In addition to memory and storage, graphics cards continue to command a premium in the PC components market. While discounts are hard to come by, the XFX Quicksilver AMD Radeon RX 9070XT Gaming Edition is currently available at Newegg for $699.99, down from its regular listed price of $789.99. At $90 off, this is one of the better prices we've seen for an RX 9070 XT in recent months.

• Check out this deal on Newegg

The XFX Quicksilver RX 9070XT OC Gaming Edition features a minimalist all-black design which makes it perfect for black-themed PC builds. The cooling system on this GPU includes a nickel-plated copper cold plate, 3x double ball bearing fans, and 6mm heatpipes to offer the best thermal dissipation. Overall, it is quite beefy with its 3.5-slot design and includes a backplate for both improved rigidity and cooling.

The RX 9070 XT stands as AMD’s current-gen flagship GPU based on the RDNA 4 architecture. An excellent card for 1440p gaming, it is also capable of handling 4K gaming once you dial in the right settings. It features 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 256-bit memory bus along with 4,906 stream processors, 64 compute units, and boost clock speeds of up to 2,970 MHz. It definitely has a place among the best graphics cards for gaming in 2026.

In our RX 9070 XT review, we found that the card delivered a solid generational uplift over AMD's previous-generation GPUs. While it may trail Nvidia in ray tracing tech, it manages to offer strong rasterization performance and a lower price than the RTX 5070 Ti making it one of the best value GPUs in its class.

At $699.99, the XFX Quicksilver RX 9070 XT Gaming Edition offers a meaningful discount over its regular asking price, and a highly recommended graphics card for anyone planning an upgrade. While it's still above AMD's original launch MSRP of $599, it is a notable improvement over the card's current typical street price.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, gaming chair, or CPU Deals pages.

The developers of RPCS3 have announced that their PlayStation 3 emulator’s minimum system requirements have been adjusted to include a crop of even older Radeon graphics cards. This well-regarded application already supported ATI Terascale 2 GPUs from the Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series, but now gamers still cradling Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 series can join in the fun. Some of these GPUs date back nearly 20 years. Please note that while RPCS3 is available for a range of platforms, this extended ATI architecture support is only for Linux users.

Fine wine on Terascale 2

Back in 2021, the RPCS3 devs lowered the emulator’s system requirements to embrace Radeon HD 5000 and HD 6000 (Terascale 2) series graphics cards. In the subsequent five years, the emulator has been tuned to improve performance on hardware from these generations. An example provided asserts that when using Persona 5 as a benchmark, performance in Kamoshida’s Castle went from 35 to 49 FPS between 2021 and today (on a PC system with an ATI Radeon HD 5850, AMD FX-8350 CPU, and 8GB of RAM).

Inspired Terascale 1 experiments

Success spurred the devs to investigate TeraScale 1 performance and compatibility. Some OpenGL wrangling ensued due to TeraScale 1 GPUs only reporting OpenGL 3.3 and GLSL 3.30 support, but getting these old and unloved ATI cards to work with the RPCS3 OpenGL renderer was surprisingly simple. It was done by overriding the reported OpenGL levels to 4.3 and 4.40.

Initial tests made use of a system packing an ATI Radeon HD 4890 with 1GB of VRAM – the most powerful Terascale 1 GPU ever sold. According to the RPCS3 blog, this card has a more powerful GPU than the PS3, but the emulator’s complex shader code is not optimal for older architectures like this. Nevertheless, “Simpler games work perfectly fine, with playable performance,” notes the blog, “while games that have more complex graphics are GPU bottlenecked with subpar performance.” Screenshots show Metal Gear Solid HD Collection and Outrun Online Arcade with frame rates close to 60 FPS.

Moving down the stack and further back in time, GPUs like the ATI Radeon HD 3870 are “still able to render very simple games with playable performance in RPCS,” assert the devs. To achieve playability, you will want to dial in PSP-like resolutions, though. Specifically, 273p was mentioned.

What about the weakest TeraScale 1 GPUs? The ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with a measly 256MB of VRAM even performs poorly at 273p. Screenshots from RPCS3 tests show it only managing 8 FPS in Outrun Online Arcade and 13 FPS in Portal.

With RPCS3’s progress over the last half decade, these performance numbers could also improve. In fact, the blog states that “future optimization should improve performance by quite a bit on these old GPUs.”

It looks like a good time to dust off your retro PC and try a few old PS3 classics on your ATI TeraScale 1 GPU-accelerated rig. Remember this extended graphics card support requires a Linux distro with the Mesa driver r600. Then you need to launch RCPS3 with the following environment variables: MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.3 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=440 ./rpcs3.AppImage

The demand for AI compute is already insatiable, and it seems only poised to grow in the wake of the introduction of frontier-class open models like Kimi K3 that anybody can potentially fine-tune and serve. Against this backdrop, Microsoft and AMD are teaming up to get Redmond more AI FLOPS for both internal and external use. The two companies announced this morning that Microsoft will commit to adding AMD's Helios rack-scale AI accelerator in volume to run frontier-model workloads in its own data centers, as well as for Azure AI infrastructure customers and services.

The partnership makes next-gen AMD AI compute available to Azure customers like AI labs for AI training and inference serving workloads, and it’ll also underpin managed compute for enterprise customers looking to deploy AI workloads through Microsoft Foundry.

The two companies didn't indicate the exact size of Microsoft's Helios deployment in either watts or dollars, but the commitment would seem to be another major win for AMD as it seeks to grab data center GPU share from Nvidia. AMD has struck massive partnerships with OpenAI and Meta in the past year with gigawatts of compute installations and hundreds of billions of dollars potentially hanging in the balance.

For a quick refresher, the Helios rack-scale accelerator will take the fight to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 system when it arrives later this year. Helios joins together 72 next-generation Instinct MI455X GPUs with an aggregate of 31.1TB of HBM4 memory capacity across the system. Those GPUs offer as much as 1.4 exaFLOPS of FP8 compute and 2.9 exaFLOPS of FP4 for AI models using those OCP AI data types.

AMD is targeting 260 TB/s of scale-up bandwidth within the rack, on par with Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale system, and 43 TB/s of scale-out bandwidth using UALink over Ethernet, or about twice that of Vera Rubin, although the performance of UALink over Ethernet in practice remains to be seen.

Microsoft and AMD also announced that Azure will add two new VM series built on AMD's upcoming sixth-gen Epyc Venice CPUs: the HDv2 series for "agentic AI and data pipelines," and the HXv2 for semiconductor design workflows. Microsoft will also leverage its existing deployment of AMD Pensando DPUs to integrate that hardware into its Azure Boost offerings to accelerate networking and storage processing operations.

Tom’s Hardware will be on the ground at AMD’s Advancing AI event this week, where we expect to learn more about AMD’s AI ambitions for the second half of this year and beyond. Stay tuned for our coverage from that event.

AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card has finally penetrated the Steam Survey video card user-share table. The complete set of new-generation RDNA 4 graphics cards data from AMD is now nestled within the Steam gamer popularity tables, with the performance-leading RX 9070 XT highest placed at position 25. AMD took the wraps off the RX 9070 XT and regular RX 9070 at a special event in Feb 2025, with availability starting from March 2025. The RX 9060 XT was a Computex 2025 (~end of May) launch. So the charting of the family has been a long time coming.

Valve doesn’t publicly state a minimum share threshold for inclusion in the results table, but whatever formula lies behind it, the numbers must have climbed sufficiently by May 2026 for the complete Radeon RX 9000 family to now make the grade. Notably, with its newfound data, the RX 9070 XT's 1.35% share sits just a shade behind the RTX 5080, which has 1.52%.

Green Team context and AMD’s leading mystery GPU

Nvidia dominates the Steam GPUs chart, as you may expect. The current leader of the Steam GPUs pack is the time-tested Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 with a 4.02% share according to the newest survey. Positions two and three are the laptop (3.99%) and desktop (3.74%) versions of the RTX 4060, so some would call this Ada Lovelace GPU the real champion of champions.

