the cheapest new one I found at Newegg cost $40 more than the cheapest new 5060 Ti 16GB. Pick the 5060 Ti only when a workload needs 16GB.

TL;DR · RTX 5060 Ti vs RTX 5070

  • Speed: the RTX 5070 is 31% faster at 1440p in Tom's Hardware's June 2026 hierarchy, and ComputerBase measured 36% in 2025.
  • Memory: 16GB on the 5060 Ti against 12GB on the 5070. That decides path-traced Indiana Jones and which local AI models fit on the card.
  • Price on September 13, 2026: the cheapest new listings I found at Newegg were $779.99 and $819.99. Each 1440p frame costs 20% less on the 5070.
  • Power: 180 W against 250 W, with NVIDIA recommending a 600 W or 650 W system supply.
  • Already own a 16GB 5060 Ti? I would keep it.

I owned an RTX 5060 Ti 16GB but have not benchmarked it or an RTX 5070, so every benchmark here is Tom's Hardware's, ComputerBase's, PCGamesN's or TechSpot's, named where it appears. Prices are Newegg listings as I read them on September 13, 2026.

Why I would buy the 5070 in September 2026

NVIDIA put these cards $120 apart at launch, $429 for the 16GB RTX 5060 Ti and $549 for the RTX 5070, and when Jarred Walton compared them for Tom’s Hardware in April 2025 the price gap and the speed gap came out about even. That was a fair fight.

It is not one now.

Both cards got more expensive over the summer of 2026, and not by the same amount. When I checked Newegg on September 13, sorted by lowest price, the cheapest new 5060 Ti 16GB was $779.99 and the cheapest new RTX 5070 was $819.99, so forty dollars now separates a card from one that is about 30% faster. That gap is small. The case for the 5060 Ti comes down to its extra 4GB of memory, so most of this page is about when that 4GB is worth more than the speed.

Specs and prices side by side

RTX 5060 Ti 16GBRTX 5070
GPUGB206GB205
CUDA cores4,6086,144
VRAM16GB GDDR712GB GDDR7
Memory bus128-bit192-bit
Memory bandwidth448 GB/s672 GB/s
PCIe link5.0 x85.0 x16
Total graphics power180 W250 W
NVIDIA’s recommended system power600 W650 W
Launch price$429 (April 2025)$549 (March 2025)
Newegg median, August 2026$804.99$899.99
Lowest new listing I found at Newegg, September 13, 2026$779.99$819.99

The core, memory and power rows come from NVIDIA’s spec pages, and the launch prices from NVIDIA’s announcements. The GPU and bandwidth rows and the launch months come from Tom’s Hardware’s comparison, the PCIe row from TechSpot and the cards’ Newegg listings, and the August medians from the table in Tom’s Hardware’s price survey. The 5070 has a third more CUDA cores and half again the memory bandwidth, while the 5060 Ti answers with 4GB more memory on a narrower bus, connected through half as many PCIe lanes. It also draws less power.

How much faster the RTX 5070 is

Tom’s Hardware’s GPU hierarchy, last updated June 24, 2026, runs both cards on a Ryzen 7 9800X3D at ultra settings. I took its average frame rates and worked out the lead.

Test, ultra settingsRTX 5060 Ti 16GBRTX 50705070 lead
1080p105.2 fps132.6 fps26%
1440p73.4 fps96.4 fps31%
4K40.2 fps54.3 fps35%
1080p ray tracing56.2 fps74.1 fps32%
1440p ray tracing38.9 fps51.5 fps32%
4K ray tracing20.6 fps22.7 fps10%

Two older tests land in the same place. Walton’s 21-game comparison from April 2025 put the 5070 31% ahead at 1440p and 32% ahead at 4K. ComputerBase measured 74.8 fps against 55.0 at 1440p that same month, a 36% lead, and 30% with ray tracing on.

The lead narrows at 1080p, where Walton found both cards running into CPU limits, and he saw it fall to 24% at 1080p medium settings. Now look at the last row. At 4K with ray tracing the 5070 is only 10% ahead, which I suspect is its 12GB filling up, though an average cannot show that, and Walton’s 2025 test had one ray-traced game hitting that limit at 4K ultra.

Commenters land in the same range. In an r/buildapc thread on this question, the top answers put it between 25% and 40%. The 2026 GPU hierarchy shows where both cards sit against everything else.

Where 16GB wins

Extra memory does nothing for a game that fits in 12GB, and in Walton’s 21-game suite from 2025 no game fell short at 1440p and only one did at 4K.

