The GeForce RTX 50-series desktop graphics lineup has remained unchanged for just over a year now (since the introduction of the RTX 5050), and none of the conversations we've had at major trade shows suggests that a mid-cycle Super refresh will occur any time soon. But there are still signs that such an update could still happen at some point, and the latest sign comes from Seasonic, which has listed an RTX 5080 Super, an RTX 5070 Ti Super, and RTX 5070 Ti Super in its PSU wattage calculator.

You can click through the calculator and assemble a hypothetical system with these unannounced products inside.

To be useful, this calculator also provides board power numbers for these as-yet-unreleased cards, and that gives us another bit of juicy info. Given that no official specifications for these GPUs exist, it's impossible to say whether these figures are accurate. But it does allow us to speculate a bit on how they might stack up to existing products.

*As listed in Seasonic PSU calculator. Unconfirmed by Nvidia.

Seasonic gives this purported RTX 5080 Super a board power of 415W in its calculator, or 15% higher than the existing RTX 5080's 360W envelope. That makes sense, because the RTX 5080's GB203 GPU is already fully enabled, so any Super version of that card would have to lean on higher power limits and more aggressive clock speeds to see any baseline performance benefit.

That figure could also partially account for slightly higher power usage from 8 GB more GDDR7 memory on such a card. Past RTX 50 Super-series rumors have suggested that Nvidia will boost VRAM capacity on those products by moving to higher-density GDDR7 modules with 3GB of capacity each. GDDR7's power consumption as part of the overall board picture is relatively small, but more of it will still matter.

If Seasonic's figures are accurate, we should also expect a similarly sized TGP increase out of the RTX 5070 Ti Super, whose 350W rating is 17% higher than that of the RTX 5070 Ti. The RTX 5070 Super, meanwhile, gets only a 10% TGP bump over the RTX 5070, from 250W to 275W. Both of these cards rely on GPUs that are slightly cut down from their full available resources, so it's possible that Nvidia could boost their performance through a balance of enabling more Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) in addition to boosting clocks through higher power envelopes.

Beware of extrapolating performance improvements directly from these percentages, though. Our own testing has shown that any real-world performance benefits from these power limit increases are likely to be smaller than those figures would suggest.

As our review of the MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z showed, the largest performance boosts from higher power limits are likely to be concentrated in ray-traced and path-traced games, whose computational intensity is significantly higher than pure raster titles and is more likely to run the GPU into its power limits.

In any event, we shouldn't expect to see these products any time soon. Nvidia has instead been focused on getting more out of existing Blackwell silicon with software improvements such as DLSS 4.5 upscaling and Multi-Frame Generation multipliers up to 6X.

These technologies enable higher output frame rates and image quality with lower input resolution than past DLSS technologies, and the boost to both performance and image quality from those technologies in tandem has certainly made existing Blackwell products more appealing than they were at launch.

But as monitor refresh rates continue to climb thanks to ongoing improvements to OLED and LCD panels, and next-generation HDMI 2.2 connectors looming over 2027, a hardware update of some kind that boosts baseline performance and potentially implements support for those standards seems practical at some point. Given these primarily consumer-focused improvements, an announcement at CES 2027 or Computex 2027 might make sense. As with any future product rumors, however, only time will truly tell.

Back at CES 2026, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that "it's a good idea" to consider reintroducing older GeForce RTX graphics cards with GPUs from trailing-edge nodes to alleviate pricing and availability concerns around cutting-edge RTX 50-series products. It appears that the idea may now have become reality. After a hiatus that began late last year, RTX 3060 12GB cards (first launched in early 2021) are beginning to reappear as new stock at e-tailers.

We've spotted a Gigabyte RTX 3060 12GB card available direct from new stock at Newegg for $339.99, or just $10 above its MSRP from over five years ago. This Windforce card is a straightforward dual-fan model with no frills, but tellingly, it carries a rare Rev2.0 suffix, directly indicating a revision or new model of some kind. That revision number aside, it's identical (as far as we can tell) to the Rev1.0 card that presumably appeared nearer to the RTX 3060 12GB's launch.

It appears that different board partners are working to quietly bring back the RTX 3060 12GB worldwide, as ComputerBase notes the availability of an Asus Dual card in the European market. We wouldn't be surprised if that product makes its way Stateside, as well.

Gamers may have hoped that the reintroduction of an older product from a foundry and a process node that isn't capacity-constrained (namely Samsung 8nm), as well as an older memory technology, would have resulted in some pricing relief, but that doesn't appear to be the case.

The RTX 3060 12GB is reappearing for just a few bucks less than the far superior RTX 5060, which offers both stronger baseline performance and unfettered performance with the latest DLSS 4.5 upscaling tech. Heck, even the entry-level RTX 5050 outpaces the RTX 3060 in our most recent tests.

The 3060's extra 4GB of VRAM compared to those products only comes into play with settings and resolutions where its shader horsepower is already inadequate to produce playable frame rates, so it's more of a psychological advantage than a practical one.

So why this product and why now? As AI wafer demand on cutting-edge nodes only grows, it's possible that simple economics dictate that the opportunity cost of producing entry-level Blackwell GPUs for the desktop is simply too great compared to the revenue and margin opportunities of making data center Rubin GPUs for the countless Vera Rubin NVL72 racks that the company is doubtless planning to ship later this year.

In the event that Nvidia does prioritize datacenter products over consumer ones, the already elevated prices of entry-level RTX 50-series cards might give way to a situation where one simply can't buy these lower-priced, lower-margin products at any cost. And in that event, the aging RTX 3060 could be one of the few sub-$350 options available to gamers who need to build a new system or upgrade from an aging graphics card.

And frankly, that's a poor outcome for gamers, as the RTX 3060 can't run the latest DLSS 4.5 upscaling model at its full potential due to the lack of proper FP8 acceleration on older Turing and Ampere GPUs. And it can't run DLSS Frame Generation at all, leaving gamers to deal with cross-platform solutions like FSR and XeSS frame generation from other vendors. Those technologies are incredibly useful tools in getting the best experience out of modern games, and if they're only available on a smaller subset of more expensive GPUs, that further stratifies the already stratified modern PC gaming experience.

We've reached out to Gigabyte and Nvidia for comment on the reappearance of the RTX 3060 and will report what we learn if we hear back.

Earlier this week, we reported on the Green Team officially retiring the creaky Nvidia Control Panel (NVCP), with all its major settings adjustments claimed to have been ported to the Nvidia App. Throughout its tenure, this long-in-the-tooth piece of graphics settings software stuck resolutely to the classic non-themed Win32 controls style, but we know there will be holdouts and those who miss it for one reason or another. Thankfully, Nvidia has left an NVCP installer in the Microsoft Store, for now. Let’s look closer at whether it is worth a separate download in mid-2026.

To be clear, you will still need to download a modern Nvidia graphics driver to use the separately available NVCP. The familiar control panel software that is now available via the Microsoft Store is simply a controls access UI - one that has now been relegated to a secondary, optional choice.

For existing Nvidia graphics card users, you probably won’t have to go out of your way to grab the old NVCP from the Microsoft Store. It should normally persist from previous driver installs and updates, unless you opt for a ‘clean install’ from now on.

Possibly the primary reason you will want to keep a copy of the NVCP handy is the updated Nvidia Apps’ missing “professional features.” From my nosing at the information available, RTX Pro / Quadro features - things like offering adjustments to Mosaic, Sync, stereo, and a few pro‑workflow toggles - are yet to be migrated. So, modern GeForce gamers shouldn’t worry about hanging onto NVCP for functionality.

Even if you don’t need the handful of missing features in new vs old, some folks will want to keep using the NVCP due to familiarity with Nvidia’s older lightweight settings software.

We’d also be tempted to download or keep a shortcut to the NVCP handy in case upcoming software from Nvidia messes up the controls accessible in the Nvidia App. The Green Team’s software has come under fire for a string of buggy releases lately. In the likely scenario that Nvidia will ship an upcoming version of its Windows drivers with some feature-breaking wrinkles or crashing issues, the NVCP might be handy for fallback or troubleshooting.

Nvidia announced its financial results for the first quarter of its fiscal year 2027 on Wednesday, posting a whopping $81.615 billion in revenue, marking its best quarter ever. Sales of the company’s AI platforms to various customers were record, prompting the company to reconsider how it reports its earnings going forward. From now on, the company will no longer report sales of its consumer graphics cards — whether for gaming or professional workloads — as separate product categories. Instead, GPU sales will be reported under different categories.

For the quarter that ended on April 28, 2027, Nvidia's GAAP revenue totaled $81.615 billion, up 20% sequentially and up 85% compared to the same quarter a year ago. Nvidia’s net income topped $58.321 billion, up 211% year-over-year (YoY) as its gross margin reached 74.9%. Sales of Nvidia’s Compute & Networking hardware hit $74.55 billion (an all-time record), whereas sales of its graphics hardware totaled $7.065 billion, up 20% sequentially and 85% year-over-year.

New reporting framework

Selling $81.615 billion worth of hardware in a single quarter is, without any doubt, an incredible achievement. However, a more startling revelation is that Nvidia will cease to report sales of gaming and professional graphics cards as separate categories, which emphasizes once again that Nvidia's primary business now is artificial intelligence and data center hardware, not graphics.

Instead of its traditional product categories, Nvidia will now split its revenue based on deployment markets. Going forward, the company will report two main platforms: Data Center and Edge Computing. Within Data Center, Nvidia is splitting revenue into two major sub-segments: Hyperscale, which includes hyperscale cloud providers and large internet companies (AWS, Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc.), and ACIE (AI Clouds, Industrial, and Enterprise), which covers enterprise AI factories, industrial deployments, sovereign AI deployments, supercomputing, and other deployments not controlled by hyperscalers. Edge Computing will include PCs, workstations, robotics, automotive, gaming consoles, and telecom infrastructure.

Splitting its data center segment into two major sub-segments — hyperscalers and ACIE —makes a lot of sense for Nvidia. Hyperscalers tend to deploy custom silicon, own AI accelerators, or hardware from competitors, which limits Nvidia's growth in this segment. By contrast, there are thousands of participants in the broad ACIE category, virtually all of whom can take advantage of Nvidia's rack-scale platform-based approach, and almost none of them can afford development of custom silicon, which means limitless growth for Nvidia. As a result, Jensen Huang repeatedly emphasized that the ACIE category eventually becomes larger than hyperscale simply because AI is going to become ubiquitous and there are thousands of companies to address.

The 'new' results

As Nvidia will from now on report its revenue split differently, the company had to re-report results across the new market platforms for previous physical years. One interesting observation is that the ACIE segment was outperforming the hyperscale segment till Q2 FY2026, when large CSPs began to deploy Nvidia's GB300 platform for inference, spending tens of billions of dollars per quarter. Now, the ACIE platform has almost caught up.

In the first quarter of its fiscal 2027, hyperscalers bought $37.869 billion worth of hardware from Nvidia, revenue from the ACIE segment reached $37.377 billion, whereas sales of edge computing hardware totaled $6.369 billion. Meanwhile, as noted above, while the bulk of Nvidia's revenue today comes from sales of compute and networking hardware, the company also sells graphics processors, but going forward, those sales will be reported as part of other segments. For example, sales of graphics hardware topped $7.065 billion in Q1 FY2027, which by far exceeds sales of the edge computing segment and strongly suggests that Nvidia now considers graphics as part of multiple newly established market platforms.

Outlook: $100 billion per quarter approaching

For the second quarter of fiscal 2027, Nvidia expects revenue of about $91 billion ± 2%. The company does not expect to ship any AI hardware to China. Gross margins are projected at around 74.9% on a GAAP basis. Nvidia expects GAAP operating expenses of roughly $8.5 billion.

With the prices of memory and storage at record highs, the amount of laptop you get for the money has shrunk significantly. We've used our knowledge and experience, informed by our extensive testing and benchmarking program, to find the best available gaming and productivity laptops on sale for under $1,000 to help you find the right laptop for you. We're updating this page constantly with the best deals available, but be aware that these deals often expire quickly, so you'll need to act fast.

A giant desktop gaming PC isn't for everyone! Price, space, and portability are negatives of a giant desktop gaming rig. These are things a compact and powerful gaming or productivity laptop can help to solve, especially if you can get your hands on one for under $1,000. There are, of course, obvious compromises that you'll need to make if you're going to try to find a budget machine. Things like dedicated graphics, the amount of onboard RAM, storage space, and even the size and quality of the screen and chassis.

Apple has jumped to the rescue with the likes of the MacBook Neo, but Windows users haven't been as lucky as of late. For gaming laptops, you're going to be looking at the lower end of GPUs from Nvidia's RTX 5050 and even graphics chips from older generations. The same goes for the processors used. Expect to see previous-gen CPUs in lower-priced laptops that are available for under $1,000.

Best Gaming and Productivity Laptops Under $1,000: Quick Links

• Amazon: Top gaming laptops under $1,000 at Amazon
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Best Gaming and Productivity Laptops Under $1,000

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Gaming laptops can be pricey, and in the past few years, they have only gotten more expensive. The components inside laptops have gotten more expensive, the market below $1,000 has effectively been decimated, and finding a good deal is harder than ever. But we're still testing, and while the goal posts of what defines a budget gaming laptop may be a bit more expensive than they used to be, there are still ways to save.

At Tom's Hardware, we test many gaming laptops every year at a range of prices with different features and parts, so we know what to expect at every price point, no matter what your budget. While even the budget gaming laptops may not be cheap, we can still point out where you get the most for your money. We thoroughly benchmark all of the best budget gaming laptops in numerous games, extensively measuring gaming performance under a wide range of graphical conditions to suss out the best cheap laptops on the market.

Most gaming laptops under $1,500 will use Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5050 and RTX 5060 graphics cards. Many of them will use the latest Intel Core Ultra or AMD Ryzen mobile processors, though sometimes you'll still find last-gen options. Above $1,500 (which, unfortunately, is still on the low end with all-new components these days), you should have the latest. That being said, don't cut corners so far that you settle for 8GB of RAM or just 256GB of storage. Those are outdated specs for gaming laptops.

With a budget gaming laptop, you'll be able to play most games — even graphically intensive ones — on medium or high settings, if not better. If you're playing lighter games, like esports, you should still be able to achieve high frame rates.

Best Budget Gaming Laptops You Can Buy

Best budget gaming laptop overall

The Acer Nitro V 16S AI is, as of this writing, typically selling around $1,500. This laptop is great for those who are willing to trade off some gaming performance for a bright and colorful screen and a ton of ports, including a microSD card slot.

Those ports, paired with a speedy storage drive in our tests, make the Nivro V 16S AI a solid productivity machine alongside one that can play most games. Acer is using an RTX 5060 with an 85W graphics card, so it's not the most performant system out there, but it's well-balanced if you're going to use just one laptop for gaming, work, or school.