Currently, the highest placed Red Team GPU is the nebulous ‘AMD Radeon Graphics’ at position 13 and 1.89% share. Some observers reckon this Steam entry impacts the tally of named models, as the Steam Client miscategorizes discrete models for some reason, perhaps due to some iGPU + GPU combos. There are also two other instances of ‘AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics’ in the table, muddying the waters.

At position 39, the RX 9060 XT has made its debut with a reported 0.72% share of Steam users gaming on this mid-ranger. The stats don’t differentiate between the 8GB and 16GB variants of this card.

We have to go all the way down to position 90 to see the Radeon RX 9070 non-XT graphics card. It has a user share of 0.18% according to the figures. For some reason, this efficiency king among GPUs has been present in the Steam Survey much longer than its brethren. We mentioned it popping up with just a 0.16% market share at the start of this year. The revised 0.18% figure doesn’t show spectacular growth, despite some of the praise heaped on this SKU. However, since the pricing of our current best-pick all-around enthusiast graphics card, the RX 9070 XT, can be so close, it’s probably not surprising that the non-XT is overshadowed.

AMD recently launched the RX 9070 GRE worldwide. This 12GB variant of the RX 9070 has been available for months in the Far East, but we aren’t surprised it hasn’t entered the Steam Survey yet (if it will ever make it).

It's a grim time to be a PC gamer and enthusiast, as anybody who has spent any time making a build list well knows. The AI gold rush has made practically everything that goes into a PC more expensive as LLMs and agentic workflows conspire to grab every available square millimeter of logic, memory, and storage wafers the world over.

For all that, here we are at Computex 2026 with a fresh graphics card review. AMD is bringing its formerly China-only RX 9070 GRE (aka “Great Radeon Edition,” neé Golden Rabbit Edition) to global markets. This card has been available in the Chinese market for about a year, but AMD has decided that now is the time to bring the GRE to the wider world.

And here it is, launching at the same $549 in the USA that the RX 9070 ostensibly listed for. That's sure to cause some double-takes, but times have obviously changed since the 9070 arrived a bit over a year ago.

In today's wild graphics market, prices on what we might call "entry-level enthusiast" cards with large memory capacities have gotten out of whack with the performance levels they deliver. The $349 RX 9060 XT 16GB is now selling for closer to $450, and the $429 RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is now closer to $570. The RX 9060 XT might be situationally recommendable at that price, but the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is clearly DOA.

And higher-end cards that would formerly have served as true midrange products are more expensive, too. The $549 RX 9070 sells for closer to $650, as does the RTX 5070.

So there's currently a wide gap in the graphics market for enthusiasts who want strong enough performance for high-refresh-rate gaming at both 1080p and 1440p without spending a dollar more than they need to, and AMD sees an opportunity for the RX 9070 GRE to fill it.

For a quick refresher, the RX 9000 series uses the RDNA 4 graphics architecture, AMD’s first to include dedicated matrix math accelerators for AI tasks like upscaling and frame gen. RDNA 4 also boasts improved RT units that claim up to a 2x improvement over the RDNA 3 CU. RDNA 4 also includes a much-improved media engine that can encode and transcode video quickly with much higher image quality than past Radeon products.

The RX 9070 GRE uses the same large Navi 48 GPU as the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT, but it's the most cut-down version of that chip thus far, with only 48 RDNA 4 compute units of a possible 64. That downsizing has the expected downstream consequences for texture sampling throughput, pixel fill rate, and raw FLOPS compared to higher-end RDNA 4 cards.

AMD has also decked out the GRE with slower GDDR6 memory and less of it compared to its higher-end stablemates. This card offers 12GB of GDDR6 running at 18 Gbps on a 192-bit bus, which is good for 432 GB/s of raw memory bandwidth. (The RX 9070 and 9070 XT use 20 Gbps GDDR6, as does the RX 9060 XT.)

All of those cuts are clearly meant to thread the performance gap between the RX 9060 XT 16GB and the RX 9070. In terms of raw FLOPS, the GRE isn't that far behind the RX 9070, but its slower GDDR6 clocks and narrower bus both mean that vital memory bandwidth is down a whole 33% compared to the 9070 and 9070 XT. And just 12GB of GDDR6 means this card will be less well suited to RT and 4K gaming versus its two higher-end stablemates.

All that suggests it might have been good for AMD to be bolder with the RX 9070 GRE's price. With just 12GB of VRAM and relatively low memory bandwidth, this card is less appealing for local AI trailblazers than the higher-end 9070 and 9070 XT might be, and as we'll see, its gaming performance isn't so close to the 9070 that it would threaten to cannibalize sales of that product.

But a $479 9070 GRE (or even a $499 one) would probably kill every current RX 9060 XT 16GB card dead — or at least force prices back down, both of which are outcomes that AMD's board partners would likely be unhappy with in today's wild market and constrained upstream supply conditions.

But another angle here is that hardware is just the beginning of evaluating a given graphics card in 2026. You don't just plug one into a PC and install occasional driver updates for it any longer. Modern gaming requires a GPU vendor to conduct ongoing investment in a multi-part software stack encompassing upscaling, frame generation, and RT denoising, and to effectively evangelize that stack to developers and get it into games.

Thanks to Nvidia's sustained investment in the DLSS ecosystem, owning a GeForce card means that you can generally trust that you'll enjoy either day-one support for the latest DLSS versions in games or an easy override using the Nvidia App. And Multi Frame Generation on Blackwell has matured to the point that early tradeoffs with input latency are basically ironed out in the latest titles. That all means that you have a wide range of freedom to tune performance, smoothness, and image quality to taste on GeForces.

AMD certainly has competitive AI-powered upscaling options in FSR 4 and 4.1, both of which are major improvements over FSR 3 and earlier. And you can enable them in many games with driver overrides, just as with the Nvidia App. But community surveys have still shown a strong preference for the output of DLSS, so AMD still has work to do on its upscaling models.

And for those who want to embrace the smoothness boost of framegen, AMD is clearly behind. FSR 4 ML Frame Generation is still limited to a 2X multiplier, and it's only supported in a handful of games compared to DLSS MFG. Even Intel has enabled higher 3x and 4x framegen multipliers for its Arc products.

And AMD's Ray Regeneration RT denoiser is only available in a couple of titles, while you can usually find DLSS Ray Reconstruction alongside titles that are pushing the state of path-traced effects forward. Ray Reconstruction is a key feature in titles like Resident Evil Requiem, Pragmata, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Doom: The Dark Ages, and more. In fact, AMD cards are locked out of path-traced effects entirely in Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata.

Whatever the cause of these divergent experiences on GeForces and Radeons, the fact of the matter is that Nvidia has the money and developer relations muscle to make sure its DLSS features make their way into practically every new game, whereas AMD apparently does not, and that gap seems to grow wider with every AAA release.

All that is to say that if you choose a Radeon today, you are likely going to encounter more inconsistent feature support, fewer cutting-edge options for eye candy, and a less flexible performance tuning experience compared to GeForces.

And that all means that AMD likely needs to be more aggressive on pricing to get gamers back into its camp (and perhaps funnel some of its AI cash back into developer relations to stoke broader adoption of its tech). It's tough to admit that you're behind on these features and their adoption, to be sure, but pricing is a powerful way to make up some of the difference.

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For our testing, AMD sent over XFX's Swift Radeon RX 9070 GRE. This is XFX's most straightforward family of graphics cards, and the 9070 GRE version features a clean, reserved design without any kind of RGB or accent lighting whatsoever. If you like stealthy builds, this card would be a fine pick for the purpose.

This card is already listed at Best Buy in the USA for AMD's $549 MSRP, so we'll have to see whether that price holds and whether you can actually buy it from stock.

