We’ve compared and ranked all the major consumer GPUs from Nvidia and AMD, starting with the fastest graphics card you can buy.
When it comes to gaming PCs, nothing matters more than your graphics card. To push as many pixels as possible you’re going to want the fastest graphics card you can afford—but ever-shifting prices and product lineups make it difficult to keep track of what’s available. We’ve verified this information through hours of blood, sweat, and benchmarking. Feel free to hit up the individual reviews to see our work in greater detail. Or, if you want more concrete buying advice for your specific budget or display resolution, be sure to read our guide to the best graphics cards for gaming. It provides much more information than this simple list, complete with discussion about considerations like value, various form factors, and what to look for in a customized model. But if you just want to know if GPU A is faster than GPU B, starting with the current consumer gaming champion, read on. The higher up a graphics card is on this list, the faster and more powerful it is. The extravagant GeForce RTX 3090 is a poor value for pure gamers, but a stunning value for creators who can use its massive 24GB of memory. Nvidia’s Founders Edition cooler is exceptional. The fantastic Radeon RX 6900 XT goes toe-to-toe with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3090 for $500 less, but doesn’t carve out a strong position for itself. Most pure gamers should opt for the Radeon RX 6800 XT instead, while content creators and performance enthusiasts might find the 3090 more compelling. The GeForce RTX 3080 delivers a staggering performance upgrade over its predecessor. It lets you play at 1440p and 4K resolution without compromises, even with ray tracing and DLSS enabled. It takes a lot of power, though. Nvidia’s Founders Edition model looks sleek and has a radical cooler, but it offers limited repairability and puts its 12-pin power adapter in an ugly place. The Radeon RX 6800 XT trades blows with the RTX 3080 at 4K and meets or beats it at lower resolutions. It also packs 6GB more memory than Nvidia’s card, all for $50 less. GeForce GPUs hold a ray tracing advantage however. AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 outperforms the RTX 3070 and offers twice as much memory, easily justifying its higher price. It can get even faster paired with a Ryzen 5000 processor, but Nvidia’s rival GeForce GPUs hold a ray tracing advantage.