The 16-inch, 1920 x 1200 IPS screen goes up to 180 Hz, allowing for smooth gameplay for esports and indie games. Our system came with a 1TB storage drive, which should hold a few games, and there's room to add another inside. It also came with 32GB of RAM, which should be a bit future-proof.

There is a bunch of bloatware that you'll probably want to uninstall, and the webcam is just 720p.

Read: Acer Nitro V 16S AI review

Best budget gaming laptop for work and play

We had previously seen this laptop as high as $1,800, but lately it's been on sale closer to $1,500. The machine is another good mix of productivity and gaming. Like many other budget systems, it's using an 85W GPU (in this case, an RTX 5070), which means you won't get the most powerful gaming performance.What it does allow for, however, is strong battery life, lasting 9 hours and 13 minutes on our test. We also found the keyboard and touchpad to be quite comfortable.

The Ryzen AI 7 350 is a recent chip, and one that offers strong productivity performance, should you be using this system for work other than just gaming.It would have been nice to see Wi-Fi 7 at this system's full price, though on sale, Wi-Fi 6E is more forgivable. That being said, the display and audio are both middling, so this may be best if you use a monitor or speakers to bump up your experience.

Read: Gigabyte Aero X16 review

Best for battery life

If you want something a bit more minimalist, the Alienware 16 Aurora, the gaming brand's stripped-down machine, may work for you. This one has been consistently available.

The Aurora has an attractive chassis that mixes its plastic body with an alumium lid. The indigo color seems almost black, but has a navy shimmer in the right light.

The biggest benefits we saw were in the 16-inch, 2560 x 1600 IPS display, which goes up to 120 Hz. That screen was brighter and far more vivid (112% of sRGB color volume, 312.2 nits) in our measurements compared to other budget machines.

We also appreciated the Aurora's 96 WHr battery, which helped the system last for 9 hours and 41 minutes on our battery test.

The 80W RTX 5060 is fairly low-power, which might help with the longevity, but means you'l have to set your expectations while gaming. Additionally, the storage could be faster, though you could consider swapping that out down the line.

Read: Alienware 16 Aurora review

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What to Expect From the Best Budget Laptops for Gaming

Shipments of discrete graphics cards for desktop PCs last year were the second highest in this decade and increased by nearly 10 million units to around 44.28 million in 2025 compared to 2024, according to Jon Peddie Research. However, the vast majority of graphics boards sold last year carried a GeForce GPU from Nvidia, whereas sales of AMD Radeon-badged cards hit an all-time low, based on data from JPR.

The industry shipped 44.28 million graphics cards in calendar 2025, up from 34.7 million units in 2024, mainly because Nvidia released its GeForce RTX 50-series graphics processors based on the Blackwell architecture. Sales of standalone graphics cards for desktops peaked in Q3, when the industry supplied 12 million units, and were slightly down sequentially in Q4, when makers of add-in-boards (AIBs) shipped 11.48 million units, which was still up from 8.4 million units year-over-year. Traditionally, graphics card sales for desktops peak in Q4 as gamers prep for the release of new games. However, this was not the case in 2025 due to a variety of reasons.

"The AIB market, largely supported by gamers, is being squeezed from the bottom by powerful new notebooks and CPU integrated graphics, and from the high end by rising pricing due to competition (supply and demand), memory prices, and Trump administration tariffs that bounce around," explained Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research.

When it comes to market share, Nvidia dominated the market throughout the whole of 2025 as it entered the year with a 92% share in Q1 and exited the year with a 94% share in Q4 (gaining 1.6% in the fourth quarter alone). By contrast, AMD shipped 8% of graphics cards in the first quarter of 2025 as it was getting ready to launch its Radeon RX 9000-series GPUs and exited the year with a 5% share in Q4 as these products failed to garner popularity among the target audience, perhaps due to scarce availability at recommended prices early in the lifecycle.

A 5% share of the desktop AIB market is the lowest share that AMD or ATI Technologies has ever had. The company can, of course, boast of a significant share of the integrated GPU market, as nearly all Ryzen processors for desktops carry an iGPU, but this is an entirely different market that is far less loyal or lucrative than the market for standalone graphics cards for desktops.

As Nvidia was gaining market share throughout 2025, while AMD was losing it, the company's unit shipments also dropped from 0.74 million in the first quarter to 0.57 million units in the fourth quarter. Again, selling 570,000 graphics cards in a quarter is the lowest result for both AMD and its predecessor, ATI.

When it comes to Intel, although the company released some new Arc graphics cards based on the Battlemage architecture, they were mostly targeted at select niches, which is why Intel has not gained any market share in 2025.

Due to constrained supply of GPUs, high GDDR memory prices, and geopolitical uncertainties, the market of graphics cards for desktops will decline by 10% year-over-year, according to Jon Peddie Research.

"Customers who would, and in some cases should, be replacing their PCs and AIB are holding off," Peddie added. "We think because of these unstable conditions, the PC and AIB market will decline almost 10% in 2026."

The chief executive of Nvidia warned that the supply of gaming graphics cards will be tight in the first half of the company's fiscal year, and it has limited visibility for the second half of the year. Given the short supply of gaming graphics cards for desktops and gaming GPUs for laptops, expect gaming hardware to come at elevated prices.

 "As much as we would love to have more supply, we do believe for a couple of quarters it is going to be very tight," said Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, during the company's earnings call with financial analysts and investors. "If things improve by the end of the year, there is an opportunity to think about what that is from a year-over-year growth, but it is still too early for us to know at this time. We will get back to you as soon as we can."

The head of Nvidia did not elaborate whether the tight supply of gaming hardware will be a result of insufficient supply of actual graphics processors, as Nvidia diverts its reserved wafer fabrication capacity at TSMC from gaming GPUs to more lucrative data center AI GPUs, or a result of insufficient supply of GDDR7 memory as DRAM makers choose to produce silicon-intensive and expensive HBM3E over GDDR7 SGRAM.

Sales of graphics processing units (GPUs) for gaming and professional visualization applications brought Nvidia $19.233 billion last fiscal year as the company sold $16.042 billion worth of GeForce graphics processors (up 41% compared to FY2025) and $3.191 billion worth of professional graphics solutions (up 70% year-over-year).

Prices of graphics cards for desktop computers have been increasing for some time. Despite this, demand for GeForce graphics boards last year was stronger than in 2024 and 2023 as Nvidia ramped up production of its GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs based on the Blackwell architecture.

While we still have yet to see how many Blackwell GPUs for gaming Nvidia shipped in calendar 2025, based on data from Jon Peddie Research, Nvidia shipped approximately 30.4 million desktop GPUs in the first three quarters of 2025, which is around 200 thousand more than the 30.2 million desktop GPUs the company sold through the whole of 2024. Typically, unit sales of gaming GPUs for laptops tend to match unit sales of gaming GPUs for desktops. By contrast, shipments of AMD's Radeon graphics cards for desktops dropped dramatically last year.

In any case, the chief exec of Nvidia has warned gamers about a short supply of graphics cards in the coming quarters, which almost certainly means high prices and limited choice.

Nvidia on Wednesday posted its financial results for the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2026 and for the whole year. Driven by unprecedented demand for AI platforms, the company's Q4 FY2026 revenue reached $68.127 billion, Nvidia's highest quarterly result ever, whereas for the whole year, Nvidia earned $215.938 billion, the highest annual result ever. But while sales of AI compute and networking hardware set records, sales of gaming hardware dropped quarter-over-quarter (QoQ).

For the quarter that ended on January 31, 2026, Nvidia's GAAP revenue totaled $68.127 billion, up 20% sequentially and up 73% compared to the same quarter a year before. The company's net income reached $42.96 billion, up 94% year-over-year (YoY) as its gross margin topped 75%. As for the whole year, Nvidia earned $215.938 billion in revenue (up 65% from $130.497 billion) amid $116.997 billion net revenue (up 58% from $74.265 billion) and a 71.3% margin.

Data center hardware sales set new record: $68.127 billion

Nvidia's data center business accounted for the lion's share of its revenue both in Q4 FY2026 and for the whole fiscal year. For the quarter, the company earned $62.314 billion, including $51.334 billion for CPUs and GPUs (up 58% YoY) and $10.98 billion for networking hardware (up 263% YoY), up 75% year-over-year and 22% sequentially. For the whole year, Nvidia's data center business grew 68% to $193.737 billion.

"Computing demand is growing exponentially — the agentic AI inflection point has arrived," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. "Grace Blackwell with NVLink is the king of inference today — delivering an order-of-magnitude lower cost per token — and Vera Rubin will extend that leadership even further. Enterprise adoption of agents is skyrocketing. Our customers are racing to invest in AI compute — the factories powering the AI industrial revolution and their future growth."

Gaming is up 41% year-over-year, but there is a catch

In the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2026, Nvidia sold $3.727 billion worth of gaming GPUs, down 13% sequentially (which is in line with seasonal trends), but up 47% compared to Q4 FY2025. Sales of professional graphics solutions reached $1.321 billion (up 74% QoQ and 47% YoY), while sales of inexpensive graphics processors to OEMs were $161 million.

Nvidia was founded as a developer of graphics processors and even though today its core business is selling AI hardware for data centers, the company still generated $16.042 billion selling gaming GPUs (up 41% YoY), $3.191 billion selling professional visualization (ProViz) graphics solutions (up 70% YoY), and $619 million selling cheap graphics products to OEMs (up 59% YoY) in FY2026. In total, Nvidia earned $22.201 billion selling graphics products in FY2026, which represents 11.45% of its revenue for the whole year.

While Nvidia's gaming GPU business performed in line with seasonality in the fourth quarter, the company warned that the supply of gaming hardware would be tight in the next couple of quarters, which may mean that sales of GeForce products will be down year-over-year in Q1 and Q2 FY2027.

 "As much as we would love to have more supply, we do believe for a couple of quarters it is going to be very tight," Huang said. "If things improve by the end of the year, there is an opportunity to think about what that is from a year-over-year growth, but it is still too early for us to know at this time. We will get back to you as soon as we can."

As for the Automotive business unit, its revenue reached $604 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, which was roughly flat year-over-year, and around $2.349 billion for the whole year, up 39% compared to FY2025.

Q1 FY2027 outlook

For Q1 FY2027, Nvidia projects revenue of $78 billion ± 2%, excluding any contributions from potential sales of data center GPUs to China and including continued sales of Blackwell and Blackwell Ultra platforms to various parties in the West. Gross margin is expected to be 74.9%.

We're keeping an eye out for the lowest-priced GPUs and keeping those listed here for you. The sad state of the memory industry, which is besieged by insanely large memory orders for AI data centers and AI GPUs, has led to increasing prices for gaming graphics cards. Nvidia is purportedly allocating memory based on the amount of money it can make per GB of VRAM, which has made the situation dire for some models. To help you navigate the pricing crisis, we have compiled this GPU index to monitor the availability and pricing of recent graphics card releases from the current and previous generations.

We update this guide constantly with the best prices in the U.S. for each SKU of GPU from the most recent two generations of Nvidia, AMD, and Intel cards. We're listing the lowest price for an available graphics card, regardless of the manufacturer, so it could be an Asus, Zotac, MSI, Sapphire, Gigabyte, Powercolor, or ASRock-branded card, but it will be the cheapest.

A word of warning: with this list, sometimes the retailers switch to third-party sellers automatically. You must be super vigilant and check sellers to ensure legitimacy. For older generation graphics cards, it can often be difficult to find these cards brand-new and on sale from first-party retailers like Amazon, Newegg, and Best Buy, and they are more often than not listed by third parties. Check prices against the current generation of GPUs to understand if you are getting a good deal, or if you're in fact better off paying a little extra for the very latest graphics cards.

Also, check out our list of the best graphics cards and our GPU benchmark hierarchy to see evergreen performance data to help you make an informed decision when choosing a new GPU for your system.

Nvidia RTX 50-Series: Lowest Graphics Cards Prices

The latest 50-series graphics cards from Nvidia include the current most powerful consumer GPU - Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090. The RTX 5090 uses the new Blackwell architecture and comes with a massive 32GB of GDDR7 VRAM, and given the current prioritization for models with lower amounts of VRAM to boost profits, it's a problem getting your hands on one at anything even in the vicinity of a reasonable price.

The 50-series range doesn't have the most impressive gen-on-gen performance uplifts on pure rasterization power compared to the 40-series, but it does support new software and tech such as 5th Gen Tensor cores, 4th Gen Ray Tracing cores, DLSS 4.5 with Multi-Frame Generation tech, and Reflex 2. Some of those technologies, like DLSS and frame gen, can help wring the most performance out of those lower-tier cards with less VRAM.

There are 8GB variants of the RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti, available at near MSRP prices, with the higher-tier GPUs like the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5080 in poor supply at any reasonable price.

Nvidia RTX 40-Series: Lowest Graphics Cards Prices

Nvidia's 40-series Ada Lovelace architecture graphics cards include the powerful GeForce RTX 4090 and 4080 Super. The 4090 combines a massive 24GB of GDDR6X VRAM and Nvidia's 4th generation of Tensor cores for increased ray-tracing ability.

The RTX 40-series cards also feature support for Nvidia's DLSS 3 software for AI frame generation, which helps to increase frame rates on higher resolutions and settings. In general, Nvidia cards are the best choice for ray tracing, with more features than the competition. You'll also generally pay more for Nvidia GPUs relative to similarly performing AMD GPUs.

Unfortunately, RTX 40-series GPUs are no longer being produced, so stock levels have dried up on many card variants. Any available cards for sale have a high chance of being either second-hand or ex-mining hardware, yet still ask for exorbitant prices. Be extra vigilant when shopping for 40-series graphics cards, and buy from a reputable seller. Prices for 40-series cards are also much higher than they should be. They can be a good choice for a second-hand purchase if you can get one at the right price and accept all associated risks.

AMD Radeon RX 9000-Series: Lowest Graphics Cards Prices

AMD's competition to Nvidia includes the Radeon RX 9060, RX 9070, and RX 9070 XT graphics cards with MSRP prices of $269, $549, and $599, respectively. Finding one of these GPUs for that price, however, could prove to be a struggle as prices of Radeon graphics cards rise due to ever-expanding memory price hikes. These new cards go toe-to-toe with Nvidia's RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti and offer a great alternative to Team Green.

The RX 9070 XT comes with 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM for those texture-heavy games and provides a large generational increase compared to RDNA 3. Improvements to AI and ray tracing tech have made this generation of AMD cards perform much better in games with ray tracing, but they still fall behind Nvidia in overall performance for ray/path tracing.

There are also 8GB and 16GB versions of the RX 9060 XT available, and they are selling for a fair price at the moment. However, 8GB of VRAM means the card isn't terribly futureproofed, as game requirements continually grow regarding shader and texture memory requirements.

AMD Radeon RX 7000-Series: Lowest Graphics Cards Prices

AMD's 7000-series GPUs are still a great option for a graphics card in your gaming rig if you can find one at a good price. Not the best choice if you're looking for pure ray-tracing performance, but if you want raw computational performance, they are a winner. Combined with AMD's FSR software, these 7000-series GPUs can still crank out high frame rates in the latest games.