At least according to retail specs, XFX rates this card for the same 2790 MHz boost clock and 220 W TDP as AMD's reference spec, so its performance in our test suite should be representative of what a 9070 GRE "reference" card would deliver, even though no such actual product exists.

While this isn't a fancy RX 9070 GRE, it doesn't feel cheap or insubstantial. The backplate is made of sturdy metal, and the heatsink proper is well-finished and features a dense nickel-plated fin stack for plenty of surface area.

We weren't able to perform formalized noise testing on this card before we had to leave for Computex, but the large heatsink and trio of fans mean that its noise signature is quiet and pleasant under load. You likely won't be able to hear this card over other components in a gaming PC when it's running full tilt.

As is common nowadays, XFX 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.

Around back, you'll find three DisplayPort 2.1 connectors and a single HDMI 2.1b port.

The RX 9070 GRE relies on two eight-pin PCIe connectors to fuel its 220W TDP, so unless you do something really stupid, you won't have to worry about potential 12V-2x6 meltdowns.

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We do our very 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.

We test without upscaling or frame generation at a mix of high and ultra settings across all of our titles. While we personally recommend using the full range of upscaling and frame generation options available in a given title to achieve your desired balance of performance and image quality, focusing on native rendering in reviews keeps our results directly comparable across different vendors' products.

Our 2026 GPU test suite covers 15 titles. 11 of them start with a raster baseline or are raster-only, while four more of them include additional RT options that we employ in our tests. Two more require a graphics card with RT support to run at all. We tested Assassin's Creed Shadows and GTA V Enhanced exclusively with RT enabled.

Here's our complete list of tested titles:

• Arc Raiders
• Assassin's Creed Shadows (RT only)
• Black Myth: Wukong (+RT)
• Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (+RT)
• Cyberpunk 2077 (+RT)
• Alan Wake II (+RT)
• Fortnite
• Marvel Rivals
• Apex Legends
• Counter-Strike 2
• Stalker 2
• Doom: The Dark Ages (RT required)
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (RT required)
• Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced (RT only)
• 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: MSI Ai1600TS

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, here you go: the RX 9070 GRE delivers a 120 FPS average at 1080p across our 11-game raster-only test suite and an 86.6 FPS average at 1440p. That puts it in a solid position to enable high-refresh-rate gaming for the two most popular monitor resolutions among PC gamers, and it's a nice boost over lower-midrange products like the RX 9060 XT 16GB and RTX 5060 Ti 16GB.

But overall raster performance falls short of a 60 FPS average at 4K, which remains the turf of the RTX 5070, RX 9070, RX 9070 XT, and RX 5070 Ti at a minimum. For a truly midrange product, though, that's an OK tradeoff for the GRE, as 4K monitors are still far less common than 1440p screens. And if you can deploy FSR 4, you can still upscale your way to a fast and high-quality 4K experience.

Read on for per-game results. We'll largely let these numbers speak for themselves except where a given game requires particular elaboration.

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, heavy demands on graphics cards in exchange. This title has a free benchmark tool, but to ensure we get 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.

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)

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. In general, GeForce cards really seem to struggle with 1% lows in this title. Radeons do a better job of delivering both the high average frame rates and 1% lows that we want for a smooth gaming experience. But frame rates are so high in general that you're unlikely to notice any dips in performance.

Arc Raiders

Why it's here: One of 2026's most popular games, powered by UE5

What it stresses: Compute

Arc Raiders shows one of the widest performance divergences between GeForces and Radeons of any game in recent memory. The 9070 GRE barely outperforms the 5060 Ti in this title, and both it and the 9070 are outpaced by the RTX 5070.

We weren't aware of how large this divergence was before we set out to perform our 2026 GPU Hierachy testing, but given how popular Arc Raiders is, you should know about it before buying a Radeon.

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.

Radeons deliver an especially strong showing in Fortnite at 1080p and 1440p. The 9070 GRE even goes neck-and neck with the RTX 5070 until we reach 4K.

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.

In this full-range testing, many of our cards hit Apex's 300 FPS cap at 1080p. Unless you enjoy leaving large parts of your pricey GPU unused, you really should step up to 1440p at a minimum and possibly even 4K, where the 9070 GRE and many other cards can still deliver esports-friendly frame rates with better image quality.

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 9070 GRE turns in a fine performance

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Why it's here: One of the most acclaimed games in recent memory

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.

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 a representative PlayStation port. Like many games in this vein, it really wants both strong compute resources and plenty of VRAM from a GPU to hit high frame rates, especially with RT enabled.

But for rasterization, 12GB is enough VRAM to allow the RX 9070 GRE to turn in over 100 FPS on average at 1080p and almost 80 FPS at 1440p, so it's a great foundation for swift and smooth gaming under those conditions.

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, so much so that while the RX 9070 GRE manages over a 60 FPS average at 1080p, it falls short at 1440p. You'd probably want to dial in upscaling or dial settings back to high for a good 1440p experience here.

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 remains a beast of a title even this long after its introduction, at least once you get above 1080p. True to its mission, the 9070 GRE turns in high frame rates at 1080p and a solid 60 FPS average at 1440p.

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Our 2026 ray-traced tests span relatively lightweight RT titles such as Doom: The Dark Ages, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced to moderately challenging titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 to performance monsters like Alan Wake II, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and Black Myth: Wukong at its Very High RT preset. If a card passes all of these tests with flying colors, it’s ready for any RT experience you can throw at it.

Beyond the high initial performance cost of enabling ray tracing, RT titles at higher resolutions are more likely to run over lesser cards’ VRAM pools, resulting in rough performance. That behavior tends to show up as wide spreads between average and 1% low frame rates, so keep an eye out in our graphs for when cards with less VRAM start to stumble.

The TL;DR: The RX 9070 GRE handles our RT suite at 1080p just fine, turning in a 65 FPS average and well-controlled 1% lows overall and a nice generational uplift compared to the 7800 XT. That’s a good baseline for enabling FSR 4 upscaling and ML Frame Generation where it’s available in pursuit of higher output resolution targets.

At 1440p, though, the GRE is already showing weakness due to its 12GB of VRAM, barely outperforming the RX 9060 XT 16GB and RX 7800 XT and landing behind even the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB. The RX 9070 and its 16GB of VRAM pull far ahead. If you're serious about RT on a Radeon, we'd strongly suggest stepping up.

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 cranked to Ultra Nightmare, DOOM: The Dark Ages isn't terribly hard for our stable of graphics cards to run well. The 9070 GRE hands in strong results at 1080p and 1440p, but 4K proves too much (as it does for most of our cards without upscaling).

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 at least in our test area, it's full of autosave points that can have rough effects on 1% lows. We've tried to control for this as much as possible, but just be aware that the 1% lows here are as much a product of the game's behavior as they are any differences between graphics cards.

Alan Wake II

Alan Wake II's RT effects are crushing even without Path Traced Indirect Lighting enabled. The biggest issue beyond the performance demands of these settings is that these effects don't really make a huge visual 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. What we’re really looking for here is a solid foundation for upscaling, and the 9070 GRE delivers that level of performance at 1080p with a near-60-FPS average.

At 1080p, 12GB of VRAM is enough to avoid performance cliffs, and you can see the huge generational advantage the 9070 GRE has over the 7800 XT. That raw performance difference persists at 1440p, but the 9070 GRE's 1% lows suggest that 12GB of VRAM is starting to become a problem. And at 4K, the GRE's performance is roughly half that of the RX 9070 and behind even the 7800 XT, showing the advantages of 16GB of VRAM.

But none of those cards are delivering a playable experience at native 4K with RT, showing why it's more important to evaluate 1080p and 1440p as upscaling foundations.

