Why AMD's latest drivers make ditching NVIDIA actually worth it

Published Aug 12, 2026, 11:45 AM EDT Monica J. White is a journalist with over a decade of experience in covering technology. She built her first PC nearly 20 years ago, and she has since built and tested dozens of PCs. PC hardware is her main beat, and graphics cards and the GPU market at large are her main area of interest, but she has written thousands of articles covering everything related to PCs, laptops, handhelds, and peripherals. From GPUs and CPUs to headsets and software, Monica's always willing to geek out over all things related to computing. Outside of her work with How-To Geek, Monica contributes to TechRadar, PC Gamer, Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, SlashGear, Whop, and Digital Trends, among others. Her ultimate goal is to make PC gaming and computing approachable and fun to any audience. Monica spends a lot of time elbow-deep in her PC case, as she's always making upgrades, testing something, or plotting out her next build. She's the go-to tech support person in her immediate circle, so she's never out of things to do. Whenever she has spare time, you'll find her gaming until the early hours and hanging out with her dog. The GPU market is a hellscape right now, and Nvidia's RTX 50 Super isn't coming to save us all (not that it would even if it did arrive). If you want a new GPU, my advice is not to get one. But what if you're desperate? Please, don't default to Nvidia. I own an Nvidia GPU in my main PC and an AMD GPU in another computer, but if I were shopping now, I'd either get an Intel Arc B580 (yes, really) or try AMD. Its latest drivers and updates make it worth revisiting. Older cards finally support FSR 4.1 Sure, there are caveats, but I'll take it! AMD had one strong upside compared to Nvidia: its FSR tech wasn't locked to a particular generation of GPUs. That changed with the release of FSR 4, which became an RX 9000-series exclusive. AMD cited hardware-based reasons for this change: FSR 4 relies on the second-gen AI accelerators found in RDNA 4, so it couldn't work on RDNA 3 (or older, obviously). That felt final at the time, but I always hoped it'd change, and my hopes weren't in vain. AMD opened up FSR 4 Upscaling 4.1 for the RX 7000 series earlier this year, proving that it was possible. We already knew it sort of worked, as many users reported using FSR 4 on cards as old as the RX 6000 series (or even cards that weren't made by AMD). Alas, without official support, this secret knowledge remained largely that -- secret -- until AMD dropped the news. Just upscaling and no improved frame gen may not seem like much, but it's still a big deal. Better upscaling alone, as a free download with no forced GPU upgrades, is still pretty huge even if you don't get the frame gen to sweeten the pot. Of course, there are some caveats. RDNA 3.5 APUs and handhelds didn't make the cut, and the rest of the Redstone stack, including Ray Regeneration and Radiance Caching, remains RDNA 4-exclusive. But hey, who doesn't love a free upgrade? AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT AMD's 16GB RX 9060 XT is a solid bet if you want a midrange card with some future-proofing (thanks to all that VRAM). The FSR override does what the game devs never got to do Although some people found their ways Credit: Collektiva | Makerworld One more huge deal! You don't actually need the game devs to painstakingly update every game to support FSR 4. You just set a supported title to FSR 3.1 and use the FSR override to use the latest version at the DLL level. This is important, because historically, support for FSR has been a little spotty compared to Nvidia's DLSS. At the very least, the adoption's not been as fast. If every game studio had to make the change by itself, many gamers would be locked out, but AMD's workaround is more universal than that. ... Well, except for the override to work, the game needs to be a DX12 title with a signed FSR 3.1 DLL integrated to AMD's guidelines. Vulkan titles and third-party plugin implementations won't make the cut here. AMD got Advanced Shader Delivery, and it works on older GPUs, too Speedy speedy loading times Credit: Justin Duino / How-To Geek Advanced Shader Delivery is a Microsoft thing, and it fixes one of the most annoying bits of loading games: compiling shaders. Honestly, if I had a penny for each time Hogwarts Legacy was stuck on compiling shaders even though they've been compiled before, I'd have a good amount of pennies. This feature lets your CPU skip building thousands of shaders on the spot; instead it receives precompiled versions alongside the game download. Pretty neat. AMD enabled it recently, across every RDNA generation, and that includes even the old(ish) RX 5000 and RX 6000 cards. AMD's own test had Forza Horizon 6 loading in mere seconds instead of a minute and a half. Now, the best part is that Nvidia doesn't support this yet. It's rare for AMD to beat Nvidia to the punch, but it truly did just that here. Local AI on Radeon isn't so bad anymore Nvidia still pulls ahead, but not by so much Credit: Ismar Hrnjicevic / How-To Geek Most people who dabble in local AI or ML will tell you that Radeon cards are problematic in that regard. It's not that they're bad; they just require so much setup and a lot of out-of-the-box thinking. Nvidia and AI go very well together, on the other hand. But AMD's AI bundle from earlier this year helps with local AI setup a whole lot. You tick a checkbox and it'll set up PyTorch, Comfy UI, Ollama, LM Studio, and Amuse for you. You'll just need a fairly new GPU for this to work. I won't pretend the gap has been erased, though. Nvidia's CUDA still owns the market, and it's hard to see that changing anytime soon, but I'm always happy to see AMD catch up. AMD is great, but is it perfect? Nvidia is the Goliath to AMD's David Credit: Ismar Hrnjicevic / How-To Geek AMD's been the underdog for as long as I can remember. Looking at market share, it still is, but I don't see it that way anymore -- Team Red's made great strides in the last few years. Nvidia still dominates on performance, sure. It also has a much more robust GPU lineup right now, and it's better at ray tracing and AI workloads. But its pricing is even more outrageous than AMD's, with the RTX 5090 selling for north of $4,000. With that said, AMD has its downsides. Outside of what I just mentioned, it's still hard to treat it as a value pick with a flagship that sells $200+ over the MSRP. If you know you'll need something better, you're forced to spend $1,000 on the RTX 5070 Ti, though. AMD is easier to recommend now, but my opinion remains unchanged This is why my advice remains largely the same as it's been this entire year: Don't buy a GPU. Seriously, if you can wait, do. But if you can't? Try AMD. It's never been a better time. PowerColor Hellhound AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT Graphics RAM Size 16GB Brand PowerColor If you need a more powerful GPU, the RX 9070 XT is the best you can get from AMD -- and it is actually better value than Nvidia's RTX 5070 Ti.