The RX 7900 XTX in particular represents a great blend of power and performance, with it being the halo-tier card from the 7000-series and AMD not replicating a super-high-end card for the 9000-series. The RX 7900 XTX still ranks highly in our GPU Benchmark Hierarchy charts.

Here are all the lowest prices for the 7000-series models currently available.

Intel Arc GPUs: Lowest Graphics Card Prices

Intel's entry into the GPU market has been a little hit-and-miss. In some titles, these cards perform relatively well, but in older DirectX games, the cards suffer from some poor performance issues.

Frequent driver updates have made many improvements to the performance of Intel's Arc lineup and turned them into a much more viable choice for a budget gaming PC build. The prices of these GPUs have hit a price sweet spot that has been abandoned by Nvidia and AMD, especially for 1080p gaming. The Arc series of GPUs should certainly not be discounted when considering any budget gaming system build.

Intel's most recent launches include the Arc B580 and Arc B570, with the cards having 12GB of VRAM for the B580 and 10GB for the B570. Pricing is very competitive with the Intel cards, but the manufacturer's variety is limited, as is stock.

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Reports and rumors of how Nvidia plans to prioritize production of its RTX 50-series graphics cards in 2026 are swirling after a CES with no new consumer GPU launches, followed by reports that the company is ending the production of some RTX 50-series gaming GPUs and moving them to end-of-life status.

We've received a comment from Nvidia on the matter. We also spoke with the CEO of Gigabyte during CES, and his comments provide context about the overall situation and outlined a rather simple calculation that Nvidia could use to determine which GPUs it will prioritize.

We asked Nvidia for comment on the recent news that some models are being cancelled and received the following statement: "Demand for GeForce RTX GPUs is strong, and memory supply is constrained. We continue to ship all GeForce SKUs and are working closely with our suppliers to maximize memory availability."

While that statement suggests that it's full steam ahead for existing RTX 50-series products, there's more to the story. Tom's Hardware's Paul Alcorn was able to sit down with Gigabyte CEO Eddie Lin at CES for a wide-ranging interview that suggests Nvidia will still prioritize production of some of its GPUs over others based on a rather straightforward calculation, and that we should expect some RTX 50-series products to be in relatively short supply as the year progresses.

Lin described Nvidia's potential GPU allocation strategy, which focuses on maximizing profit from the limited memory resource, as follows:

"They cannot produce only high-end or low-end [products]... but they can, for example, they have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, five segments. They focus on 1, 3, and 5, and reduce the percentage on 2 and 4, because on 2 and 4, the revenue contribution per gigabyte of memory is lower. They will calculate how much revenue [each segment] contributes per gigabyte of memory." [Emphasis added]

Lin went on to share the example of a $300 GPU (like the RTX 5060), for which "the memory contributes $35 per GB of revenue, whereas for a $400 8GB GPU, that product would contribute $50 per GB of memory. For a $500 [card] with 16GB of memory, that puts you at only $32 of revenue per GB, then the [contribution] is lower."

Additionally, Lin noted that Gigabyte continues to receive bundled memory from Nvidia with its GPUs. Rumors have swirled that Nvidia is no longer providing board makers with memory, which would portend a dire situation for smaller-scale players if they were forced to buy memory on the open market. Other vendors could be subject to different agreements and conditions with Nvidia, but we haven't received any confirmation from vendors that Nvidia is no longer bundling memory.

Using Lin's framework, we can understand what graphics cards are likely to be prioritized and deprioritized for allocation in 2026. Consider the following table:

At the lower end of the market, the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB contributes $47.38 of gross revenue per gigabyte of GDDR7 compared to the RTX 5060's $37.38, meaning that the 5060 Ti will likely be prioritized for allocation despite its wildly underwhelming initial reception.

The RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is the most threatened card of the bunch by this measure, since as a byproduct of its MSRP and higher VRAM capacity, it contributes just $26.81 of revenue per GB of GDDR7 on board — the lowest of any RTX 50-series card.

Moving up the stack, the RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti contribute the same gross revenue per gigabyte, meaning that the cheaper-to-produce 5070 will likely be favored over its Ti sibling (which uses a bigger, more power-hungry GPU and a more complex board design)—or that both cards are likely to be deprioritized in favor of the more profitable RTX 5060 Ti 8GB.

At the highest end, the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 contribute nearly the same revenue per gig of VRAM, meaning that the RTX 5080 will likely take precedence for allocation of 2GB GDDR7 chips going forward due to its smaller GPU die (half the size of the RTX 5090's) and much less complex board design. It would also mean that the 32GB of VRAM needed to produce one large 5090 GPU would instead create two 16GB RTX 5080s, which would help with overall supply and possibly lead to more margin.

Just for fun, the RTX 5090 and RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell share the same GB202 GPU (albeit with differing SM counts), but even with 96GB of GDDR7 on board, the RTX Pro 6000 contributes a whopping 41% more revenue per GB of GDDR7 on board versus the 5090.

Of course, the RTX Pro 6000 uses 3GB GDDR7 chips in clamshell mode to achieve its memory capacity rather than the 2GB single-side parts on the RTX 5090, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

But it does make it obvious why Nvidia may have foregone launching the RTX 50-series Super refresh at CES: the margins afforded by using 3GB packages on RTX Pro products are simply much more attractive than they would have been for GeForce cards that presumably would have sold for near the same MSRPs as non-Super cards did at launch.

Going forward, we expect that the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB, RTX 5070, and RTX 5080 may be the easiest cards to find on shelves, relatively speaking, while enthusiast favorites like the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and RTX 5070 Ti will be in short supply. The writing is also on the wall for the RTX 5090 — we can already see the supply situation reflected in today's empty e-tail shelves and dramatically inflated prices from third-party sellers. We'll continue to monitor this situation and update our list of the best GPUs for gaming accordingly.

Nvidia just released the GeForce Hotfix Display Driver 581.94, which it says fixes performance issues seen in some games after Microsoft released KB5066835. The problematic mandatory patch was released in October and affected systems that ran Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2, which introduced a bug that reduced game FPS in some instances, according to Windows Latest. Since this is a mandatory cumulative update, future Windows patches are also expected to experience the same problem, so it’s highly recommended that you download and apply the latest GPU driver if you experience some performance loss while gaming after installing the update.

While Nvidia says that only some games were affected by the bug, it seems to have been significant enough for it to release a hotfix instead of waiting for its regular driver update release schedule. Team Green says that GPU drivers are incredibly complex, especially as it has to deal with a potentially infinite number of hardware and software configurations. Because of this, it usually releases driver updates in line with major hardware and game launches after extensive testing.

However, this means that major issues could remain unaddressed as existing users wait for Nvidia’s regular release cadence. Because of this, the company drops hotfixes, which are released in advance to resolve major issues as soon as possible. For example, when the newly-launched 50-series GPUs started crashing and producing black screens, Nvidia dropped a hotfix outside of its usual release cadence to address the problem. When some issues remained unsolved, the company dropped another hotfix just a week after that to further address crashes and clock speeds.

Windows Updates have recently been breaking a lot of stuff, including one that made USB keyboards and mice unusable in the Windows Recovery Environment and another that triggers BitLocker and encrypts your hard drive without warning. Thankfully, Nvidia stepped up relatively quickly and released an update to fix what the Windows Update broke. It’s unclear if Intel and AMD will release driver updates of their own to deal with KB5066835, especially as neither company has acknowledged any Windows Update-related problems so far, but Windows Latest said that GPUs from Intel and AMD are also suffering from performance issues brought about by this particular patch.

Nvidia on Wednesday announced its financial results for the third quarter of its fiscal year 2025, once again beating its own sales records as all its data center GPUs were sold out during the quarter. The company's earnings totaled $57 billion, as sales of all its products — except gaming GPUs — were up. Nvidia does not expect its revenue growth to stop, so it models that its revenue will hit $65 billion in Q4 FY2026, and the company expects sales of its Blackwell and Rubin GPU platforms to hit $0.5 trillion by the end of calendar 2026.

Nvidia's GAAP revenue reached $57.006 billion, up 62% year-over-year and 22% quarter-over-quarter, in the third quarter of the company's fiscal year 2026. The company's net income hit $31.91 billion, a 65% increase compared to Q3 FY2025, while its gross margin totaled 73.4%, up 1% sequentially, but down 1.2% YoY.

Sales of data center hardware exceeds $51 billion

Nvidia's data center business delivered a rather whopping $51.215 billion revenue in Q3 FY2026, rising 66% year-over-year and 25% sequentially. Within the segment, compute revenue — comprising CPU and GPU sales — reached $43 billion, as the Blackwell and Blackwell Ultra platforms were adopted by all major clients, including cloud hyperscalers, enterprise AI, sovereign AI projects, and industrial. Networking revenue totaled $8.2 billion, up an extraordinary 162% year-over-year, as customers purchased more networking hardware while switching from individual AI servers to rack-scale solutions.

"Blackwell sales are off the charts, and cloud GPUs are sold out," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. "Compute demand keeps accelerating and compounding across training and inference — each growing exponentially. We have entered the virtuous cycle of AI. The AI ecosystem is scaling fast — with more new foundation model makers, more AI startups, across more industries, and in more countries. AI is going everywhere, doing everything, all at once."

Gaming GPUs hit their peak, whereas ProViz solutions set new record

Nvidia's gaming segment generated $4.265 billion in the third quarter of the fiscal year, rising 30% YoY but slipping 1% sequentially, which was a surprise. Nvidia said channel inventories normalized ahead of the holiday season, though GPUs are normally strongest in the third quarter, so it looks like other factors were affecting sales of graphics cards. Nonetheless, at $4.265 billion, Nvidia's Q3 of FY2025 is the company's second-best quarter for consumer GPUs ever, suggesting the market has peaked for the company at this time.

While sales of GeForce RTX graphics cards were so strong in Q2 and Q3 that they could no longer grow, sales of professional visualization solutions increased to $760 million, rising 56% year-over-year and 26% sequentially, setting an all-time record for Nvidia and likely the whole industry. The improvement was driven primarily by the launch and ramp of the DGX Spark AI workstation platform and increased demand for Blackwell-based professional GPUs used in CAD, CAM, DCC, and various emerging creative workflows.

Nvidia's Automotive and Robotics revenue reached $592 million in Q3 FY2026, increasing 32% year-over-year and 1% sequentially, which was driven by continued adoption of the company’s self-driving platforms. During the quarter, Nvidia announced that its next-generation Drive AGX Hyperion 10 Level 4-capable vehicle platform has been adopted by major partners, including Uber, so expect this segment to become even more important for the company going forward.

The OEM and Other segment recorded $174 million in revenue for the third quarter, up 79% year-over-year and 1% sequentially.

Q4 outlook: More money incoming

Nvidia expects another quarter of strong growth, so it guides revenue to $65 billion ±2% and GAAP gross margin of 74.8%. These results will be primarily driven by continued adoption of Blackwell and Blackwell Ultra platforms by various customers in the West. It is noteworthy that the company said nothing about sales of its AI GPUs to China, perhaps reflecting sentiment that this market has largely been lost for now.

If you're a gamer on a tight budget, the past few years have offered slim pickings for entry-level graphics cards. As we sussed out earlier this year, gamers shopping at the $200-to-$250 price point have long been forced to pick among compromised choices that are all a generation or two old, and modern games are really starting to put the hurt on that older hardware.

Even versus checkered company like Intel’s Arc A750 and AMD’s Radeon RX 6600, Nvidia's last entry-level card of note, the GeForce RTX 3050 8GB, put in a particularly weak showing in our tests. The entry-level Ampere card struggled to clear the 60 FPS average we consider a baseline for solid gaming experiences, even at 1080p.

Enter Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5050, powered by the latest Blackwell architecture. Is this $250 card the game changer that this end of the graphics market so desperately needs?

Let’s start with the basics. The RTX 5050 has 2560 Blackwell CUDA cores, a basic setup that's defined this class of product since the RTX 3050’s arrival. Those CUDA cores are now more capable, though, as a Blackwell SM partition can process up to 32 INT or FP32 per clock, versus 16 FP32 instructions and a second 16 FP32 or 16 integer instructions per clock on Ampere.

(The full GB207 chip may include more inactive SMs for reasons of yield or headroom for use in future products, as a "full" implementation encompassing two Blackwell GPCs would total out to 3072 possible CUDA cores.)

On top of Blackwell's basic architectural benefits, the RTX 5050 is clocked much higher than the RTX 3050, at a rated boost clock of 2572 MHz rather than just 1780 MHz on the Ampere card. All those improvements mean this card offers raw compute potential of at least 13 TFLOPS in boost, up 44% from the RTX 3050.

The move to the Blackwell architecture and a more advanced process node also grants the RTX 5050 a massive increase in L2 cache, from just 2MB on the RTX 3050 to at least 24MB on the Blackwell card. Bigger caches are relatively easy wins for boosting performance, and Nvidia says that Blackwell's large L2 benefits ray-tracing workloads especially.

The biggest difference between the RTX 5050 and other Blackwell cards is Nvidia's continuing use of GDDR6 memory. This card gets 8 GB of 20 Gb/s GDDR6 on a 128-bit bus for an effective 320 GB/s of memory bandwidth, up from 224 GB/s on the typical RTX 3050. Even RTX 5050 mobile implementations get GDDR7.

In and of itself, this choice isn't necessarily a bad thing for performance. AMD's Radeon RX 9000-series cards all stick with GDDR6 and still deliver competitive performance with RTX 50-series products at similar price points.

Taken all together, the RTX 5050 sounds like an impressive multi-generational improvement, but only if your frame of reference excludes RTX 4050 mobile chips. Those similarly provisioned GPUs were clocked at least as high as 2370MHz in their most generous power and thermal envelopes.

At its highest thermal and power specs, the mobile RTX 4050 could have compute potential at least as high as 12 TFLOPS, although its performance is likely hampered by just 6GB of 16Gb/s GDDR6 on a 96-bit bus, producing just 192 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Had Nvidia brought the RTX 4050 to the desktop in a more fully fledged 8GB form, the improvements of the RTX 5050 might be considerably less impressive.

Partially because it sticks with GDDR6, the RTX 5050 still rings in at a 130W total board power rating, the same as the RTX 3050. Like most 3050s, most RTX 5050s still employ an eight-pin PCIe power connector to get all of their necessary juice. Builders hoping for a power-sipping, high-performance slot-powered card will still be left wanting.

If supplies of cutting-edge GDDR7 have to go anywhere, Nvidia certainly prefers that they be used on higher-end, higher-margin discrete cards and in notebooks, where tight power and thermal budgets mean that GDDR7's power usage and efficiency benefits yield all sorts of fruit for engineers trying to squeeze out every last second of battery life or to shave off every last gram from a heatsink or chassis. It's much easier to deal with the higher power and heat production of GDDR6 in the relatively unconstrained power and thermal environment of desktop PCs.

