Last year I jumped at a really good sale on an Odyssey G5 34" Ultrawide monitor. I'm not an ultrawide snob, but I was using dual 27" 1440P 165hz monitors on dual arm Vesa mount and wanted to swap and reduce the screen clutter and wall mount to free my desk space/monitor overhang.

First impressions were great - I don't want/need an OLED or super color accuracy - I game in a light controlled office and don't pay much attention to backlighting. The limited HDR support is nice in certain use cases but overall I was quite happy!

Then came the gaming; I tested the new aspect ratio on a couple of games, which were nice but had a noticeable drop in frames of about 10-15% - a reasonable tradeoff for 33% more pixels displayed, but in some games it made it unplayable.

Rust.... bane of my existence but my 4800 hours in it makes it a "comfort" game - but immediately I noticed it was unplayable. 20-30fps highs on my usual settings, and barely hitting 60-70 fps in potato settings until I'm near a larger base or gunfight. I was committed to the monitor, so I shelved Rust for six months and have enjoyed other titles with; while reduced quality settings enjoyable fidelity and stable.

The limitation in the 8gb graphics card and the woeful optimization of Rust just tells me I've got two choices; upgrade to an RTX 5070 Founders Edition which I can get at MSRP locally (lots of stock) - or find someone to swap ultrawide monitors with and drop to 1080p.

Specs are;

Ryzen 5900X
RTX3070 Founders edition
32GB Ram

My rig is nearly five years old now, but I feel like the 5070 while an improvement will still be irrelevant in short time and I'm just trying to buy myself a bit more time with my existing rig, potentially through to the next gen cards.

I don't have the case capacity to go with a larger card, limited to 270mm length.

So the debate I have, is

A) Buy a 5070 - ride out my hardware and monitor for three years and then build a new system
Trade locally for a 1080P Ultrawide and return some frames to my "normal" and wait it out.

What would you do?

5070 is fine

Just drop your textures and RT settings if Vram is running our

But yes you're right. It will be an obsolete card in a few years because games now are designed to work with 16gbs of vram

Your other option is an RX 9070
They're actually quite good and it will last longer

I've considered this card, it just won't fit my case dimensions. My build is nearly 5 years old, an a small form for even its time. The only recent gen card that fits is the 5070, which is why I'm just thinking I'll push the upgrade out for a couple of years and build new.

I'm more than happy with the life I've gotten from my setup, and I realistically wouldn't have noticed the drop off had I not changed monitors.
First world problems

save your money for a whole new system-- ride it out with your current setup, even if you have to turn settings all the way down or move to 1080p; i think this is the best move.