Black Myth Wukong

Black Myth Wukong is tough on graphics cards even before we apply its RT presets, and Very High RT crushes everything into dust with native rendering. Even then, the game favors GeForce cards to such a degree that you'd need a massive dose of upscaling to reach playability with Very High RT on Radeons, even at 1080p.

Assassin's Creed Shadows

A new title for our 2026 GPU Hierarchy testing, Assassin's Creed Shadows boasts gorgeous RT visuals that make for a major upgrade when they're enabled. And it does all this without putting major pressure on VRAM.

As with many of our other RT titles, though, Shadows really seems to expect you to dial in upscaling (and maybe even some framegen) to achieve smooth frame rates, and the 9070 GRE provides a strong enough foundation for that purpose if you consider 1080p an input resolution for FSR 4 Performance at 4K, for just one of many potential examples.

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2

Enabling RT in Spider-Man 2 greatly improves the appearance of reflections on the many glass-clad buildings you'll swing by in its New York City setting, so it's worth the performance hit in our eyes. But the RX 9070 GRE's 12GB of VRAM already seems to be holding it back in this game at 1080p, as it isn't performing much better than the RX 9060 XT 16GB and RX 7800 XT. And the 9060 XT 16GB even outperforms the GRE at 4K.

Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced

It’s hard to believe we’re still testing Grand Theft Auto 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.

Even with that in mind, GTA V produces some... interesting results on our cards. Radeon RX 9000-series products suffer from a major frame rate drop partway through our run, and that results in much lower 1% lows compared to RX 7000-series cards, which don't experience the same issue. (And neither do RX 6000-series cards, even though they're not shown here.) We've watched this issue persist for many months, and it doesn't speak well for AMD's latest-gen graphics cards that it's lingered this long.

GeForces aren't immune to weird performance in this title either, however. At 1080p and 1440p, higher-end RTX cards seem to suffer from some weird potential CPU-boundedness, and that also appears as a wide gap between average frame rates and 1% lows in our charts. But unlike the RX 9000-series cards, those drops are only perceptible as slight stutters rather than an extended, painful dip. Raise the resolution to 1440p or especially 4K, and those stutters lessen or go away.

• MORE: Best Graphics Cards
• MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
• MORE: All Graphics Content

The Radeon RX 9070 GRE is surgically targeted to land in the wide-open performance gap between the RX 9060 XT and the RX 9070 for Radeons and the RTX 5060 Ti and RTX 5070 for GeForces, and it does exactly that for $549 as it arrives Stateside.

Wait, you might be saying. Didn’t the RX 9070 already launch at $549? Indeed it did, but outside of Prime Day events and holiday sales, we’ve rarely seen those cards available at that price. And the ongoing chip-pocalypse has durably spiked graphics card prices well above MSRP across the board, keeping $549 9070s a rare sight.

Even before the AI gold rush made all consumer tech more expensive, the past couple of years have shown that MSRPs are basically hopes and dreams without the supply to back them up, and that’s a headache that’s affected both AMD and Nvidia to varying degrees. Witness the consistently elevated prices of the RTX 5070 Ti, the RTX 5080, and the RTX 5090 even before the AI crunch.

But AMD was perhaps unreasonably aggressive with the promised pricing of the 9070 and 9070 XT given how rarely those products have been seen at MSRP. A 12GB card with a heavily cut-down die like the 9070 GRE would seem to offer a stronger price anchor, and as the distant player two in PC gaming graphics right now, AMD needs to give buyers a big, loud reason to pay attention.

At $479, the RX 9070 GRE would be the single best value in gaming by our calculations, period. But the realities of today’s market and AMD’s partner relationships probably limit the room for such a splashy sticker, given how much downward pressure it would place on the GDDR6-intensive RX 9060 XT 16GB. As things stand, the $549 MSRP makes the 9070 GRE the third-best value in gaming right now, after the RX 9070 and RTX 5070.

So what are you getting for that money? As a baseline, the GRE delivers a roughly 90 FPS 1440p raster experience, and that’s a solid place to be before you add FSR 4 upscaling and framegen to the mix. But if you got a $499 Radeon RX 7800 XT back in the day, you’re already enjoying a similar experience. And with a version of FSR 4 for RDNA 3 cards coming soon, there’s little reason for midrange RX 7000 owners to consider a jump.

Looking further back, the 9070 GRE is a strong upgrade for owners of the five-year-old RX 6700 XT and its 6750 XT refresh, both of which are now on the wrong side of 60 FPS at 1440p in our 2026 GPU Hierarchy testing. It delivers much better raster and RT performance, a vastly improved accelerated media engine, and official FSR 4 upscaling and framegen support, all of which will give RX 6000-series upgraders a much more modern and enjoyable gaming, streaming, and media transcoding experience.

The 9070 GRE might also tempt RTX 3070 owners that are struggling within the confines of that six-year-old card’s 8GB of VRAM. But the universal availability and generally superior image quality of DLSS upscaling and the added performance boost of DLSS MFG means that AMD will probably have a hard time convincing GeForce gamers to switch to an RX 9070 GRE versus an RTX 5070.

The two major drawbacks of this card lie in its 12GB of VRAM and, consequently, its RT performance at resolutions higher than 1080p. If you’re a fan of ray tracing and you’re considering this card, you will want to pay close attention to the availability of FSR 4 upscaling and ML Frame Generation or support for their overrides in any game you’d like to play. Those technologies will help mitigate the potential issues caused by 12GB of VRAM for memory-hungry RT titles.

But if you’re really serious about RT, we’d strongly recommend spending less than $100 more and getting an RTX 5070. It not only provides better baseline performance all around but also offers the one-two software punch of DLSS 4.5 upscaling and Dynamic MFG for effortless performance tuning, as well as Ray Reconstruction in some titles. You also avoid the annoying AMD lockout for path tracing in the latest Capcom releases like Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata.

All told, the RX 9070 GRE is a strong midrange graphics card that gives buyers a useful step up between the RX 9060 XT 16GB and RX 9070 (and the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and RTX 5070). We’d much rather have this product as a lifeline for PC gaming than the long-rumored-to-be-reintroduced RTX 3060 12GB, which is well past its sell-by date by every measure at our disposal.

But we still think that AMD could have truly changed the midrange game by going even cheaper than the GRE's $549 MSRP, given its performance and software ecosystem limitations compared to GeForces. At its listed price, we'll have to see whether the 9070 GRE offers enough of a hook to get buyers to bite.

• MORE: Best Graphics Cards
• MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
• MORE: All Graphics Content

Owners of Radeon RX 9000-series cards have been enjoying the benefits of the company's FSR 4 upscaling tech for some time now, and that feature has officially been exclusive to those products since launch. Gamers with older Radeons were left out in the cold, sparking community outrage—until today. AMD VP Jack Huynh has revealed that FSR 4.1 upscaling will be made available for RDNA 3 cards (RX 7000-series products) in July, and for RDNA 2 cards (RX 6000-series products) in "early 2027."

Community testing of AMD's INT8 FSR 4 code puts the penalty at around 10-20% versus FSR 3 on 6000-series cards, and a lower cost on 7000-series Radeons, but only testing with the full official version will tell the full story. Having said that, even with lower performance scaling, the quality-to-speed ratio of FSR 4.1 is almost certainly worth it.

The company has hinted at open-sourcing FSR4 in the wake of the aforementioned leak, a move that would probably be a good idea for the future of the technology, given how AMD's GPU division seems focused on catching up to Nvidia in the far more lucrative market AI accelerators. A more recent SDK update also suggested that FSR frame generation might get 4-6x multipliers, too, which would give it feature parity with Nvidia's MFG. In any event, making FSR 4 available to owners of older Radeons is a welcome step that will extend the useful life of those products for some time.