If Nvidia saved anything on the RTX 5050's bill of materials by sticking with last-gen GDDR6, it isn't throwing any bones to the lowest end of the market in turn. The RTX 5050 sticks with the same $250 price as the RTX 3050 did about three-and-a-half years ago, even as tariffs and inflation put the squeeze on today's consumers.

You'd think Nvidia could find a few bucks in one of Jensen's jacket pockets to offer some relief to gamers on a budget, given the staggering amounts of money it's making in the data center, but maybe that's too tough a nut even for advanced AI to crack.

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To represent the RTX 5050 in our testing, we picked Gigabyte’s Windforce OC version of this card. Ringing in right at Nvidia’s $249 MSRP, this model offers everything you need and nothing you don’t for the kind of entry-level gaming build that’s most likely to include an RTX 5050.

Typical of cards built to hit MSRPs, the Windforce OC RTX 5050 lacks any fancy extras, like RGB LED lighting or heavy-duty metal shrouds. You get two counter-rotating fans, a plastic fan shroud and backplate with some prominent Gigabyte and GeForce branding, and a metal mounting bracket, and that’s about it. We do appreciate this card’s compact 7.8" x 4.6" by 1.6" (LWD) dimensions (199 x 116 x 40 mm), which should allow it to fit into most any case.

Gigabyte still outfits the Windforce OC card with a proper aluminum fin stack rather than a cast affair, and two beefy copper heat pipes run through it to transfer heat from the GB207 GPU itself into those fins.

We didn’t pull our 5050 apart entirely to examine the base plate of the heatsink, but it appears that this card cools the four GDDR6 memory chips with thermal pads or gel, making contact with an aluminum base plate. Those are all signs that this card should keep its most important components cool under load.

As is common nowadays, Gigabyte cuts a vent in this card’s backplate to allow air from the forward portion of the fin stack to escape directly upwards into the case’s airflow path.

The single 8-pin power connector is located toward the rear of the card, a somewhat annoying trend that we’ve seen several graphics card OEMs adopt recently. PCIe power cables really have to stretch to reach these distant power connectors in many cases. We’d much prefer that the connector be placed toward the front of the card.

Around back, we find a somewhat unusual complement of two DisplayPort 2.1 connectors and two HDMI 2.1 outputs. The mounting bracket features large vents to allow exhaust air to flow out the rear of the card.

Overall, we have no complaints about Gigabyte’s design choices with this card, given that it rings in right at MSRP. Let’s see how it performs.

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We do our best to deliver clean, reliable benchmark numbers. Each of our tests encompasses 60 seconds or more of real-world gameplay, carefully chosen to represent what we expect will be typical gameplay experiences. We sanity-check every result and retest whenever necessary to ensure that outliers don’t muck up our final standings.

For now, we're sticking with native resolution testing at a mix of high and ultra settings at 1080p, as well as ultra settings at 1440p and 4K.

We're weighing whether pure native-res testing will remain the way to go going forward, as pretty much every vendor-independent TAA or upscaler implementation (like Epic's TSR) looks worse than DLSS 4, FSR 4, or XeSS running at the Balanced or Quality preset.

We think that more and more gamers are taking advantage of the performance and image quality benefits of these upscalers without a second thought, and we're weighing whether to enable them by default so our tests are more representative of the real-world performance figures gamers can expect when buying into and using a vendor's entire hardware-software stack.

This is a tough decision, and not one we're making lightly. Any final verdict on the way forward likely won't occur before 2026. For now, we're leaving upscaling and framegen off and sticking with native-res testing exclusively.

Our first draft of a new test suite covers 12 raster-only titles. Five of those include additional RT options that we employ in our tests, while two more require a graphics card with RT support to run at all. Finally, we tested GTA V Enhanced exclusively with RT enabled, as that extra eye candy is the entire reason to run it over GTA V Legacy, in our opinion.

Here's our complete list of tested titles:

• Black Myth: Wukong (+RT)
• Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (+RT)
• Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (+RT)
• Cyberpunk 2077 (+RT)
• Alan Wake II (+RT)
• Fortnite
• Marvel Rivals
• Apex Legends
• Counter-Strike 2
• Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
• Stalker 2
• Doom: The Dark Ages (RT required)
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (RT required)
• Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced (RT)
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

We've tried to cover a broad mix of game engines, graphics APIs, and game types in this lineup, from popular esports experiences to crushing AAA visual feasts developed both natively for PC and ports from consoles. Our selected games stress every part of a modern graphics card, from pure compute horsepower to VRAM management to RT to driver overhead at high frame rates. If a card rises to the top of our charts after weathering all of these tests, you can be sure that it's a standout product.

When picking titles to test, we considered games' time in market, active player counts, review scores (to see whether a title is likely to become an enduring part of PC gaming), and the ease of conducting a repeatable benchmark, among other factors.

Wherever possible, we use real, live, eyes-on-screen, hands-on-mouse-and-keyboard benchmark runs. We don't think automated, on-rails, hands-off canned benchmarks fully capture the gameplay experience on a given graphics card.

Only by actually playing a game can we account for factors like how input lag affects the experience, and making sure that a title has acceptable input lag is becoming a key consideration when latency-sensitive framegen techniques are becoming more and more common as performance-boosting tools.

Our current test system comprises the following components:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
• Motherboard: ASUS TUF Gaming X670E-Plus Wifi
• Memory: G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo 32GB DDR5-6000
• Storage: Inland Gaming Performance Plus 4TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD
• Power supply: Corsair RM1000x

With all that out of the way, let's dive into our results.

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If all you want is the TL;DR, the RTX 5050 turns in a 58% improvement to average frame rates versus the RTX 3050 at 1080p without RT enabled, basically tying with Intel's $249 Arc B580 and the $299 RTX 4060. Critically, its overall result clears 60 FPS on average across our range of titles, and its 1% lows are good enough for a generally smooth ride.

Click over to our 1440p results, and it's clear that you really want to step up to a Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB or RTX 5060 Ti 16GB to enjoy a smooth ride across most games at these higher resolutions, even with DLSS or FSR in play.

4K gaming is heavy enough on compute and VRAM that none of these cards are going to be anybody's first choice for a 4K experience without a heavy application of upscaling, assuming you can even keep VRAM usage in check.

If you’re interested in these cards' performance in a particular title, read on for our commentary on individual game results.

Black Myth Wukong

Why it's here: a stunning showcase for PC graphics

What it stresses: Compute, VRAM, RT (when enabled)

Black Myth Wukong is a gorgeous example of what’s possible from Unreal Engine 5, but it places heavy demands on graphics cards in exchange. This title has a free benchmark tool, but to ensure we were getting the benefits of all the updates that Game Science has made to this game since launch, we picked up the full version and devised our own benchmark sequence.

At very high raster settings, the RTX 3050 struggles in this title, but the RTX 5050 at least has enough oomph to potentially benefit from a DLSS boost.

Alan Wake II

Why it's here: One of the richest AAA feasts for the eyes on PC

What it stresses: Compute, VRAM, RT (when enabled)

Alan Wake II is the latest technical tour-de-force from Remedy, and it really puts the hurt on these lower-end cards. As with other AAA heavyweights in our test suite, the RTX 5050 delivers more oomph than the RTX 3050 (as it well should), but you really want DLSS, lower settings, or both to get to a 60 FPS experience at 1080p, and any higher resolutions will need a much more powerful card to achieve playability.

Counter-Strike 2

Why it's here: over a million active players can't be wrong

What it stresses: Compute, driver overhead at high frame rates

Counter-Strike 2 needs no introduction as one of the most popular esports titles out there. The RTX 5050 lands just shy of the 244 FPS average you'd want to drive an ultra-high-refresh-rate monitor at 1080p, but its 1% lows are weirdly low relative to even aging hardware like the RX 7600.

In general, Blackwell cards really seem to struggle with 1% lows in CS2, even as the RX 9060 XT duo posts both the high average frame rates and 1% lows that we want for a smooth gaming experience.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024

Why it's here: One of the most demanding games available on PC right now

What it stresses: Compute, VRAM

Flight Simulator 2024 is honestly too much game for any $300-or-less graphics card, at least at ultra settings. Average frame rates are low on everything that's not an RTX 5060 Ti 16GB or RX 9060 XT 16GB, and that pain is compounded by a hunger for VRAM that sends 1% lows far beneath averages that might appear OK on the surface. Frame rates plummet especially hard as you come in for landings, making consistent control of your aircraft a pain in the butt.

The RTX 5050 basically doubles the RTX 3050's performance in this title, but it's not enough to achieve a truly playable frame rate.

Fortnite

Why it's here: It's Fortnite

What it stresses: Compute

Fortnite may have a reputation as a potato game, but make no mistake: this is an Unreal Engine 5 showcase through and through, and it can deliver stunning visuals in between the heated skirmishes of its pop-culture-blending brawls.

The RTX 3050 struggles to hit even a 60 FPS average at 1080p in this title. The RTX 5050 delivers a nice boost, landing midpack at just above an 80 FPS average and laying a great performance foundation for DLSS if you want it.

The RX 9060 XT duo surprises by landing at the top of the charts in this title. AMD's cards deliver slightly higher average frame rates alongside much higher 1% lows than the RTX 5060 Ti duo. If only Epic would implement FSR 4...

Apex Legends

Why it's here: Unique engine, giant player base

What it stresses: Compute

Apex Legends is another wildly popular esports title that needs no introduction. It normally has a 144 FPS cap, but you can disable it with a launch option to reach a 300 FPS ceiling.

Nvidia called out Apex as a particularly good showing for the RTX 5050 in its launch materials, and it's easy to see why. The baby Blackwell card delivers a 75% performance boost over the RTX 3050 at 1080p, even without the use of DLSS or framegen. You could even push a 144Hz 1440p monitor with this card in this title.

Marvel Rivals

Why it's here: another hugely popular free-to-play title

What it stresses: Compute

Marvel Rivals is another popular free-to-play game that might have a reputation as a bit of a potato title. Unlike other games in our suite that share its UE5 foundation, Rivals doesn’t require a superhero of a graphics card to hit high frame rates. The RTX 5050 can nearly hit a 90 FPS average at 1080p, and it can even hit 60 FPS at 1440p.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Why it's here: One of the most popular RPGs of 2025

What it stresses: Compute

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has stunning Unreal Engine 5-powered visuals. Since it keeps VRAM usage in check even on 8GB cards, its performance is mostly defined by how much compute horsepower you can throw at it.

At 1080p Epic settings, the RTX 5050 ekes out about 40 FPS on average, which is a nice 50% boost over the RTX 3050 but still a case where you'd really want to dial back to high settings and consider using DLSS to get to a truly smooth experience.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

Why it's here: a representative older PlayStation port

What it stresses: Compute, VRAM, RT (if enabled)

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is the kind of experience that will take gamers of a certain age on a nostalgic journey back to summer breaks spent in front of CRT TVs with a PlayStation 2 whirring away nearby. This title features incredibly charming art direction and animation that's still delightful to look at even two years after its arrival on PC.

Rift Apart already demands more than 8GB of VRAM with very high settings even at 1080p, which sort of shows in the relatively low 1% lows alongside high average frame rates on the RTX 5050 and its surrounding 8GB competition. Even so, the RTX 5050 delivers a fine experience, blowing the RTX 3050 out of the water with a 60% boost and taking this game from marginally playable to perfectly enjoyable on an entry-level GeForce.

Marvel's Spider-Man 2

Why it's here: A newer PlayStation port

What it stresses: Compute, VRAM, RT (if enabled)

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is another solid PlayStation port, but like many games in this vein, it really wants both strong compute resources and plenty of VRAM from a GPU to high high frame rates. The RTX 5050 is much faster than the RTX 3050 in this title, but it's not up to the job of delivering a 60 FPS average at 1080p.

Spider-Man 2 is an example of a game where you might want to enable Multi-Frame Generation on Blackwell cards for an extra performance boost, but because it's already spilling out of 8GB of VRAM at 1080p without upscaling enabled, the feature simply didn't work on the RTX 5050 or RTX 5060.

We're sure you could get MFG going on the RTX 5050 withsome further tweaking, but the promise of RT + DLSS + MFG that Nvidia pushes so heavily with Blackwell isn’t really possible on 8GB GPUs. You might only be able to use one of those features at a time.

Stalker 2

Why it's here: A visually stunning revival of a classic PC franchise

What it stresses: Compute, VRAM (to some degree)

Stalker 2 is another beast of a UE5 game, and none of the cards in this entry-level-to-midrange menagerie can even crack 60 FPS on average at 1080p. As we've seen already, the RTX 5050 is a major improvement over the RTX 3050 in this title, but it's still not enough to raise frame rates to a playable level without turning down some settings or enabling DLSS.

Cyberpunk 2077

Why it's here: One of the biggest PC releases of all time

What it stresses: Compute, VRAM, RT (when enabled)

Cyberpunk 2077 may have been a beast of a title when it arrived five years ago, but after a couple of generations of new graphics cards and countless improvements and optimizations to the base game, everything in our suite except the RTX 3050 can run this title at a 60 FPS average or higher at 1080p. Chalk up another boost for the RTX 5050.

The RTX 5060 Ti 16GB turns in weirdly low 1% low frame rates at 1080p in Cyberpunk, and we found this result to be repeatable. We're not entirely sure what the reason is behind it, but we did try to iron it out without success.

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Our ray-traced gaming test suite includes five titles we’ve already seen that feature RT as extra eye candy, plus two modern titles that require RT support to run. We’ve also thrown in GTA V Enhanced as an older title that benefits from an RT-powered visual upgrade.

First, the TL;DR: none of the $300-or-less cards we’re testing today are great for RT, even at 1080p. You should really budget for a GeForce RTX 5060 Ti if you’re serious about RT experiences. Its leading performance in our test suite, as well as its 16GB of VRAM, make it ideal for tuning RT performance with upscaling and framegen.

DOOM: The Dark Ages

Why it's here: one of a new crop of games that requires RT to run

What it stresses: Compute, RT, VRAM

Even with mandatory RT support and everything but texture pool size cranked to Ultra Nightmare, DOOM: The Dark Ages isn't terribly hard for our stable of graphics cards to run well. The RTX 5050 comes in just shy of a 60 FPS average at 1080p and should serve as a fine foundation for DLSS-enhanced gaming if you prefer.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Why it's here: another of a new crop of games that requires RT to run

What it stresses: Compute, RT, VRAM

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a weird beast. It uses a unique fork of the id Tech engine to deliver its cinematic adventure gameplay, and it doesn't necessarily play well with Nvidia graphics cards with 8GB of VRAM.

If you crank the texture pool size high enough or enable DLSS or MFG at the ragged edge of VRAM usage on GeForce cards, you're likely to cause an annoying hard crash—something we didn't see on any of our Radeon cards.

Even the RX 9060 XT 8GB will let you max out every setting without crashing, even if it might not run that well. We're surprised at how rough the user experience in this game can be on GeForces given that The Great Circle is an Nvidia-sponsored title.

