The battle between AMD and NVIDIA rages on eternally, it seems, though it’s rather a one-sided battle in the desktop PC market, where NVIDIA holds something like 95%, and AMD most of what’s left apart from Intel’s (almost) 1%.
But as dominant and popular as NVIDIA is, AMD proponents could always raise the value argument. On a per-dollar basis, you get more value with an AMD card, and even better, you have the benefit of AMD “FineWine” which ensures your card will become even better with time.
What “FineWine” meant—and why it mattered
FineWine was something that AMD fans began to notice during the GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture. Incidentally, the last AMD dedicated GPU I bought was the R9 390, which was of that lineage. Since then, all my AMD GPUs have been embedded in consoles or handheld PCs, but I digress.
The R9 390 is actually a good example of FineWine. Launched in 2015, like many AMD cards, the R9 390 had a rough start, and I sold mine in exchange for a stopgap card in the form of the RTX 2060, because I wanted to play Cyberpunk 2077 on PC, where it wasn’t broken the way it was on consoles. Even though, on paper, the raw power of the RTX 2060 wasn’t much more than a 390, the AMD card’s performance on my (then) 1080p monitor was a stuttery mess, whereas everything suddenly ran great on my 2060 the minute the AMD GPU was expunged from the system.
But, a decade later, that same game is perfectly playable on this card, as you can see in this TechLabUK video.
A lot of it is because the developers have kept patching and improving the game, but this is something you see across the board for AMD cards on various games. This is FineWine. Years later, with continued driver updates from AMD, the cards go from being a little worse than their NVIDIA equivalent at launch to being as good or even a little better in the long run.
Of course, that’s not super helpful to customers who buy hardware at launch, but it has given some AMD users computers with longer lifespans than you’d think, and made many used AMD cards an even better bargain.
Why AMD’s FineWine era worked
A bit of smoke and mirrors
FineWine wasn’t magic, of course. The phenomenon was the result of a mix of factors. AMD’s architectures were in some cases a little too forward-thinking for the APIs of the day. Massively parallel with a focus on compute, they’d only come into their own with DirectX 12 and more modern games. NVIDIA’s cards at the time were better optimized to run current games well. Over time, NVIDIA cards would make similar architectural changes, but with better timing.
The other reason FineWine was a thing came down to driver maturity. As a much smaller company with fewer resources, it seems that AMD had some trouble releasing cards with optimized drivers. So, over time, the card would start performing as intended.
In both cases, you could frame FineWine not as the card getting better, but rather getting “less worse” over time. If you set the bar low at launch, the only way is up. However, there’s a third factor to take into account as well. AMD dominates console gaming. The two major home console series have now run on AMD GPUs for two generations, and so games are developed with that hardware in mind. This also gives newer titles a bit of a leg up, though it’s hard to know exactly by how much.
How AMD moved on from FineWine
It seems worse, but it’s actually better
With the shift to RDNA architecture, AMD made a deliberate change in philosophy. Modern Radeon GPUs are designed to perform well right out of the gate. Reviews on day one are much closer to what you could expect years later. There are still decent gains to be had on RDNA cards with game-specific optimizations (Spider-Man on PC is a great example), but the golden age of FineWine seems to be in the past now.
That’s a good thing! Products should put their best foot forward on day one, so let’s not shed a tear for FineWine in that regard. So it’s not so much that AMD doesn’t care about improving the performance and stability of older cards over the years, it’s that the company is now better at its job, and so there’s less room for improvement.
- Cooling Method
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Air
- GPU Speed
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2520Mhz
The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT from Sapphire features 16GB of DDR6 memory, two HDMI and two DisplayPorts, and an overengineered cooling setup that will keep the card cool and whisper quiet no matter the workload.
NVIDIA kept the idea—but changed the formula
It’s all about AI
It’s funny, but these days I think of NVIDIA cards as the ones with major longevity. Take the venerable GTX 1080 and 1080 Ti cards. These cards only lost game-ready driver support in 2025, which doesn’t immediately make them useless, it just means no more optimization for those chips. What an incredible run, getting a decade of relevant game performance from a GPU!
But, that’s not really NVIDIA’s take on FineWine. Instead, the company has taken to adding new and better features to its cards long after they’ve been launched. Starting with the 20-series, the presence of machine-learning hardware means that by improving the AI algorithms for technologies like DLSS, these cards have become more performant with better image quality over time.
While NVIDIA has made some features of its AI technology exclusive to each generation, so far all post 10-series GPUs benefit from every new generation of DLSS. Compare that to AMD which not only offers inferior versions of this new upscaling technology, but has locked the better, more usable versions to later cards, such as the case with FSR Redstone.
FineWine is an ethos, not a brand
In the case of my humble RTX 4060 laptop, the release of DLSS 4.5 has opened new possibilities, notably the ability to target a 4K output resolution, which was certainly not on the table when I first took this computer out of the box. We might not call it “FineWine,” but it sure smells like it to me!
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