The news is certainly welcome for gamers with older Radeons, though technically minded folks already had access to FSR 4's improvements by way of community tools like Optiscaler. AMD initially restricted FSR 4 to RDNA 4's accelerated FP8 hardware, but an FSR 4 source code leak in August 2025 revealed that the company had also created an INT8 version of the AI upscaling model that was compatible with older cards. The community used that source code to enable support for FSR 4 on older Radeons through unofficial tools, creating an ongoing outcry for official support that's now been answered.

It's notable that the upcoming official release will incorporate the latest FSR 4.1 release. That upscaler improves on the original FSR 4.0 on most every front, with less blurring and smearing, better detail retention on thin lines and distant retention, and finer particle effects. There's also significantly less shimmer on object edges (aka improved temporal stability).

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

Quick Shopping Tips

What to Expect From the Best Budget Laptops for Gaming

15 years ago, AMD released its powerful Radeon HD 6990 graphics card (review link). This flagship dual-GPU hot rod, codenamed Antilles, was several months late in March 2011 and poked its head out only a couple of weeks before Nvidia’s reply. Nevertheless, the dual-Cayman XT GPU board, with a majestic-for-the-era 4GB of VRAM, became the world’s fastest graphics card (though that was an honor AMD already held with the Radeon HD 5970 2GB). To reach this PC performance pinnacle, AMD perhaps pushed the silicon a little too hard, though, with reviews of the time complaining about heat, noise, and power consumption.

The specs and performance of the Radeon HD 6990 were spectacular to behold at the time. Two fully-fledged Cayman XT GPUs were shoehorned onto a single PCB and connected via AMD’s CrossFireX. Essentially delivering two HD 6970 graphics cards on one board, albeit slightly downclocked, the HD 6990 thus delivered:

• Dual Cayman XT 40nm GPUs, packing 3072 stream processors and 5.28bn transistors combined
• Standard GPU clock of 830 MHz, OC up to 880 MHz
• 4GB GDDR5 (2GB per GPU)
• Five-display support
• Massive 375 W TDP, with OC modes pushing 450W (dual BIOS switch innovation)
• Dual-slot 12-inch PCB with two 8-pin connectors
• Flagship pricing at $699

If you want some in-depth analysis of what AMD’s Antilles represented at the time, please check out our 16-page review from March 2011.

Our test suite would embrace a slew of DirectX 11 titles. Most readers will be familiar with the F1, Battlefield, and Metro franchises, which featured in our tests. If you still play any of these classics, compare the results from the HD 6990 with what you can achieve using your modern GPU. Bonus points: Can your iGPU beat the Quad-CrossFire configuration of the HD 6990 in Crysis?

Above, Tom's Hardware’s Editor Emeritus, Chris Angelini, performs an AMD Radeon HD 6990 4GB noise test.

As we have already hinted, Tom’s Hardware wasn’t impressed by the heat, power consumption, and noise during the Radeon HD 6990 tests. Moreover, we thought, as an alternative, that a pair of Radeon HD 6970s sacrificed nothing except space in your case.

A couple of weeks later, Nvidia replied with its noticeably quieter dual-GPU GeForce GTX 590, but it couldn’t quite manage to usurp the Radeon HD 6990.

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."

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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Hot on the heels of one of AMD's David McAfee suggesting that the company might dust off the blueprints for its Zen 3 CPUs for another production run, another exec let out a hint about AMD's future plans with FSR 4. In an interview at CES, AMD's president of GPU Technologies and Chief Software Officer Andrej Zdravković suggested that the FSR 4 Redstone technology might be open-sourced. The statements come in the wake of an accidental release of the FSR 4 code earlier this year.

The hint came during a Q&A that Tom's Hardware attended when Chips and Cheese's George Cozma asked Zdravković if an open-source release was in the cards. The software head responded that the accidental public release in August was unexpected, but that it intends to release the source for the FSR4 library while keeping the core technology closed, so as not to give Nvidia engineers an advantage.

He continued by stating that AMD intends to "work as openly as possible," and was then asked to be specific about FRS 4's open release. Zdravković then said "that's the long-term plan," seemingly corroborating an earlier remark that "open sourcing is in [AMD's heart and mind]".

While the Radeon chief's words aren't a direct statement, it's likely that FSR 4 will see an official open-source release sooner rather than later. The August leak was by way of a GitHub repository that was part of FidelityFX SDK, which itself bears a broad MIT license, except for a handful of specific files.

Many have taken this to mean that although AMD pulled the source code down, theoretically it can't put the genie back in the bottle, as all of the published data, including the core AI model and its weights (a critical piece to replicate the technology), was arguably MIT-licensed for a brief moment in time.

Keeping FSR 4 as an exclusive selling point for 9000-series Radeon cards might not really be a realistic option anymore, either. As soon as they got their hands on the source code, industrious modders quickly tweaked the algorithm to work on RDNA 3 and older cards, and even on 3000-series GeForces.

While this comes with a hefty performance penalty versus running it on contemporary cards, many found the quality-versus-performance tradeoff very much worth it, given the significantly better output of the FSR 4 model. Don't be surprised if that FSR 4 GitHub repository pops up again soon.

Last week, the first rumors emerged that AMD was considering increasing recommended prices of its graphics cards in response to climbing prices of GDDR6 memory. Today, a leak by @harukaze5719 on X/Twitter could indicate the magnitude of the increase that AMD is planning to implement. If the rumor holds true, the company could increase recommended prices of its Radeon RX graphics cards with 8GB of memory by $20 and graphics boards with 16GB of memory by $40. The information is strictly unofficial, but may have some merit if we look at market trends.

8GB of GDDR6 memory was priced around $19.54 ($2.443 per 8 Gb chip) on the spot market on July 1, 2025, according to DRAMeXchange. The spot price of 8GB of GDDR6 today, December 2, is around $31.52 ($3.94 per 8 Gb chip), an increase of 61% in less than half of a year. Prices of 16 Gb GDDR6 memory ICs aren't as easy to find, but normally they should be about two times more expensive than their 8 Gb counterparts, which means that it costs over $62 to equip a graphics card with 16GB of GDDR6.

An avid reader may argue that as a large consumer of GDDR memories, AMD purchases memory in large volumes on long-term contracts, which smooths out sudden price changes. Yet the volumes of GDDR6 memory that AMD is likely to buy for graphics cards aren't that large these days: the company sold 740,000 discrete graphics processors for desktops in Q1, followed by 700,000 units in Q2 and 840,000 standalone GPUs for desktops in Q3, based on data from Jon Peddie Research. Getting huge discounts is hard if you do not buy a lot.

Furthermore, since we are dealing with a structural DRAM market change and as leading producers of memory clearly allocate more of their capacity for HBM memory aimed at AI accelerators, commodity DRAMs like GDDR6 are poised to get more expensive.

If it comes to pass, this rumor highlights the growing pressures that the AI boom is placing on the entire industry. AMD likely chose GDDR6 memory over GDDR7 for the RX 9000 series in part to control costs by maximizing its GDDR6 volumes (its Xbox and PS5 SoCs also use GDDR6), but the skyrocketing AI demand for silicon right now means there ultimately isn't any escape from rising costs.

These pressures also aren't isolated to AMD. Other rumblings suggest that Nvidia could move away from the business model of selling GPU packages and GDDR memories as a set to board partners altogether. We usually think of HBM as the memory type of choice for AI accelerators, but each Rubin CPX GPU requires 128GB of GDDR7, and if that memory could go on a high-margin AI accelerator rather than a lower-margin consumer graphics card, it's not hard to understand why Nvidia would prioritize furthering its AI lead.

AMD's current lineup includes Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 with 16 GB of memory ($599 and $549), the Radeon RX 9070 GRE with 12 GB, Radeon RX 9060 XT with 8GB or 16GB ($299 and $399), and a Radeon RX 9060 with 8GB that is designed primarily for OEMs. Increasing MSRPs of AMD's existing Radeon RX 9000-series products by $20 to $40 will hardly make them substantially more expensive and therefore less competitive, as Nvidia's relatively high MSRPs for its Blackwell cards leave some wiggle room for AMD to adjust its own sticker prices while remaining competitive. But at the same time, no increases go unnoticed in today's market.