Keeping texture pool size to a minimum and maxing out every other setting (save for path tracing) is totally possible in The Great Circle on these cards, and it only barely affects image quality, so that's how we tested.

The RTX 5050 clears a 60 FPS average in our test sequence, but as with other 8GB GeForce cards, its 1% lows fall lower than we'd like for a truly smooth experience. Still, the point stands: you can have a great time in The Great Circle even on affordable hardware at 1080p.

Alan Wake II

Alan Wake II's high RT preset enables some path-traced effects for extra eye candy, in theory, but they place quite the strain on this selection of hardware. The biggest issue beyond the crushing performance demands of these settings is that these effects don't really make a visible difference in this title, so you could just as soon ignore them and enjoy much higher frame rates.

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the few RT-heavy titles we've seen where enabling the feature creates major differences in image quality, so you might actually care about its performance on these cards. What we’re really looking for here is a solid foundation for upscaling, not a native 60 FPS.

Even by that measure, the RTX 5050 can’t even break 30 FPS on average with RT enabled. If you’re looking to enable RT in this title, you really want an RTX 5060 or RTX 5060 Ti 16GB for the best experience, and only then at 1080p.

Black Myth Wukong

Black Myth Wukong is tough on graphics cards even before we apply RT, and turning on “full ray tracing” takes performance below even the 30 FPS average on all but a handful of cards in our lineup.

RT does make a visible difference in this title, so it’s worth exploring if you’ve got the graphics card to match its considerable demands, but you really need an RTX 5060 or RTX 5060 Ti 16GB or better to even start considering enabling the feature.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

As an older RT title, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart plays OK even on more affordable hardware like the RTX 5050 with RT enabled at 1080p, but stepping up to 1440p increases VRAM pressure to the point that you really want a 16GB card (and more raw horsepower) to really get a good experience.

As with other RT titles in our lineup, though, Rift Apart doesn’t look that much different with RT than without, so unless you’re peeping pixels, you can just leave the feature off and enjoy higher performance.

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2

Enabling RT in Spider-Man 2 puts the hurt on any graphics card that doesn’t have 16GB of VRAM to play with, even at 1080p, and matters only get worse from there. Sorry to sound like a broken record, but if you’re playing this game on a sub-$300 graphics card, enabling RT really isn’t worth the performance hit.

Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced

It’s hard to believe we’re still testing GTA V more than 10 years after its arrival on the PC, but here we are. The latest Enhanced re-release adds appealing RT eye candy to Los Santos, and its demands on hardware are modest enough that even modest hardware can provide a solid enough performance foundation for upscaling.

We didn’t test the raster version of GTA V Enhanced as a baseline, as most any GPU can run it well. With RT maxed out, the RTX 5050 can’t crack 60 FPS on average, but it at least can provide a good baseline before you turn on DLSS (which you’ll want to do for the best image quality anyway).

Roll up all of our RT and raster results into one chart by the power of geomeans, and the RTX 5050 falls just a tiny bit behind the RTX 4060 and Arc B580, but not by enough to change any overall standings. What this analysis does emphasize is that you really want to step up to an RX 9060 XT 8GB, RTX 5060, or ideally an even higher-end card if ray-traced gaming is something you want to explore, as these cheaper cards fall just short of having enough oomph to deliver a solid baseline experience.

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Used alongside the FrameView software that we use to capture performance results, Nvidia’s PCAT hardware allows us to capture live power consumption data with every frame, and we can use that data to communicate real-world power usage figures that are more precise than a worst-case total board power rating.

Power consumption taken in isolation doesn't mean much, though. A card can be both highly efficient and still draw a lot of power to turn in a high overall performance level, and it can also draw a modest amount of power and still deliver relatively low performance per watt.

To express power efficiency, we simply divide a card's average frames per second by its average power consumption across all of our tests. We stuck with our 1080p results for this analysis, as these cards' relatively low performance at 1440p and 4K would make efficiency discussions with those results more academic than anything.

By this measure, the RTX 5050 is much more efficient than the Ampere-powered RTX 3050, but it’s disappointingly inefficient for a Blackwell card. The RTX 5060 turns in 20% higher frames per watt at 1080p, and the RTX 5060 Ti duo is even better still. Any generational efficiency gains Nvidia made in the GB207 GPU on the RTX 5050 appear to be offset entirely by sticking with fast GDDR6 memory at the board level. On net, we end up with efficiency even slightly worse than that of the RTX 4060.

For reference, we've also included the geomean of clock speeds and temperatures across all our cards at the tested resolutions. Some data is missing due to driver and/or software hiccups, which we'll correct in future testing.

We don't think there are any surprises in these results. The RTX 5050 clocks much higher than its rated boost speed, a testament to Nvidia's GPU Boost logic and the thermal and electrical headroom that even this modest card apparently boasts.

The Gigabyte card is the hottest-running of this bunch, but it's also got one of the smallest coolers among the cards we tested, and it's still well below any level that would represent cause for concern.

Compared to the three-and-a-half-year-old RTX 3050 8GB, the RTX 5050 is a solid improvement - and it certainly ought to be, given that Nvidia didn't make an RTX 4050 for the desktop in the meantime. The baby Blackwell card is 60% faster on average than its entry-level Ampere predecessor in our raster results at 1080p (all without any help from DLSS or MFG).

If you squint, the 5050 brings RTX 4060 performance to a $50 lower price point, and given that the 4060 is the most popular graphics card on Steam right now, that sounds like a potentially appealing combo on paper.

Stacked up against other Blackwell cards, though, the RTX 5050 looks less impressive as a generational improvement. The RTX 5060 turns out 20% higher frames per watt at 1080p for raster titles despite consuming just 10% more power in our real-world tests, which emphasizes just how much of Blackwell's perf-per-watt improvements come from the use of GDDR7 at the board level.

The RTX 5050 doesn't suck down power by any means, but it's slightly less efficient than even the RTX 4060 despite being a generation newer. Oops.

If the RTX 5050 was priced in proportion to its raw performance gap with the RTX 5060, our results suggest it really should be a $229 card. At that price point, it would make life extremely difficult for the Arc B570 and B580 for 1080p gaming, and it wouldn't face any AMD competition at all in most markets.

For the $249 Nvidia wants for these cards in reality, we think the 5050 is an overpriced, relatively inefficient product that faces tough challengers from AMD and Intel alike, as well as more appealing options within Nvidia's own lineup. It also feels insulting that this card can't consistently deliver the Blackwell architecture's marquee experiences.

DLSS Multi-Frame Generation sometimes just doesn't work on the RTX 5050 in the titles that could really use the boost, because those demanding games already eat up all of the 5050's 8GB of VRAM, leaving no room for the MFG AI model to reside in local memory.

If you end up with an RTX 5050 in a pre-built system or because you received one as a gift, you certainly won't have a bad time with it at 1080p. Outside of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, which really, really wants a powerful GPU with 16GB of VRAM to deliver anything approaching consistent performance even at 1080p, we had a perfectly fine time with 1080p gaming on the RTX 5050. The Gigabyte card we tested runs cool and quiet, too, so it's easy to live with. But if you have any say in the matter, you can do much better for yourself by saving up and spending just a bit more money.

The real spoiler for every $300-or-less graphics card available right now is AMD's Radeon RX 9060 XT 8GB, which has consistently been available for $269 on Amazon of late. At that price point—$30 under its $299 MSRP—it delivers 25% higher frame rates on average than the RTX 5050 for just 8% more money. In raster games that aren't limited by VRAM, which describes many of today's most popular titles on the PC at 1080p, the 9060 XT wipes the floor with everything further down the ladder, and it isn't even close.

Try to render games at a native 1440p, and the 9060 XT 8GB does start to show some cracks, as evidenced by its 1% low frame rates. Of course, you can get around those challenges by lowering settings a bit, using FSR 4 upscaling, or both. You can usually work around 8GB of VRAM in general, but you can't add more raw compute horsepower to begin with, and the RX 9060 XT 8GB has the most raw muscle per dollar of anything on the market if you find it on sale.

If you prefer to stay in the green team's corner to keep access to DLSS 4 and MFG, the RTX 5060 makes a strong case for itself at $300. It delivers 27% higher performance than the RTX 5050 at 1080p for 20% more money. This card's high standings in our overall results at 1080p (and 1440p) show that even if the RX 9060 XT 8GB can outrun and outgun it from time to time, the 5060 hits back by maintaining a more consistent level of performance across our test suite, even as the 9060 XT 8GB sometimes stumbles.

Pair that consistently high performance with wickedly good power efficiency, and it's easy to understand why the RTX 5060 is storming up the Steam Hardware Survey charts of late.

Despite its age, Intel's Arc B580 stays in the affordable gaming fight thanks to some recent price decreases. It can finally be had for its $249 MSRP from some Intel board partners on Newegg. It still delivers solid enough gaming performance at both 1080p and 1440p, along with an ample 12GB of VRAM for better game compatibility across a wider range of resolutions and settings.

The challenge for Intel is that Battlemage can exhibit big performance falloffs even in extremely popular games that aren't VRAM-limited (like Fortnite) that sometimes put it behind even the RTX 5050. Those performance cliffs make it tough to generally recommend.

You really need to make sure your favorite titles play well on Arc before buying a B580 (or B570), and you need to be prepared for the possibility that future titles might not run as well as you'd expect. And that's before we touch on Battlemage's power efficiency, which trails everything but the RDNA 3 cards we tested. For the money, though, you might not care.

Putting the spotlight back on the RTX 5050, this card feels like something Nvidia had to make to keep its system integrator partners happy rather than something it really wanted to put on store shelves for enthusiasts.

The Dells, HPs, and Lenovos of the world that need to build cheap gaming PCs for buyers at Wal-Mart and Best Buy now have access to a product that says RTX 50 rather than RTX 30 on the shelf sticker, and for more casual audiences who mostly spend time in wildly popular free-to-play games like Counter-Strike 2, Fortnite, Apex Legends, or Marvel Rivals, this card provides a much-needed performance boost over the ancient RTX 3050. But price-conscious enthusiasts who are waiting for a true no-compromise, game-changing product around the $250 mark are still going to find themselves tapping their feet.

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Nvidia on Wednesday published its financial results for the second quarter of its fiscal year 2026, posting record revenue of $46.743 billion and marking its best quarter ever. During the quarter the company managed to tangibly increase sales across all product categories both sequentially and year-over-year. Yet, AI GPUs accounted for nearly 88% of its revenue, asserting Nvidia's dominance in the AI hardware segment. But perhaps the biggest thing that will please Nvidia's investors is its outlook for the third quarter.

For the second quarter of fiscal year 2026, Nvidia posted GAAP revenue of $46.7 billion, up 56% year-over-year (YoY) and 6% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ). The company's net income surged to $26.4 billion, a 59% increase from the same period last year, despite the fact that the company's gross margin dropped 72.4% from 75.1% a year ago, to some degree due to a $180 million charge related to banned sales of its H20 AI accelerators to Chinese entities. However, Nvidia's gross margin increased sharply from 60.5% in the prior quarter.

Data center revenue exceeds $40 billion for the first time

Data center AI platforms is by far Nvidia's biggest business with revenue reaching $41.1 billion, up 56% year-over-year and a 5% sequential gain. Large cloud service providers (CSPs) accounted for approximately 50% of total data center revenue.

Compute revenue was $33.8 billion, up 50% YoY, but declined 1% sequentially, primarily due to a $4.0 billion drop in H20 GPU sales to Chinese entities. Networking revenue surged to $7.3 billion, reflecting 98% YoY growth and 46% QoQ growth, driven by strong adoption of Nvidia's GB200 NVL72 and GB300 NVL72 systems that exclusively rely on NVLink fabric, Ethernet, and Infiniband solutions developed by Nvidia.

Perhaps the biggest highlight of Nvidia's data center business during the quarter was the ramp-up of Blackwell GPUs, including Blackwell Ultra, which grew 17% quarter-over-quarter and contributed revenue across all customer segments. Meanwhile, Nvidia still sold plenty of Hopper-based processors and HGX servers to various parties that still deploy such machines.

"Blackwell is the AI platform the world has been waiting for, delivering an exceptional generational leap — production of Blackwell Ultra is ramping at full speed, and demand is extraordinary," said Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive of Nvidia. "Nvidia NVLink rack-scale computing is revolutionary, arriving just in time as reasoning AI models drive orders-of-magnitude increases in training and inference performance. The AI race is on, and Blackwell is the platform at its center."

Gaming and ProViz hit new highs, so does automotive

As Nvidia sells a great deal of AI GPUs for data centers, some people outside of the PC gaming world probably begin to forget that the company's origins are indeed in PC gaming. This business segment not only continues to bring Nvidia a lot of money, but it thrives.

In the second quarter of fiscal 2026, Nvidia sold a whopping $4.3 billion worth of gaming GPUs, reflecting a 49% increase year-over-year and a 14% rise from the previous quarter. The company attributed strong performance to robust demand and improved supply of its Blackwell-based gaming GPUs, which continued to gain traction in the consumer market. Another reason is of course the launch of highly-successful performance-mainstream GeForce RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti graphics cards.

Additionally, the OEM and Other segment posted $173 million in revenue, up 97% year-over-year and 56% sequentially, which marks increasing demand even for Nvidia's low-end GPUs.

Nvidia's professional visualization (ProViz) business generated $601 million in revenue in Q2 FY2026, reflecting a 32% YoY increase and an 18% QoQ rise. What is a little bit unexpected, is that Nvidia claims that the growth was primarily driven by the accelerated adoption of Blackwell-based notebook GPUs by 'AI-powered workflows, real-time graphics rendering, and data simulation,' which somewhat implies that not all ProViz GPUs were set to be used for graphics.

Last but not least, Nvidia's Automotive segment achieved $586 million in revenue in Q2 FY2026, its best quarter ever. As adoption of Nvidia's autonomous driving and robotics platforms across global OEMs increase, sales of appropriate products increased 69% compared to Q2 FY2025 and 3% compared to the previous quarter.

Remarkable outlook amid China uncertainty

Nvidia is making a return to Gamescom this year, but the GPU manufacturing giant will be focusing on topics not involving new GPU hardware releases. Nvidia announced on its blog that it will be kicking off Gamescom 2025 with a live stream at noon PT, announcing "major" GeForce Now news, new GeForce features, and "some highly anticipated" PC games.

Nvidia went out of its way to make clear to the public that it wouldn't be announcing new graphics cards, explicitly stating that "no new hardware" would be announced at the convention. Nvidia's RTX 50 series GPUs launched just eight months ago, so this announcement isn't all too surprising. Nvidia typically waits a year or almost two years after a GPU launch before introducing new graphics cards, so we will likely see official announcements on the highly rumored RTX 50 series Super refresh in 2026.

At the 2025 RISC-V Summit in China, Nvidia announced that its CUDA software platform will be made compatible with the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) on the CPU side of things. The news was confirmed during a presentation during a RISC-V event. This is a major step in enabling the RISC-V ISA-based CPUs in performance demanding applications.