That one was Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, where the 5060 Ti finished 5% ahead of the 5070 at 4K ultra. In a separate test, PCGamesN’s Ben Hardwidge pushed the same game to its Supreme preset with full path tracing at 1080p. The 5070 averaged 5 fps. The 16GB 5060 Ti started from 40 fps, and Hardwidge put the 5070’s collapse down to its 12GB of VRAM. He still judged 40 fps too low for frame generation to smooth out without obvious input lag, so the 16GB card wins that test without making it pleasant.

Local AI is the other case. On my RTX 5080, which also carries 16GB, nvidia-smi showed 13.1 to 14.0 GiB of the card’s memory in use across two captures with gpt-oss 20B loaded in Ollama. That reading is above a 5070’s 12GB. Qwen 2.5 14B at Q4_K_M read 10.6 GiB at a 4,096-token context and 12.8 GiB at 16,384 tokens, already past 12GB. All of these are whole-card readings, and the dataset treats such readings as an upper bound because Ollama can keep an earlier model loaded, so they overstate what each model needs on its own. They come from my RTX 5080 LLM dataset. A 5060 Ti 16GB runs gpt-oss 20B in MXFP4, and the benchmark table in llama.cpp’s gpt-oss guide discussion lists it at 111.51 tokens a second in llama.cpp’s short generation test, a different benchmark from the MLPerf figure below.

Where the model fits both cards, the 5070 has been faster. Tom’s Hardware measured 111.7 tokens a second against 84.2 in MLPerf Client’s text generation test, a 33% lead.

So I pick by the model and its context. If the whole footprint, buffers included, sits comfortably under 12GB, buy the 5070. If it runs between 12 and 16GB, the 5060 Ti has room the 5070 does not. The local LLM by VRAM guide lists which models land in each tier.

PCIe x8, power and features

The 5060 Ti uses eight PCIe lanes and the 5070 uses sixteen, and TechSpot’s Steven Walton tested what the x8 link costs on older boards and found the PCIe mode has little effect while a game stays within the card’s memory. His 16GB card on PCIe 3.0 averaged 66 fps in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, where the 8GB model managed 27. TechSpot only ran the 16GB card on PCIe 3.0, and it ran well there. The link is a real problem for the 8GB version on a PCIe 4.0 or 3.0 board.

The 5070 draws more power. NVIDIA rates it at 250 W of total graphics power against 180 W and recommends a 650 W system supply, 50 W more than for the 5060 Ti. If your power supply sits near either number, the PSU wattage calculator will tell you whether the rest of your parts leave room.

Features match. NVIDIA lists DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation on both cards.

The price math

Walton ended his April 2025 comparison with a rule for gamers, that the 5070 was worth paying up to 30% more than the 5060 Ti 16GB, and he argued for as much as 40%.

At launch prices the 5070 cost 28% more. At Newegg’s August 2026 medians it cost 12% more. At the cheapest new listings I found on September 13, the difference was 5%.

By that rule, it is not close. Using Tom’s Hardware’s 1440p averages, each frame cost $10.63 on the cheapest new 5060 Ti and $8.51 on the cheapest new 5070. That is 20% less per frame. The hierarchy page is blunt about the smaller card, calling the 5060 Ti 16GB “hopelessly overpriced for the performance it offers in mid-2026.”

Check both prices before you buy. If the gap widens past Walton’s 30 to 40%, the 5060 Ti starts to make sense.

Upgrading from a 5060 Ti to a 5070

I owned a 16GB 5060 Ti. If you own one, I would keep it. The 5070 is about 31% faster at 1440p, but $819.99 is a lot to pay for one tier, and you give up 4GB of memory you may already be using. I would save for a bigger jump.

The 8GB 5060 Ti is a different story. TechSpot measured it falling apart once games ran past its memory, and in Dragon Age: The Veilguard it stayed unplayable even on PCIe 5.0. Its 8GB was the problem. Moving from that card to either of these is a real upgrade.

Who should buy neither

If you only game and your budget sits nearer the 5060 Ti’s price, AMD’s 16GB RX 9060 XT had a median Newegg price of $474.99 in Tom’s Hardware’s August survey. It is far cheaper. The RTX 5060 Ti vs RX 9060 XT comparison covers that trade in detail. AMD’s 16GB answer to the 5070 is the RX 9070, and the RTX 5070 vs RX 9070 page weighs it.

If 12GB worries you and the budget stretches, look one step up. The RTX 5070 Ti has 16GB, and its August median held at $1,099.99. The RTX 5070 vs RTX 5070 Ti page covers whether that premium pays.