After a turbulent weekend of updates and clarifications, AMD has published an entire web page to assuage user backlash and reaffirm its commitment to continued support for its RDNA 1 and RDNA 2-based drives, following a spate of confusion surrounding its recent decision to put Radeon RX 5000 and 6000 series cards in "maintenance mode." This comes after AMD had to deny that the RX 7900 cards were losing USB-C power supply moving forward, even though the drive changelog said something quite different.

Just last week, AMD released a new driver update for its graphics cards, and it went anything but smoothly. First, the wrong drivers were uploaded, and even after that was corrected, several glaring errors in the release notes required clarification. AMD was forced to correct claims about its RX 7900 cards, but at the time clarified that, indeed, RX 5000 and 6000 graphics cards were entering "Maintenance Mode," despite some RX 6000 cards being only around four years old.

Now, though, AMD has either rolled back that decision or someone higher up the food chain has made a new call, as game optimizations are back on the menu for RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 GPUs.

"We’ve heard your feedback and want to clear up the confusion around the AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2 driver release," AMD said in a statement. It went on to confirm that there were separate drivers for RX 7000 and 9000, and RX 5000 and 6000 GPUs, but that there wouldn't be any major differences in the support for these GPUs.

"Your Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series GPUs will continue to receive: Game support for new releases, Stability and game optimizations, and Security and bug fixes," AMD said.

Using the new split driver approach will reportedly make the job of AMD's driver team easier, whilst preventing anything designed for newer GPUs from breaking anything on the older ones.

"Our goal is simple: to give every Radeon gamer the best experience possible. By separating the code paths, our engineers can move faster with new features for RDNA 3 and RDNA 4, while keeping RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 stable and optimized for current and future games," AMD said.

This public statement backs up the response Tom's Hardware received from AMD at the tail end of last week.

"New features, bug fixes and game optimizations will continue to be delivered as required by market needs in the maintenance mode branch," an AMD spokesperson told Tom's Hardware last week.

This probably puts to bed any ideas of those older AMD cards getting the latest upscaling support, despite what modders have already proved is possible. AMD's early cards were notoriously and significantly behind the Nvidia curve when it came to upscaling and ray tracing support. With how much greater focus recent generations of AMD hardware and the latest games have placed on these technologies, perhaps it makes sense for AMD to keep its efforts for these new features focused on the future and recent past.

Either way, it's good to know that game optimizations will remain for those on older cards, even if they won't get quite the same shiny new features as the latest designs.

Following AMD's decision to put RDNA 1 and 2-based GPUs into "maintenance mode" in order to focus on new features for its more recent graphics technology, the company is backtracking a bit. AMD tells Tom's Hardware that RDNA 1 and 2 won't be left in the dust entirely when it comes to game optimizations. [Edit 11/3/2025: To be clear, AMD gave Tom's Hardware both an on-the-record verbal statement clarifying that day-zero support would be enabled, and also provided the following written statement.]

"New features, bug fixes and game optimizations will continue to be delivered as required by market needs in the maintenance mode branch," an AMD spokesperson told Tom's Hardware.

That's a statement that's likely to confuse some customers, as it's unclear what those "market needs" are. This sounds like new features will still be focused on RDNA 3 and 4-based GPUs, but AMD's clarification is that RDNA 1 and 2 will continue to get day-zero support for games, including on handhelds.

This is meant to clarify a statement from yesterday that read: "In order to focus on optimizing and delivering new and improved technologies for the latest GPUs, AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2 places Radeon RX 5000 series and RX 6000 series graphics cards (RDNA 1 and RDNA 2) in maintenance mode. RDNA 1 and RDNA2 graphics cards will continue to receive driver updates for critical security and bug fixes."

That statement, which would apply to a number of fairly recent graphics cards, as well as the integrated graphics in some laptops (like the Ryzen 7000 and 6000 series) and the Asus ROG Xbox Ally handheld (but not the more expensive Xbox Ally X), caused serious blowback among PC gamers and in the enthusiast press.

The Radeon RX 5700 XT and the Radeon RX 5700, which launched in July 2019, are only six years old, while the Radeon 6000 series, including the 6700XT, is still hanging out on the Steam Hardware Survey as of September 2025. The oldest Radeon 6000 cards are five years old. RDNA 2 can also be found in the Steam Deck, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X.

While AMD has made inroads with enthusiasts on pricing, some have held a belief that Nvidia has better drivers. In this case, Nvidia, which only this year is stopping support for its Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs (including the GTX 1080 Ti), came out looking like a winner because of how long it's been providing updates for its products. Nvidia's cards will continue to see security updates for another three years.

Yesterday, AMD clarified that another piece of news stating that the company would drop USB Type-C functionality on its RX 7900 cards was an error. The company told Tom's Hardware yesterday that "The release notes for AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2 posted today included misinformation that has since been corrected. There is no change to USB-C functionality on the RX 7900 series GPUs in the 25.10.2 driver."

We'll only see in time just how much support RDNA 1 and 2 GPUs receive for new games — and if this new position will help quell some of the backlash that's popped up in forums and on social media.

AMD has added a graphics card called Radeon 9060 XL, that does not officially exist, into the list of products supported by its ROCm 6.4.2 software stack, noticed a VideoCardz reader. However, the Radeon 9060 XL may not be a name of a new product, but simply a typo on AMD's part.

AMD's list of products supported by the ROCm 6.4.2 software stack includes the company's latest Radeon RX 9070 XT, RX 9070, RX 9070 GRE, RX 9060 XT, and RX 9060 XL, but lacks the RX 9060 model. While the document correctly points the latest Radeon RX 9000-series graphics cards to the gfx1200 and gfx1201 processors (as LLVM targets for compilers), it for some reason attributes them to the RDNA 3 microarchitecture, which is incorrect as they belong to the RDNA 4 family of GPUs.

Given that the document incorrectly describes microarchitecture of AMD's latest Radeon RX 9000-series graphics processors, it may as well call the Radeon RX 9060 the Radeon RX 9060 XL - as the unit most likely carries the Navi 44 XL processor.

While ATI Technologies, which became AMD's graphics products group (after AMD acquired ATI in 2006), used the 'XL' moniker for select products (e.g., Radeon X1800XL in 2005 and for OEM-only versions), starting from the Radeon HD 3000 series onward (with models like HD 3770, HD 4870, HD 5970, HD 6970, R9 290X, RX 480, RX 7900 XTX, etc.), AMD abandoned the 'XL' branding, but retained the moniker to mark cut-down versions of its GPUs: for example, the Radeon RX 7900 GRE carries the Navi 31 XL processor.

A Redditor took to the social media platform to ask for guidance on a GPU their friend found. The images in the original post show a unit labeled as AMD Radeon with what appears to be four rubber pegs at the back. There’s also a sticker near the pins marking the graphics card as “Engineering Sample NOT for Qualification” and saying that it was “Made in China-ATI/PCP NOT FOR RESALE” and dated 10/01/25.

One of the first commenters in the post suggested that the graphics card is an AMD Radeon AI Pro R9700, which was first announced at Computex 2025. The card that AdagioScray3267's friend has in their hands looks remarkably similar to AMD’s reference design, which AMD has clearly labeled as an artistic rendering in the PowerPoint presentation. The mysterious graphics card also has a sticker stating 300W — the same TDP as the R9700. This GPU is basically a Radeon 9070 XT with double the VRAM and is optimized for workstations and AI workloads.

There were various suggestions on what they can do with this find, with some saying that they can put it in their system, as it’s quite a great GPU in terms of graphical performance. On the other hand, others suggest selling it and acquiring a proper gaming GPU. The Radeon AI Pro 9700 costs around $1,324 (including tax and shipping) new in the retail market, but it’s likely to be hard to find, as it’s primarily focused on professional users and workstations.