The announcement makes it clear that RISC-V can now serve as the main processor for CUDA-based systems, a role traditionally filled by x86 or Arm cores. While nobody even barely expects RISC-V in hyperscale datacenters any time soon, RISC-V can be used on CUDA-enabled edge devices, such as Nvidia's Jetson modules. However, it looks like Nvidia does indeed expect RISC-V to be in the datacenter.

The Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX launched 20 years ago, today. Though its name and reputation may have faded over two decades, it was a ground-breaking achievement at the time from the green team. This Nvidia Curie architecture graphics card quickly gained a reputation with its HDR lighting, its leap in shader counts, the significantly improved efficiency over the prior generation, and its performance compared to ATI’s best Radeon R400 architecture cards.

As is the case nowadays, Nvidia lit the fuse of the new Curie line with a flagship, the GeForce 7800 GTX, whose birthday we celebrate in our title. Back then, Nvidia launched this model with immediate availability and an eye-watering (for the era) $599 MSRP. For your hard-earned cash you would get to enjoy the new G70 GPU, with 302 million transistors, and its 24 pixel and 8 vertex shaders, fabbed on a 110nm process. It also came packing 256MB GDDR3 VRAM and embraced SLI technology.

Later in 2005, when a 512MB version of the 7800 GTX was released, we crowned the updated 7800 GTX the “new graphics champion” after our extensive labs testing. Helping it along weren’t just a larger VRAM buffer, it also featured significantly boosted core and memory clocks. Nvidia’s newest flagship had also opened the doors to dual-card SLI configs with an enviable 1GB of VRAM. We also highlighted how the updated card was a solid response to ATI’s launch of the X1000 series of graphics cards, including the new X1800 XT.

You can see seven contemporary 7800 GTX 512MB models tested in our roundup, towards the end of 2005, too. That’s 43 pages of green-tinged nostalgia for you to take over your Sunday. Spoiler, Gigabyte's 7800 GTX Turbo Force was the fastest solution out of the box.

Not surprisingly, GeForce 7800 GTX graphics cards are now only useful for retro builds or hanging on the wall like an old tech hunting trophy. While this GPU excels in titles of its peak era, official driver updates for the card came to a stop over a decade ago. That limits you to Windows titles build around APIs up to DirectX 9.0c.

Last but not least, the PlayStation 3’s Reality Synthesizer (RSX) chip is said to be based on the 7800 GTX (256MB) with some thoughtful modifications implemented by the collaborative Nvidia / Sony team.

Update 6/6/2025 9:00 am ET: Jon Peddie has kindly provided us with comments regarding AMD's GPU business underperformance in Q1 2025. He believes that the sources of AMD's decline in GPU shipments lie in the company's failure to accurately predict demand for its GPU products six to nine months in advance, as well as the necessity to balance its TSMC allocations between Zen CPUs and Radeon GPUs. Read the exact comments below.

AMD's desktop GPU market share, based on sales into the market, has dropped to a historic low in the latest report from Jon Peddie Research, despite the company's launch of new products during the quarter. Discrete GPU shipments for desktop PCs increased significantly both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year in Q1 2025 and totaled 9.2 million units. However, as both AMD and Nvidia rolled out their new-generation graphics cards in the first quarter, Nvidia managed to sell millions of its new GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs and capture its highest market share, while AMD struggled to sell even 750,000 add-in-boards, which is why its share dropped to a historical low.

Nvidia now commands around 92% of the desktop discrete GPU market, while AMD's share declined to approximately 8%, the company's lowest share ever.

The industry shipped 9.2 million standalone graphics processing units for desktop PCs during the first quarter, up 8.5% compared to the prior quarter and by 5.3% on an annual basis. In terms of market share dynamics, Nvidia was the only major vendor to expand its position, gaining 8.5%. AMD’s share declined by 7.3%, while Intel's share saw a smaller contraction of 1.2%. 

AMD's GPU shipments totaled approximately 740,000 to 750,000 units, the company's worst results in three years. To make matters worse, for the first time in decades (if not ever), the quarterly sales of AMD GPUs declined despite the launch of new halo products. Jon Peddie, the head of Jon Peddie Research, believes the poor performance was a result of an AMD demand misprediction in Q1.

Nvidia sold around 8.46 million standalone graphics processors for desktops, the company's best result in three years, especially keeping in mind that the company sold quite expensive products ($379 - $1999) during the first quarter and these products happen to be some of the best graphics cards around. 

"AMD and Nvidia have to walk a tight rope wire when it comes to placing orders at fabs like TMSC — and you never get it right all the time," said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research, in a conversation with Tom's Hardware. "Forecasting demand six to nine months in advance, when the economic and political environment is so unstable adds an additional layer of complexity. Then you have yield issues on top of it all, and of course you have to get the specs right. Nonetheless, AMD has been doing this for decades and knows all those tradeoffs, plus in their case they have the added burden of balancing resources of demand for Zen CPUs against GPUs."

The numbers from Jon Peddie Research appear to contradict comments made by Lisa Su, Chief Executive of AMD, who stated during the quarter that the launch of the company's Radeon RX 9070-series products was AMD's most successful product launch in terms of first-week sales. Yet, this is not exactly the case. Jon Peddie Research monitors how many GPU chips each company sells-in to its partners per quarter, not the number of cards sold through retailers. By contrast, Lisa Su mentioned sold through results of the Radeon RX 9070-series, referring to the final stage where the retailer sells the product to the end user.

Images of AMD's early Navi 48 graphics processors — the GPUs that power the Radeon RX 9070-series boards — indicate that their assembly took place in late October 2024, which means that production of the actual silicon started approximately 90 days prior, in late July 2024. This suggests that AMD had been building up inventory for several months ahead of the official launch on March 6, 2025. 

While the total number of GPUs and add-in boards accumulated before the release remains unclear, Jon Peddie Research reported back in March that AMD delivered around 1.43 million discrete desktop GPUs to partners in the fourth quarter of 2024. The lion's share of these processors were likely AMD's Navi 48, so it is reasonable to conclude that AMD entered the first quarter of 2025 with a substantial stockpile of Navi 48 chips. Although precise figures are not available, it is likely that AMD's partners shipped well over a million Radeon RX 9070-series graphics cards during the quarter. However, this was a result of accumulating GPUs over a period of about six months.

By contrast, the company AMD supplied its partners with only around 740,000 to 750,000 GPUs (probably mostly Navi 48 and Navi 44, although we are speculating) in the first quarter, which explains why the company could not meet demand for its Radeon RX 9070 and 9060-series products in the second quarter. The reasons why AMD did not ramp up shipments/production of its Radeon RX 9000-series RDNA 4-based GPUs in late Q4 2024 – early Q1 2025 are unclear. However, JPR's numbers indicate that the company had reduced sales (and possibly production) of GPUs from Q4 to Q1, which is an unprecedented event. This likely means that shortages of AMD's latest Radeon products — the Radeon RX 9060 and 9070 series — will persist at least through the second quarter.

"We were surprised to see AMD’s shipments drop so drastically in Q1," said Peddie. "At the same time Nvidia was ramping Blackwell filling any vacuum AMD may have left. Both companies' products have been criticized at the low end, which is traditionally a volume market. But in the past few quarters, the high end has taken off and that is where Nvidia had an open playing field, and so far, still does. So, it is a combination of economic and political instability, and consumer demand shifting to the high end that has caught AMD in a crossfire so to speak."

While shipments of graphics cards were up in the first quarter, sales of desktop processors dropped. JPR reports that the desktop CPU market contracted sharply as volumes dropped by 14.5% year-over-year and 20.6% sequentially.

"The PC market is caught in the crosswinds, some might say crossfire, of Trump's trade wars, with on-again and off-again, special cutout, and changing import/export rules," said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. "As part of the turmoil, some PC suppliers have pulled back or held orders, while a few have increased orders, hoping to lock in prices. Pre-ordering to lock in prices is a temporary fix, which will cause a depression in future quarters’ sales, as discussed here. We think overall PC sales and, subsequently, client PC GPU sales will be down for the year.”

Nvidia on Wednesday disclosed its financial results for the first quarter of its fiscal 2026, posting revenue of $44.062 billion — its best quarter ever.

The company's sales increased almost across the board both in terms of quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year comparisons. As the company ramped up its Blackwell GPUs, it also set revenue records both for gaming and datacenter revenues. But the recent shipments ban of H20 GPUs to China hurt Nvidia's margins quite significantly.

Record quarter

For the first quarter of fiscal 2026, Nvida reported GAAP revenue of $44.062 billion, marking a 12% rise quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) and a 69% increase year-over-year (YoY). The company's gross margin fell sharply to 60.5%, primarily due to a $4.5 billion charge related to writing down of H20 inventory due to the latest U.S. export restrictions imposed in early April. 

Without the charge, Nvidia's non-GAAP margin would have been 71.3%, still considerably lower than 78.9% in Q1 FY2025 or 73.5% in Q4 FY2025. Nvidia's operating income was $21.6 billion, down 10% from the prior quarter but up 28% year-over-year, as for net income, it reached $18.8 billion, a 15% sequential decline but a 26% increase from the same period a year ago.

Driven by AI and gaming

Nvidia's data center revenue set a new record $39.112 billion, comprising of $34.155 billion compute revenue and $4.957 billion networking revenue. The result represented a 10% quarter-over-quarter growth and 73% year-over-year growth, driven by surging global demand for AI infrastructure.

Nvidia does not provide the split between sales of Blackwell and Hopper AI GPUs as well as Blackwell and Hopper systems, but it said that transition to Blackwell is almost complete. This means that while there are still some customers interested in Hopper processors, the vast majority of its clients now want Blackwell products. In addition, the company highlighted strong momentum in Blackwell-based systems as NVL72 GB200 machines ramped to full-scale production during the quarter.

"Our breakthrough Blackwell NVL72 AI supercomputer — a 'thinking machine' designed for reasoning — is now in full-scale production across system makers and cloud service providers," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. "Global demand for Nvidia's AI infrastructure is incredibly strong. AI inference token generation has surged tenfold in just one year, and as AI agents become mainstream, the demand for AI computing will accelerate." 

Nvidia's gaming products also achieved record-breaking revenue of $3.8 billion — a 48% increase from the previous quarter and a 42% rise YoY — in the first quarter of FY2025. This growth was driven by multiple factors, including insufficient gaming GPU shipments in the previous quarter as well as  launch of Nvidia's mainstream GeForce RTX 5070 and 5060-series products based on the Blackwell architecture. As for OEM and other segment, it generated $111 million, down 12% sequentially but up 42% year-over-year. 

Nvidia's professional vizualization (ProViz) business reported revenue of $509 million, down from $511 million QoQ, but up 19% from $427 million in the same quarter a year go. Such results may indicate that workstation makers continued to purchase Ada Lovelace-based professional graphics cards despite the imminent release of Blackwell-based RTX Pro graphics boards in May, perhaps because of uncertainities with the U.S. tariffs. 

It is noteworthy that sales of Nvidia's client and professional GPUs — which are reported under gaming, ProViz, OEMs, and other monikers — totaled $4.42 billion, which is lower than sales of Nvidia's networking gear. 

Nvidia's automotive and robotics segment earned $567 million, down from $570 million in the previous quarter, but up a whopping 72% from $329 million in Q1 FY2025. 

 Impressive outlook 

GPU Benchmarks Introduction

Tom's Hardware exhaustively benchmarks every GPU to find out which are worthy of our list of the best graphics cards. Our GPU benchmarks hierarchy ranks current and previous generation graphics cards by performance. Whether it's playing games, running artificial intelligence workloads, or doing professional video editing, your graphics card typically plays the biggest role in determining performance — even the best CPUs for gaming take a secondary role.

Our 2026 GPU Hierarchy testing spans three generations of Nvidia and AMD graphics cards, as well as Intel's Arc B-series GPUs.

Our testing has been made easier by the fact that no truly new gaming GPUs have been introduced in almost a year. If you haven't already upgraded your graphics card after the GeForce RTX 50-series and Radeon RX 9000-series launches in 2025, well, you're still looking at the exact same products now.

AMD did make its formerly China-only Radeon RX 9070 GRE available globally after Computex 2026, but in our review, we found that $549 product to be too expensive given the level of performance it delivers and the compromises made to hit its price point. Check out that coverage for all the details.

Most of the products we recommend remain at elevated prices compared to their MSRPs, but this is just life in mid-2026. It's admittedly cold comfort, but unless you're shopping for an RTX 5090, graphics card prices haven't risen much more than they already did earlier this year.

Compared to the doubling or tripling of prices we've seen for RAM kits and SSDs in 2026 versus last year, a GPU upgrade remains a relatively affordable (and self-contained) option, either as a boost for an existing PC or part of an all-new parts list.

Let's dive into our ranking of GPUs past and present so you can figure out how all those cards stack up.

Our full GPU hierarchy using traditional rendering (aka rasterization) comes first, and below that we have our separate ray tracing hierarchy. We've also mashed up these results into one overarching ranking for the complete pictures.

The results are all collected at native resolution, without enabling DLSS, FSR, or XeSS upscaling or frame generation.

As a brief refresher of the cards in this version of our hierarchy, Nvidia's cutting-edge Blackwell architecture and its DLSS 4 suite of tech upgrades the quality of both upscaling and ray reconstruction on RTX 50-series GPUs. It also adds Multi Frame Generation support. As of mid-2026, MFG can add anywhere from one to five AI-generated frames in between natively rendered ones.

Even if you're not into framegen, DLSS 4.5 upscaling and its transformer neural network architecture can offer a big boost in image quality at the same output resolution compared to earlier DLSS versions. That tech can benefit all GeForce RTX GPUs going back to the RTX 20-series, albeit at a heavier performance cost on older hardware compared to earlier DLSS versions.

Nvidia's Ada Lovelace architecture powers its prior-gen RTX 40-series cards. Ada introduced DLSS Frame Generation, which can double output frame rates in supported games. Ada cards don't benefit from MFG, though.

AMD's Radeon RX 9000 series cards, powered by its latest RDNA 4 architecture, get a big boost to both ray-tracing and AI capabilities with dedicated RT and matrix math accelerators. AMD uses those capabilities to enable its FSR 4 upscaler and its much-improved image quality in a small but growing range of titles, whether through native support or with driver-level overrides.

The FSR Redstone update last year brought ML Frame Generation to RX 9000-series cards. Like FSR 4.x upscaling, ML Frame Generation can be directly integrated in games or enabled through a driver override.

Meanwhile, the last-gen RDNA 3 architecture powers seven RX 7000-series seven desktop cards. Until very recently, RX 7000-series cards couldn't officially run FSR 4 upscaling, but an official version of that tech will be made available for those cards in July 2026.

Intel's Battlemage-powered Arc B580 and Arc B570 offer major improvements in performance and efficiency compared to its Alchemist architecture. Battlemage only serves the entry-level end of the graphics card market today. Intel introduced a larger Battlemage chip in the form of the Arc Pro B70 earlier this year, but that product is intended for AI and professional visualization, and it's priced like it.

