Should I buy AMD or NVIDIA GPUs this Black Friday 2026?

Question

im really stressing about this build ive been saving up for like a year now and black friday is coming up and i just dont know which way to go. i saw some benchmarks saying nvidia is still king for like professional work and stuff and i do some light video editing for my job but then i read on a forum that amd is way better value for just pure gaming performance and they give you way more vram which sounds better for the long term right? my budget is around 750 bucks and im staying on windows but im worried if i go amd ill miss out on the fancy ray tracing stuff or if nvidia is just overpriced marketing... should i stick with the reliability of nvidia or is amd actually the play in 2026?

rubberpenguin · Accepted Answer

Just make sure you double-check your power supply first. At $750:AMD Radeon RX 8800 XTNVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Get it professionally installed if you are not sure.

mooncereal · Answer

I've been through three or four of these cycle shifts now — honestly it feels like every other year we have this exact debate — and I've learned the hard way that "future-proofing" is mostly just a marketing trap. > im worried if i go amd ill miss out on the fancy ray tracing stuff or if nvidia is just overpriced marketing... Look, I tried an all-AMD build about four years ago and the drivers were... well, let's just say I spent more time troubleshooting than actually playing anything. Things have definitely changed since then, but if you're doing any video editing (even light stuff for work), Nvidia's CUDA is just more reliable. If you can find a deal, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16GB is probably the sweet spot for that budget — wait, no — if you really want that VRAM cushion for gaming, look at the AMD Radeon RX 8900 GRE 16GB. Just don't overthink the ray tracing; it's cool, but you'll barely notice it after an hour of playing.