A potentially* UNRELEASED unknown model EVT Prototype AMD graphics card has been found by my friend. What model is it? And what do we do with it? from r/Amd

Providing another fine example of the depth of support for older hardware on Linux, driver extensions have just been released to deliver functional improvements for owners of old ATI Radeon R300 GPUs. Linux-centric site Phoronix notes that the new OpenGL Extensions from the open-source community will also deliver benefits to X700 / X800, R400, and X1000 R500 series graphics cards.

Let’s talk about the depth of support on offer here. Old ATI X300 series GPUs first walked the Earth in 2002 AD. They were the backbone of the Radeon 9000 series graphics cards, starting with the game-changing Radeon 9700 PRO, which spearheaded the latest DirectX 9 and AGP 8X performance technologies on the desktop. For a major episode of nostalgia, flick through our 29-page review of this Red Team challenger that “proved to be superior in all possible categories.”

It’s pretty heartwarming that these veteran slivers of silicon are still carefully tended for by the Linux community. According to our searches, mainline Windows support for R300 GPUs ended with the Catalyst 9.3 unified driver in March 2009. When AMD released Catalyst 9.4 the following month, nothing older than the Radeon HD 2000 series (R600 GPU family), which debuted in mid-2007, was supported.

So, what’s new with the Linux driver? As part of the upcoming release of Mesa 25.3, the R300 Gallium3D driver will now support two memory-related OpenGL extensions that weren’t implemented prior to this week.

Graphics processing units (GPUs) are designed in a way that their performance can be scaled up or down during the design phase, or even after tape-out. AMD's 9000-series, built on RDNA 4 (also known as Navi 4), is no exception. AMD confirmed this during one of its Hot Chips 2025 presentations, and demonstrated how it can cut down the design of its GPUs to produce more SKUs.

Building a product family using two GPU designs

All GPUs contain a massive number of similar components, including Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs), caches, special-purpose hardware units, controllers, and physical layers (PHYs). So, if a defect occurs during production, the faulty part could be disabled, and the processor may still function correctly. However, it does not mean total flexibility. Some units reuse transistors between them, and others rely on data paths that are integral to neighbouring components. AMD claims it has designed RDNA 4 to be more adaptable than its predecessors, thanks to a feature it calls asymmetric harvesting.

By selectively disabling components, adjustments can be made to memory systems and asymmetric resource allocation. This allows the company to produce higher-end, mid-tier, and specialized GPUs from the same base design, or even the same die.

By using this strategy, AMD spawned a smaller Navi 44 (Radeon RX 9060-series) out of the bigger Navi 48 (Radeon RX 9070-series) design by reducing the number of shader engines (SEs), Infinity cache, GDDR6 controllers, and PHYs, but leaving things like the command processor, display engines, media engines, security processor, and other specific things intact. By reusing photomasks from Navi 48, AMD saved on manufacturing costs. In addition to this, AMD built the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 GRE from the full-fat Radeon RX 9070 XT by disabling certain elements, which essentially increased yields and enabled them to hit pricing targets. Such an approach also shortened the relevant GPU's time-to-market, as fewer unique silicon designs required tape out, validation, and production.

Asymmetric harvesting

The most important element of this strategy is the way a Shader Engine (SE) can be harvested. An SE is a fundamental building block of the GPU, housing multiple Work Group Processors (WGPs), Compute Units (CUs), and fixed-function stages for geometry, rasterization, and rendering. On RDNA 4-based products, AMD allows entire shader engines to be disabled when defects are present or when a lower performance target is desired. In addition to this, AMD may disable specific WGPs, which provides a lot of additional flexibility.

Memory harvesting adds another dimension of flexibility. The RDNA 4 memory subsystem contains multiple GDDR6 controllers, linked through Infinity Fabric and cache structures. Each memory controller can be fused off individually, meaning that AMD can reduce the effective bus width in increments of 64 bits.

For instance, a flagship model such as the Radeon RX 9070 XT includes all four shader engines, each featuring 64 compute units (with 4096 stream processors that contain ALUs), and four 64-bit memory interfaces. Meanwhile, the lower-end Radeon 9700 GRE features only three SEs, resulting in 48 CUs and 3072 SPs, and three 64-bit memory arrays, resulting in a 192-bit memory interface.

In addition to whole shader engines, smaller harvesting steps are possible through the selective disabling of work group processors inside a shader engine. This fine control enables AMD to produce products with unusual compute unit counts, such as the 56 CU Radeon RX 9070. Using this method, the Radeon RX 9070 uses a certain number of CUs instead of the whole SE. But it also comes with all memory interfaces enabled, so the RX 9070 has a full-blown 256-bit memory bus.

The concept of asymmetric harvest extends further by enabling different ratios of compute to pixel resources, ensuring that products can be tailored to gaming workloads, multimedia tasks, or compute-centric usage without redesigning the core architecture or die.

For example, the Radeon RX 9070 XT maintains a full 256-bit interface with sixteen gigabytes of memory, while the RX 9070 GRE drops to 192-bit with twelve gigabytes. Mid-range models such as the RX 9060 variants shrink further to 128-bit buses, supporting either sixteen gigabytes or eight gigabytes, depending on the SKU. This granularity allows AMD to respond to memory pricing, availability, and positioning across markets while using the same baseline silicon.

At the SoC level, RDNA 4 integrates global L2 cache blocks, compression and decompression hardware, and Infinity Fabric links (operating at 1.5 GHz – 2.50 GHz depending on the load) in a modular fashion. Because these components can handle variable data flows regardless of how many SEs or memory channels remain active, the architecture sustains efficiency, even in harvested configurations.

Centralized compression saves bandwidth and power across workloads, with AMD reporting up to a 25% reduction in fabric traffic, and a claimed 15% uplift in certain rasterization scenarios. This design ensures that whether a die is partially disabled or fully enabled, the supporting infrastructure remains balanced throughout.

Security and reliability features are also embedded within the architecture, which makes the aforementioned flexible configuration possible. By providing robust error handling, AMD can confidently sell partially defective chips as lower-end SKUs without any compromises.

Commercial implications

The commercial implications of AMD's asymmetric harvesting approach are significant: so far, the company has built a line-up of seven products for desktop PCs and inference servers using just two processors: the Navi 48 and the Navi 44. In theory, AMD could add four or more RDNA 4 GPUs for notebooks to its line-up, if it were interested in competing in that market.

AMD announced the Radeon AI Pro R9700 back at Computex earlier this year, a professional GPU built on the RDNA 4 architecture meant to give Nvidia a run for its money. As the name suggests, it's geared towards AI workloads that require a lot of memory. Therefore, even though the R9700 shares many of the same specs as the gaming-oriented RX 9070 XT, it has double the VRAM at 32 GB. Originally, this card was limited to system integrators and OEM vendors as AMD barely laid out any availability details, but it seems like it's finally here for the DIY market.

Just today, a user on Reddit reports receiving their R9700 bought through a proper retail channel, not some underground website sifting through non-descript cards that didn't pass inspection at an OEM. The variant they received was from Gigabyte, namely part of their "AI Top" lineup with a blower-style cooler.

R9700 Just Arrived from r/LocalLLaMA

The AI Pro 9700 has a Navi 48 GPU inside with 4,096 cores or 64 Compute Units—same as the 9070 XT—and is manufactured using TSMC's N4P node. It packs 53.9 billion transistors into a 357 mm² die that's packaged with a monolithic design, a departure from the MCM approach used for Navi 31, its predecessor. As previously mentioned, it has 32 GB of GDDR6 memory saturated across a 256-bit wide bus.