On page two, you'll find our 2025-2026 test data for posterity. Page three has our 2024–2022 benchmark suite, which covers previous-generation GPUs running an older test suite and a Core i9-12900K. Page four has an even older 2020–2021 test suite with only raster games, running on a Core i9-9900K testbed. The legacy tables are no longer being actively updated. There's also the "Ancient Legacy GPU hierarchy" (without benchmarks, sorted by theoretical performance) for reference purposes.

The following tables sort everything solely by our performance-based GPU benchmarks, from fastest to slowest. Factors including real-world pricing, graphics card power consumption, overall efficiency, and features aren't factored into the rankings here. The latest results use an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D testbed. Here are the tables and benchmark results — rasterization games first, then ray tracing games, and finally the content creation results.

GPU Benchmarks Hierarchy 2026: The tests

For our latest GPU benchmarks, we test every card at a mix of high and ultra settings, depending on the game. We test across three resolutions: 1080p, 1440p, and 4K.

All the scores are expressed as percentages relative to the top-ranking 1080p ultra card, which is of course the GeForce RTX 5090.

Our 2026 test suite comprises the following games. 11 are raster titles, and of those, four have RT support. We test another four games that either require RT to run (DOOM: The Dark Ages and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle) or look best with RT (Assassin's Creed Shadows and Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced.)

• Black Myth Wukong (+RT)
• Alan Wake II (+RT)
• Apex Legends
• Counter-Strike 2
• Fortnite
• Arc Raiders
• Stalker 2
• DOOM: The Dark Ages (RT required)
• Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced (RT only)
• Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (+RT)
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (RT required)
• Marvel Rivals
• Assassin's Creed Shadows (RT only)
• Cyberpunk 2077 (+RT)
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

GPU Benchmarks Hierarchy 2026: Raster gaming

The FPS score is the geometric mean (equal weighting) of all 11 games. Note that the specifications column links directly to our original review for the various GPUs.

Rasterization GPU Benchmarks, Key Findings

• Unsurprisingly, the RTX 5090 takes the top spot across the board, but prices remain stratospheric in mid-2026. It's also difficult to fully engage the GB202 GPU for pure raster gaming unless you're playing at 4K.
• Among current cards, the RX 9060 XT 8GB and RTX 5060 duke it out for the best performance per dollar at 1080p.
• The Radeon RX 9070 is the 1440p raster value champ. The recently introduced RX 9070 GRE sits just behind, and the RTX 5070 is a somewhat distant third.
• At 4K, the RX 9070 XT is the cheapest way to get into 4K 60 FPS native gaming. But the RX 9070 and RTX 5070 are also strong options among current GPUs if you're willing to enable a dash of upscaling.

Overall, if you're only interested in native raster gaming, Radeons are a strong choice in 2026. But Nvidia offers superior DLSS 4.5 upscaling and Multi Frame Generation support across all RTX 50-series cards, which makes matching your GPU's performance to your monitor's refresh rate a snap.

FSR 4.x upscaling isn't on par with DLSS 4.5 yet, and FSR ML Frame Generation is limited to a 2x framerate boost where it's available.

Rasterization GPU Benchmarks Rankings 2026

Remember that we're not including any upscaling or framegen results in the above table. DLSS, FSR, and XeSS offer differing image quality, and we want to keep things directly comparable.

Don't buy any of the cards at the top of our hierarchy without a high-refresh-rate 2560x1440 or 4K monitor to match. Even one of our best gaming CPUs, like the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, can only do so much when a powerful card becomes CPU-bound.

In general, if you're still running a 60 Hz fixed-refresh-rate monitor, it's entirely possible that you're not seeing all the frames your graphics card can generate. Practically any current-gen graphics card from the RTX 5060 on up is good enough for high-refresh-rate gaming at 1080p in 2026 even without upscaling or framegen, and the RTX 5070 or RX 9070 will give you the same experience at 1440p.

In this era of upscaling and framegen, a high-resolution monitor is no longer an obstacle to the best gaming experience. Upscalers work best with higher-than-1080p output resolutions, and the advent of the DLSS 4.5 upscaling model especially means that you can get both smooth performance and crisp image quality from surprisingly modest graphics cards.

But if you don't have a high-refresh-rate 1440p or 4K monitor to begin with, you can't take full advantage of the free boost to both performance and image quality that AI-powered upscaling offers, nor can you enjoy the full smoothness boost of framegen. Check out our list of the best gaming monitors for a potential upgrade if you're still rocking a 1080p 60 Hz display from the 2010s.

On to our 2026 raster results. Among currently available graphics cards, Blackwell rules the top three spots. The RX 9070 XT ends up fourth, just behind the potent (but much more expensive, as of June 2026) RTX 5070 Ti.

Moving into the midrange, the RX 9070's strong raster performance gives it the edge over the RTX 5070, but it's close. And the 5070 has the full arsenal of DLSS 4.5 features at its disposal in virtually every modern game.

Given the image quality and smoothness advantage of DLSS 4.5 upscaling and MFG, the 5070 got the nod in our most recent round of best graphics card picks after our 2026 retests.

The recently introduced RX 9070 GRE lands between the 5070 and the lower-end 5060 Ti and 9060 XT, a position for which Nvidia has no current-gen answer (and no easy path to one.) But AMD may have priced the GRE too high at $549, and we're already seeing big price drops on that product that might make it uniquely appealing in a market where the RTX 5060 Ti is its direct price competition.

The formerly midrange RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is hopelessly overpriced for the performance it offers in mid-2026, and the formerly somewhat affordable 8GB model is also selling for elevated prices now, making the entire 5060 Ti family impossible to recommend.

The RX 9060 XT 16GB holds down the entry-midrange 16GB position by itself, and its $459 price tag isn't so absurd as to make it un-recommendable. But as RX 9070 GREs start going on sale for $500-ish, the step up is going to look mighty tempting.

As we move further down the stack, the $300-ish Arc B580 represents Intel's best card right now, but it remains very much a budget part in mid-2026, trading blows with the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 4060. The only reason it lands as high as it does in our results is that its 12GB of VRAM prevents its performance from totally plummeting at 4K, as it does for those older 8GB cards.

The RTX 5060 is 24% faster than the Arc B580 at 1080p and 17% faster at 1440p, and its prices are proportionately higher. The scarce RX 9060 XT 8GB is a whole 30% faster at 1080p and 23% faster at 1440p, for similarly more money.

We don't think the potential longevity afforded by the B580's 12GB of VRAM is worth the massive performance tradeoff versus current-gen 8GB GPUs. Save up a few more bucks and grab an RTX 5060 or RX 9060 8GB instead (and enjoy the more widely adopted DLSS 4.5 or FSR 4 versus XeSS while you're at it).

The $250 Arc B570 is still a good value in mid-2026, and as the only modern, decent graphics card available for (well) under $300, it's still worth a look if you can't stretch to an RTX 5050. But recent software ills that took months to fix have led us to consider it more of a gamble than a product worthy of a recommendation, even though those issues did eventually get corrected.

Ray Tracing GPU Benchmarks 2026

For 2026, we're testing a range of RT titles that present a progressively more difficult workload to the GPUs under test.

Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced, DOOM: The Dark Ages, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are all relatively lightweight RT titles that will run on a wide range of RT-ready hardware. Spider-Man 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and Assassin's Creed Shadows represent greater challenges to compute resources, VRAM, or both. And Black Myth Wukong and Alan Wake II still bring even the most powerful graphics cards to their knees at native resolutions.

Our results for those more demanding games represent more of a jumping-off point for upscaling and framegen rather than native performance. But lighter RT titles mean that you can explore the differences in image quality that ray tracing offers without crushing your GPU flat.

In any case, graphics cards at the top of our RT tests are ready for practically any RT game. But as you'll see, that's still quite the high bar to clear in 2026.

Ray Tracing GPU Benchmarks, Key Findings and Notes

• The RTX 5090 really comes into its own with RT enabled, as expected.
• AMD's RX 9070 XT outperforms the RX 7900 XTX in our RT tests, showing that the ray-tracing improvements in RDNA 4 deliver.
• Even with those improvements, the RX 9070 XT can only manage a tie with the RTX 4070 Ti with RT in play, coming in eighth place overall.
• Maintaining 60 FPS in RT titles (as a good foundation for upscaling and framegen enhancements) is a very tall order. Among recent products, you'll want:
  • an RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, RTX 5070, or RX 9070 GRE to handle ~60 FPS RT at 1080p without running out of VRAM
  • An RTX 4070, an RTX 5070 or RX 9070 at 1440p, or an RX 9070 XT or RTX 5070 Ti for the best possible experience
  • An RTX 5080, RTX 4090, or RTX 5090 at 4K

Ray Tracing GPU Benchmarks Rankings 2026

The RTX 5090 and RTX 4090 lead our RT results. But if you want to enjoy high-end RT without a 4090- or 5090-sized bankroll, the RTX 5070 Ti proves itself as the last card with a reasonable price-to-performance ratio before things get crazy.

The 5070 Ti leads the RX 9070 XT by a wide margin in our RT tests, and it's anywhere from 10%-15% behind the absurdly overpriced RTX 5080 across the board. But if you want the absolute best RT performance possible without stepping up to a 4090 or 5090, the extra cash for a 5080 is your best — and only — option.

That said, you should really explore DLSS 4.5 upscaling and MFG on the 5070 Ti before spending big to step up to a 5080.

The RX 9070 XT remains AMD's fastest RT GPU, outpacing the 7900 XTX across all tested resolutions. It leads the RDNA 3 halo card by about 10% across the board, which is an impressive generational leap considering its 33% deficit in CUs versus the XTX.

But the 9070 XT can only trade blows with the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 5070 with Nvidia competition in the picture. It beats out the 5070 at 1080p and 1440p, but DLSS 4.5 upscaling and MFG give Blackwell gamers more flexible options for boosting performance with only minimal impact to image quality versus both RDNA 4 (and Ada).

Of course, the RX 9070 XT has FSR 4 upscaling and framegen at its disposal in compatible titles, but support for those features isn't as widespread as DLSS.

Meanwhile, the RX 9070 comes in slightly behind the RTX 5070 at 1080p and 1440p for RT. Even though its 16GB of VRAM prevents the 9070's 4K RT performance from completely nosediving, the average frame rate at that resolution isn't high enough to make it a 4K RT choice.

At 1080p, the RX 9070 GRE presents an intriguing RT option for Radeon gamers, delivering a near-60-FPS average baseline that would make a great FSR 4 foundation. But its 12GB of VRAM quickly becomes a liability at 1440p versus the 9070, and 4K is out of the question.

Overall, our demanding 2026 RT test suite shows that the bar for entry to a good RT experience remains high, especially as elevated prices on the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB mean that the first "real" RT-ready Blackwell card at 1080p and up is the RTX 5070. And on the Radeon side, you really want an RX 9070 GRE or RX 9070 for the best experience.

Test Setup and Hardware for GPU Benchmarks

We've used several different PCs for our testing over the years. The latest update switches to an AMD Zen 5 processor: the unparalleled Ryzen 7 9800X3D and its 3D V-Cache-enhanced performance.

Here are the specifications for our latest GPU test PC.

Tom's Hardware 2026 GPU Benchmarks Testbed

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
CPU Cooler: Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120 SE
Memory: G.Skill Trident Z5 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5-6000 CL30
Motherboard: Asus TUF Gaming X670E-Plus Wifi
SSD: Inland Performance Plus 4TB
PSU: MSI MPG Ai1600TS 1600W

We test across the three most common gaming resolutions, 1080p, 1440p, and 4K, using a mix of high and ultra settings, depending on the title. Where possible, we use 'reference' cards for all of these tests, like Nvidia's Founders Edition models and AMD's reference designs. Most midrange and lower GPUs don't get reference models, however, and in some cases we only have factory-overclocked cards for testing. We do our best to select cards that are close to the reference specs in such cases.

For each graphics card, we follow the same testing procedure. We run one pass of each benchmark to "warm up" the GPU after launching the game, then perform our actual test runs across each resolution.

We carefully review our test data and check for anomalies. For example, we always expect the RTX 5080 to be faster than the RTX 5070 Ti. If it's not, and we're not in a CPU limited situation, we'll recheck both cards to ensure that our standings our accurate. We also check and retest in cases of subtler issues, as when a transient hitch or frame-time spike causes a large dip in 1% low FPS.

Due to the length of time required for testing each GPU, updated drivers and game patches inevitably come out that can impact performance. We periodically retest a few sample cards to verify our results are still valid, and if not, we go through and retest the affected game(s) and GPU(s). We may also add games to our test suite over time, if one comes out that is popular and conducive to testing. See what makes a good game benchmark for our selection criteria.

GPU Benchmarks: Individual Game Charts

The above tables provide a summary of performance, but for those that want to see the individual game charts, for both the standard and ray tracing test suites, we've got those as well. These charts only cover current-gen GPUs for readability.

These charts are up to date as of June 2026.

GPU Benchmarks — 1080p

GPU Benchmarks — 1440p

GPU Benchmarks — 4K

GPU Benchmarks — Power, Clocks, and Temperatures

Most of our discussion has focused on performance, but for those interested in power and other aspects of the GPUs, here are the appropriate charts. We'll run these from highest to lowest settings, as 4K ultra tends to be the most strenuous workload on most of these GPUs.

If you're looking for the legacy GPU hierarchy, head over to page two! We moved it to a separate page to help improve load times in our CMS as well as for the main website. And if you're looking to comment on the GPU benchmarks hierarchy, head over to our forums and join the discussion!

Choosing a Graphics Card

Choosing a Graphics Card

Choosing a Graphics Card

Which graphics card do you need? To help you decide, we created this GPU benchmarks hierarchy, comprising 48 GPUs from three generations of hardware for Nvidia and AMD and also including Intel's Battlemage cards. Not surprisingly, the fastest cards are using the latest GPU architectures, though they're not always a major upgrade over the prior generation.

Of course, it's not just about playing games. Many applications use the GPU for other work. But a good graphics card for gaming will typically do equally well in complex GPU computational workloads. Buy one of the top cards and you can run games at high resolutions and frame rates with the effects turned all the way up, and you'll be able to do content creation work as needed. Drop down to the middle and lower portions of the list and you'll need to start dialing down the settings to get acceptable performance in regular gameplay and GPU benchmarks.

If your main goal is gaming, you can't forget about the CPU. Getting the best possible gaming GPU won't help you much if your CPU is underpowered or many years out of date. So be sure to check out the Best CPUs for gaming page, as well as our CPU Benchmarks Hierarchy to make sure you have the right CPU for the level of gaming performance you're looking to achieve.

And don't forget about your monitor. Be sure to get a display whose refresh rate range matches the average frame rates of the graphics card that you want in the games that you play. Check out our list of the best gaming monitors for a starting point.