Sources

Frequently asked questions

Is the RTX 5070 better than the RTX 5060 Ti?
For gaming, yes. Tom’s Hardware’s June 2026 hierarchy has the RTX 5070 31% faster at 1440p, and 32% faster at 1440p with ray tracing. ComputerBase measured a 36% lead at 1440p in 2025. The 16GB RTX 5060 Ti is the better card only when a job needs more than 12GB of memory, such as path-traced Indiana Jones or a local AI model whose footprint runs past 12GB.
Is upgrading from a 5060 Ti to a 5070 worth it?
Not from the 16GB 5060 Ti, in my view. The 5070 is about 31% faster at 1440p, but the cheapest new one I found at Newegg on September 13, 2026 cost $819.99, and it has 4GB less memory. From the 8GB 5060 Ti the case is stronger, because TechSpot measured that card falling apart once games ran past its memory.
How much faster is the RTX 5070 than the RTX 5060 Ti?
About 26% at 1080p, 31% at 1440p and 35% at 4K in rasterized games, from Tom’s Hardware’s June 2026 averages on a Ryzen 7 9800X3D. With ray tracing the lead is 32% at 1080p and 1440p but only 10% at 4K. ComputerBase’s 2025 test put the 1440p gap at 36%.
Is 12GB of VRAM enough on the RTX 5070?
In Tom’s Hardware’s 21-game test, yes. 12GB was enough in every game at 1440p and in all but one at 4K. It runs out at extreme settings. PCGamesN measured the 5070 at 5 fps in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle with the Supreme preset and full path tracing at 1080p, where the 16GB 5060 Ti started from 40 fps, still too low for smooth frame generation.
Which is better for local AI, the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB or the RTX 5070?
It depends on the model and its context. On my 16GB RTX 5080, nvidia-smi showed 13.1 to 14.0 GiB in use with gpt-oss 20B loaded in Ollama, a whole-card reading above the 5070’s 12GB, so a 16GB card leaves that model more room than a 12GB card. Where a model fit both, the 5070 was faster in Tom’s Hardware’s MLPerf Client test, 111.7 tokens a second against 84.2.
Does the RTX 5060 Ti’s PCIe x8 link matter?
Mostly for the 8GB version. The 5060 Ti uses eight PCIe lanes, and TechSpot found the PCIe mode has little effect while a game stays within the card’s memory. Its 16GB card ran well on PCIe 3.0. The 8GB card lost badly on older PCIe once games overflowed its memory.
What power supply do the RTX 5060 Ti and RTX 5070 need?
NVIDIA recommends a 600 W system power supply for the RTX 5060 Ti and 650 W for the RTX 5070. The cards are rated at 180 W and 250 W of total graphics power. If your supply sits near those numbers, run your parts through a PSU wattage calculator before you buy.

Evidence ledger

Last updated
Methodology
See our methodology for research and review standards. It draws on 16 cited sources, listed below, each checked against the original page on the date above. I owned an RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, and my RTX 5060 Ti vs RX 9060 XT showdown covers that card. I did not benchmark it or an RTX 5070 for this page, so the frame rates and gaming leads here are other people’s measurements, named where they appear: Tom’s Hardware’s GPU hierarchy (last updated June 24, 2026, on a Ryzen 7 9800X3D) and Jarred Walton’s April 21, 2025 comparison for Tom’s Hardware, ComputerBase (April 16, 2025), PCGamesN (updated June 4, 2025) and TechSpot (June 28, 2025). The percentage leads in the hierarchy table are my arithmetic from Tom’s Hardware’s published averages. Prices are Newegg search results sorted by lowest price that I read on September 13, 2026 at about 01:30 CDT, taking the cheapest new listing for each GPU, plus Tom’s Hardware’s August 10, 2026 survey of median Newegg prices. The VRAM figures are my own: whole-card memory reported by nvidia-smi with each model loaded in Ollama 0.32.1 on my RTX 5080 in August 2026, published in the site’s RTX 5080 LLM throughput dataset. Every source was opened on September 13, 2026.
Sources
Update log
  • 2026-09-13 — Ownership added, no figure changed: I owned an RTX 5060 Ti 16GB (covered on the RTX 5060 Ti vs RX 9060 XT page). I did not benchmark it or an RTX 5070 for this page, so every benchmark stays attributed to its source.
Corrections
Spotted an error or a stale number? Email hello@techfuelhq.com. Confirmed corrections are added to the update log above.

About the author

Written by Lowell K. Wood IV, who builds and runs TechFuelHQ from St. Louis, Missouri.