GPU Benchmarks from 2022–2024

Our 'legacy' GPU benchmarks used different hardware. Here are the details for the 2022–2024 configuration that used an Alder Lake 12900K CPU.

Tom's Hardware 2022–2024 GPU Testbed

Intel Core i9-12900K
MSI Pro Z690-A WiFi DDR4
Corsair 2x16GB DDR4-3600 CL16
Crucial P5 Plus 2TB
Cooler Master MWE 1250 V2 Gold
Cooler Master PL360 Flux
Cooler Master HAF500
Windows 11 Pro 64-bit

We have upgraded our test system and changed our test suite for 2025, effectively resetting our benchmarking and rankings. However, the old data — collected using a Core i9-12900K PC — remains valid. We aren't testing new GPUs with the old testbed, as that would double the time required for what is already a lengthy process, but we felt it would be helpful to some to keep the final data available.

We also had an interim system that never quite got wrapped up, which had a Core i9-13900K Raptor Lake CPU. Our original CPU was one of the impacted units that failed over time, which explains in retrospect why so much of the data felt a bit questionable. Thankfully, the new Ryzen 7 9800X3D system seems to be running just fine. Here are the 12900K results.

For these GPU benchmarks, we tested nearly every GPU released between 2016 and 2024, plus a few extras. All graphics cards were tested at 1080p medium and 1080p ultra, and we sorted the table by the 1080p ultra results. Where it made sense, we also tested at 1440p ultra and 4K ultra. All the scores are scaled relative to the top-ranking 1080p ultra card of the time, which in our suite is the RTX 4090 — especially at 4K and 1440p.

The above summary charts show the relative performance of the cards we've tested across the past several generations of hardware at 1080p ultra — swipe through the above gallery if you want to see the 1080p medium, 1440p, and 4K ultra images. There are a few missing options (e.g., the GT 1030, RX 550, and several Titan cards), but otherwise it's basically complete. Note that we also have data in the table below for some of the other older GPUs.

The eight games used for our standard GPU benchmarks hierarchy are Borderlands 3 (DX12), Far Cry 6 (DX12), Flight Simulator (DX11 Nvidia, DX12 AMD/Intel), Forza Horizon 5 (DX12), Horizon Zero Dawn (DX12), Red Dead Redemption 2 (Vulkan), Total War Warhammer 3 (DX11), and Watch Dogs Legion (DX12). The fps score is the geometric mean (equal weighting) of the eight games. Note that the specifications column links directly to our original review for the various GPUs.

*: GPU couldn't run all tests, so the overall score is slightly skewed at 1080p ultra.

While the RTX 4090 does technically take first place at 1080p ultra, it's the 1440p and especially 4K numbers that impress. It's less than 2% faster than the RTX 4080 Super at 1080p ultra, but that increases to 9% at 1440p and then 25% at 4K. Also note that the fps numbers in our table incorporate both the average and minimum fps into a single score — with the average given more weight than the 1% low fps.

Again, keep in mind that we're not including any ray tracing or DLSS results in the above table, as we use the same test suite with the same settings on all current and previous generation graphics cards. Since only RTX cards support DLSS (and RTX 40-series if you want DLSS 3), that would drastically limit which cards we could directly compare. You can see DLSS 2/3 and FSR 2 upscaling results in our RTX 4070 review if you want to check out how the various upscaling modes can help.

The RTX 4090 comes at a steep price, though on paper it's not that much worse than the previous generation RTX 3090. In fact, we'd say it's a lot better in some respects, as the 3090 was only a minor improvement in performance compared to the 3080 at the time of launch, but with more than double the VRAM. Nvidia pulled out all the stops with the 4090, increasing the core counts, clock speeds, and power limits to push it beyond all contenders. There are two problems with the 4090, however: It's not available at MSRP any longer, due to demand from the AI sector — it often costs $2,000 or more — and there are still concerns with pulling 450W of power over the 16-pin connector.

Stepping down from the RTX 4090, the RTX 4080 Super and RX 7900 XTX trade blows at higher resolutions, while CPU bottlenecks come into play at 1080p. We'll be switching our testbed in the near future, with the current results from our 13900K testing in the charts at the bottom of the page.

Outside of the latest releases from AMD and Nvidia, the RX 6000- and RTX 30-series chips still perform reasonably well and if you're using such a card, there may not be any need to upgrade at present. Intel's Arc GPUs also fall into this category and are something of a wild card.

We've been testing and retesting GPUs periodically, and the Arc chips running the latest drivers now complete all of our benchmarks without any major anomalies. (Minecraft was previously a problem, though Intel has finally sorted that out.) They're not great on efficiency, but overall performance and pricing for the A750 is quite good.

Turning to the previous generation GPUs, the RTX 20-series and GTX 16-series chips end up scattered throughout the results, along with the RX 5000-series. The general rule of thumb is that you get one or two "model upgrades" with the newer architectures, so for example the RTX 2080 Super comes in just below the RTX 3060 Ti, while the RX 5700 XT basically matches the newer and less expensive RX 6600 XT.

Go back far enough and you can see how modern games at ultra settings severely punish cards that don't have more than 4GB VRAM. We've been saying for a few years now that 4GB was just scraping by, and these days we'd avoid buying anything with less than 8GB of VRAM — 12GB or more is the minimum we'd want with a mainstream GPU, and 16GB or more for high-end and above. Old cards like the GTX 1060 3GB and GTX 1050 actually failed to run some of our tests, which skews their results a bit, even though they do better at 1080p medium.

Now let's switch over to the ray tracing hierarchy.

Ray Tracing GPU Benchmarks 2022–2024

Enabling ray tracing, particularly with demanding games like many of those we're using in our DXR test suite, can cause framerates to drop off a cliff. We're testing with "medium" and "ultra" ray tracing settings. Medium generally means using the medium graphics preset but turning on ray tracing effects (set to "medium" if that's an option; otherwise, "on"), while ultra turns on all of the RT options at more or less maximum quality.

Because ray tracing is so much more demanding, we're sorting these results by the 1080p medium scores. That's also because the RX 6500 XT, RX 6400, and Arc A380 basically can't handle ray tracing even at these settings, and testing at anything more than 1080p medium would be fruitless.

The five ray tracing games used are Bright Memory Infinite, Control Ultimate Edition, Cyberpunk 2077, Metro Exodus Enhanced, and Minecraft — all of these use the DirectX 12 / DX12 Ultimate API. The fps score is the geometric mean (equal weighting) of the five games, and the percentage is scaled relative to the fastest GPU in the list, which again is the GeForce RTX 4090.

If you want to see what the future may hold with ray tracing, check out our Alan Wake 2 benchmarks where the full path tracing barely manages playable performance even with upscaling on non-Nvidia GPUs. However, and this is a critical point, the number of games where RT truly makes a striking difference in visuals is extremely limited. For most games, we still feel running pure rasterization rendering makes more sense.

If you felt the RTX 4090 performance was impressive at 4K in our standard test suite, just take a look at the results with ray tracing. Nvidia put even more ray tracing enhancements into the Ada Lovelace architecture, and those start to show up here. There are still further potential performance improvements for ray tracing with SER, OMM, and DMM — not to mention DLSS 3, though that ends up being a bit of a mixed bag, since the generated frames don't include new user input and add latency.

If you want a real kick in the pants, we also ran many of the faster ray tracing GPUs through Cyberpunk 2077's RT Overdrive mode, which implements full "path tracing" (full ray tracing, without any rasterization) — as well as Alan Wake 2, which uses path tracing at higher settings, and Black Myth: Wukong that supports full ray tracing. Those games provide a glimpse of how future games could behave, and why upscaling and AI techniques like frame generation are here to stay.

Even at 1080p medium, a relatively tame setting for DXR (DirectX Raytracing), the RTX 4090 roars past all contenders and leads the previous generation RTX 3090 Ti by 41%. At 1080p ultra, the lead grows to 53%, and it's nearly 64% at 1440p. Nvidia made claims before the RTX 4090 launch that it was "2x to 4x faster than the RTX 3090 Ti" — factoring in DLSS 3's Frame Generation technology — but even without DLSS 3, the 4090 is 72% faster than the 3090 Ti at 4K.

AMD continued to relegate DXR and ray tracing to secondary status, focusing more on improving rasterization performance — and on reducing manufacturing costs through the use of chiplets on the new RDNA 3 GPUs. As such, the ray tracing performance from AMD isn't particularly impressive. The top RX 7900 XTX basically matches Nvidia's previous generation RTX 3080 12GB, which puts it barely ahead of the RTX 4070 — and that's not even in all DXR games. There are some minor improvements for RT performance in RDNA 3, though, as the 7800 XT for example ends up basically tied with the RX 6800 XT in rasterization performance but is 10% faster in DXR performance.

Intel's Arc A7-series parts show a decent blend of performance in general, with the A750 coming in ahead of the RTX 3060 overall. With the latest drivers (and with vsync forced off in the options.txt file), Minecraft performance also looks much more in line with the other Arc DXR results.

You can also see what DLSS Quality mode did for performance in DXR games on the RTX 4090 in our review, but the short summary is that it boosted performance by 78% at 4K ultra. DLSS 3 frame generation improved framerates another 30% to 100% in our testing, though we recommend exercising (extreme) caution when looking at FPS with the feature enabled. It can boost framerates in benchmarks, but when actually playing games it often doesn't feel much faster than without the feature.

Overall, with DLSS 2, the 4090 in our ray tracing test suite is nearly four times as fast as AMD's RX 7900 XTX. Ouch. AMD's FSR 2 and FSR 3 can help as well, and AMD continues to work on increasing the rate of adoption, but it still trails DLSS both in the number of games supported and in the overall image quality. Only two of the games in our DXR suite have FSR2 support. By comparison, all of the DXR games we're testing support DLSS2 — and one also supports DLSS3.

Without FSR2, AMD's fastest GPUs can only clear 60 fps at 1080p ultra, while remaining decently playable at 1440p with 40–50 fps on average. But native 4K DXR remains out of reach for just about every GPU, with only the 3090 Ti and above breaking the 30 fps mark on the composite score — and a couple of games still come up short on the 3090 Ti.

AMD also has FSR 3 frame generation. Like DLSS3, it adds latency, and AMD requires the integration of Anti-Lag+ support in games that use FSR 3. But Anti-Lag+ only works with AMD GPUs, which means non-AMD cards will likely incur a larger latency penalty. We've tested it in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and found it worked pretty well, but that was not the case in Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum. It has since gained a lot more traction, though quality and latency remain quite variable — it can look and run well in one game, and then fall flat in another.

The midrange GPUs like the RTX 3070 and RX 6700 XT basically manage 1080p ultra and not much more, while the bottom tier of DXR-capable GPUs barely manage 1080p medium — and the RX 6500 XT can't even do that, with single digit framerates in most of our test suite, and one game that wouldn't even work at our chosen "medium" settings. (Control requires at least 6GB VRAM to let you enable ray tracing.)

Intel's Arc A380 ends up just ahead of the RX 6500 XT in ray tracing performance, which is interesting considering it only has 8 RTUs going up against AMD's 16 Ray Accelerators. Intel posted a deep dive into its ray tracing hardware, and Arc seems reasonably impressive, except for the fact that the number of RTUs severely limits performance. The top-end A770 still only has 32 RTUs, which proves sufficient for it to pull ahead (barely) of the RTX 3060 in DXR testing, but it can't go much further than that. Arc A750 and above also ends up ahead of AMD's RX 6750 XT in DXR performance, showing just how poor AMD's RDNA 2 hardware is when it comes to ray tracing.

It's also interesting to look at the generational performance of Nvidia's RTX cards. The slowest 20-series GPU, the RTX 2060, still outperforms the newer RTX 3050 by a bit, but the fastest RTX 2080 Ti comes in a bit behind the RTX 3070. Where the 2080 Ti basically doubled the performance of the 2060, the 3090 delivers about triple the performance of the 3050.

Test System and How We Test for GPU Benchmarks

For each graphics card, we follow the same testing procedure. We run one pass of each benchmark to "warm up" the GPU after launching the game, then run at least two passes at each setting/resolution combination. If the two runs are basically identical (within 0.5% or less difference), we use the faster of the two runs. If there's more than a small difference, we run the test at least twice more to determine what "normal" performance is supposed to be.

We also look at all the data and check for anomalies, so for example RTX 3070 Ti, RTX 3070, and RTX 3060 Ti all generally going to perform within a narrow range — 3070 Ti is about 5% faster than 3070, which is about 5% faster than 3060 Ti. If we see games where there are clear outliers (i.e. performance is more than 10% higher for the cards just mentioned), we'll go back and retest whatever cards are showing the anomaly and figure out what the "correct" result would be.

Due to the length of time required for testing each GPU, updated drivers and game patches inevitably will come out that can impact performance. We periodically retest a few sample cards to verify our results are still valid, and if not, we go through and retest the affected game(s) and GPU(s). We may also add games to our test suite over the coming year, if one comes out that is popular and conducive to testing — see our what makes a good game benchmark for our selection criteria.

GPU Benchmarks: Individual Game Charts

The above tables provide a summary of performance, but for those that want to see the individual game charts, for both the standard and ray tracing test suites, we've got those as well. We're only including more recent GPUs in these charts, as otherwise things get very messy. These are also using a newer test suite and a 13900K CPU, which changes the performance slightly from the above table, simply because our newest tests are more relevant (but haven't been run on a lot of the older GPUs shown in the tables).

These charts were up to date as of November 11, 2024.

GPU Benchmarks — 1080p Medium

GPU Benchmarks — 1080p Ultra

GPU Benchmarks — 1440p Ultra

GPU Benchmarks — 4K Ultra

GPU Benchmarks — Power, Clocks, and Temperatures

Most of our discussion has focused on performance, but for those interested in power and other aspects of the GPUs, here are the appropriate charts.

Our even older 2020–2021 'legacy' GPU benchmarks used another set of hardware with different games. Here are the details for the Coffee Lake 9900K and Z390 PC.

Tom's Hardware 2020–2021 GPU Testbed

Intel Core i9-9900K
Corsair H150i Pro RGB
MSI MEG Z390 Ace
Corsair 2x16GB DDR4-3200
XPG SX8200 Pro 2TB
Windows 10 Pro (21H1)

The results below combine results from nine games with six resolution and setting combinations. All of the scores are combined (via a geometric mean calculation) into a single overall result, which tends to penalize the fastest and slowest GPUs — CPU bottlenecks come into play at 1080p medium, while VRAM limitations can kill performance at 4K ultra.

These results have not been updated since early 2022, when we added the RTX 3050 and RX 6500 XT to the list. We won't be adding future GPUs to this table, so there's no RTX 40-series, RX 7000-series, Arc, 3090 Ti, 6950 XT, 6750 XT, or 6650 XT, but it does help to provide a look at a slightly less demanding suite of games, where 6GB or more VRAM isn't generally required at 1080p ultra settings. You can use these older results to help inform your purchase decisions, if you don't typically run the latest games at maxed out settings.