Now that the specs are out of the way, it's also important to note that blowers are common in professional GPUs because they're expected to be used in a server environment. In such cases, it's better to pump hot air out the back so it exits the stack entirely, unlike in a traditional desktop case, where open-air designs recirculate heat inside the entire chassis.

A massive prototype cooler from AMD’s Radeon RX 7000 series has surfaced online, sparking speculation that AMD once considered a true RTX 4090-class GPU during the RDNA 3 era. The leak originated from Korean forum Quasarzone, where a user named FP32 shared images of a mysterious shroud purchased from the Chinese marketplace Xianyu. At first glance, it looks like a standard RX 7900 XTX reference cooler, but a second look reveals another story entirely. Thankfully, the user broke down everything, comparing the cooler with an actual, retail RX 7900 XTX.

The prototype measures almost 34 cm in length compared to 29 cm for the RX 7900 XTX, and is nearly 5.5 cm thick, taking up three slots with a triple-fan configuration. It has slightly different cutouts for LEDs as well, but it largely looks the same aesthetically.

The most eye-catching feature is its power design, with space carved out for three 8-pin connectors instead of the two seen on the 7900 XTX. This alone suggests a total board power well beyond 450W, making it more akin to Nvidia’s RTX 4090 in scale and power delivery. The heatsink itself has three painted red fins, indicating "RDNA 3," and it's a centimeter longer than the RX 7900 XTX reference edition.

Once opened up, we see a copper baseplate and a heavy heatpipe array, clearly intended for handling higher thermals and demanding loads. The internal layout of this design is decidedly different than the 7900 XTX, further suggesting it was intended for a beefier config. Keep in mind that there was no PCB inside, so it couldn't be connected to a PC for further testing. The cooler also lacks any I/O at the back, so we can't (accurately) guesstimate what model this was going to house.

There are a bunch of serial numbers stickered onto the shroud, but they don't return any info when reverse-searched for; again, a dead end.

Regardless, with the RX 7900 XTX already running a fully unlocked Navi 31 die at 96 Compute Units, this prototype may have been designed for much higher clock speeds or faster memory configurations. It’s equally possible that AMD experimented with a larger GPU variant that never made it past internal testing. Rumors of models like the RX 7950 XTX or RX 7990 XTX have circulated since 2022, but this is the first physical evidence pointing toward AMD’s exploration of a more aggressive “halo-tier” design for RDNA 3. Even a year later there was still speculation over Team Red's unreleased cards that, in hindsight, never came to be.

Such a GPU could've possibly bridged the huge gap between the RTX 80-class and 90-class cards with a middle-of-the-road option, even today. But the cooler itself is incompatible with retail designs due to its unique mounting pattern, leaving its original purpose a mystery. What’s clear is that AMD ultimately shifted focus away from the ultra-enthusiast segment, choosing to compete on efficiency and price-to-performance rather than raw power. This prototype is a reminder of what might have been if AMD had decided to go head-to-head with NVIDIA at the very top end.

Hardware samples like this often surface years after launch, usually as engineering leftovers that make their way into secondary markets. The discovery of this prototype cooler, particularly with its triple-slot, triple 8-pin design, offers a rare look at AMD’s internal experiments and discarded plans, showing that even in the RDNA 3 era, a 4090-class Radeon wasn’t entirely off the table.

AMD's Radeon AI Pro R9700 may not be a contender for inclusion on the list of best graphics cards for gaming. Nevertheless, the professional PCIe 5.0 graphics card powered by Navi 48 presents an excellent option for the AI and workstation sectors; consequently, ASRock has promptly introduced the brand's Radeon RX AI Pro R9700 Creator, which is based on the reference Radeon AI Pro R9700.

The Radeon RX AI Pro R9700 Creator is the third installment in ASRock's Creator lineup of graphics cards, succeeding the previous Radeon RX 7900 XTX Creator and Radeon RX 7900 XT Creator. Design-wise, you can never go wrong with a dual-slot design and a blower-type cooling system, a combination that facilitates multi-GPU setups on a single motherboard. ASRock implemented a vapor chamber under the Radeon RX AI Pro R9700 Creator's die-cast metal shroud. It also uses Honeywell PTM7950 phase-changing thermal pads for improved heat dissipation.

The Radeon RX AI Pro R9700 Creator, equipped with the Navi 48 silicon, boasts 4,096 Streaming Processors (SPs) and achieves game and boost clock speeds of up to 2,350 MHz and 2,920 MHz, respectively. These clock speeds align with the reference specifications.

One key attraction for AI and workstation users is the Radeon RX AI Pro R9700 Creator's memory capacity. This graphics card has 32GB of GDDR6 memory running at 20 Gbps. Additionally, its 256-bit memory interface allows for a memory bandwidth of up to 644.6 GB/s.

AMD this week introduced the 7th version of its ROCm (Radeon open compute) open-source software stack for accelerated computing that substantially improves the performance of AI inference on existing hardware compared to ROCm 6, as well as adds support for distributed workloads, and expands to Windows and Radeon GPUs. In addition, ROCm 7 adds support for FP4 and FP6 low-precision formats for the latest Instinct MI350X/MI355X processors. 

The biggest change brought by ROCm 7 for client PCs is the extension of ROCm to Windows and Radeon GPUs, which allows the use of discrete and integrated GPUs for AI workloads, but only on Ryzen-based PCs. Starting in the second half of 2025, developers will be able to build and run AI programs on Ryzen desktops and laptops with Radeon GPUs, which could be a big deal for those who want to run higher-end AI LLMs locally.

One of the reasons for AMD's weak position in the AI hardware market is imperfect software. But it looks like the situation is improving as AMD's Instinct MI300X with ROCm 7 delivers over 3.5 times the inference performance and 3 times the training throughput compared to ROCm 6, according to AMD. The company conducted tests using an 8-way Instinct MI300X machine running Llama 3.1-70B, Qwen 72B, and Deepseek-R1 models with batch sizes ranging from 1 to 256, and the only difference was the usage of ROCm 7 over ROCm 6.  AMD says that such improvements are enabled by enhancements in GPU utilization as well as data movement, though it does not provide any more details.

The new release also introduces support for distributed inference through integration with open frameworks such as vLLM, SGLang, and llm-d. AMD worked with these partners to build shared components and primitives, allowing the software to scale efficiently across multiple GPUs. 

Furthermore, ROCm 7 adds support for lower-precision data types like FP4 and FP6, which will bring tangible improvements for the company's latest CDNA 4-based Instinct MI350X/MI355X processors as well as upcoming CDNA 5-based MI400X and next-generation Instinct MI500X-series products that will succeed the Instinct MI300-series in 2026 and 2027, respectively.

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.”

It appears that memory will not be the only differentiator between AMD's RX 9060 XT 16GB and 8GB GPUs. According to VideoCardz, PowerColor is preparing certain RX 9060 XT models, where the 16GB variant features slightly higher clock speeds than its 8GB counterpart. While we checked models from other AIBs, most have not yet listed their frequencies, so we will likely need to wait until the embargo lifts to confirm wider adoption of this strategy.

AMD introduced the RX 9060 XT family of budget GPUs at Computex last month. Much like the RTX 5060 Ti family, AMD has segmented these GPUs into 8GB ($299) and 16GB ($349) models. Both GPUs are powered by the same Navi 48 core, with 2,048 Stream Processors or 32 Compute Units, with an advertised boost clock of 3.13 GHz. The GPUs are set to launch on June 5, with the review embargo likely lifting a day earlier, as typically seen.

Based on data secured by VideoCardz, PowerColor is preparing seven RX 9060 XT models across its Reaper and Hellhound designations. Specifically, the Reaper family shows the RX 9060 XT 16GB model with a 3.23 GHz boost clock and a 2.62 GHz game clock, compared to the 8GB model's 3.13 GHz boost and 2.53 GHz game clock. This 2-3% frequency delta, though minor, indicates that Reaper-based 8GB models will stick to reference clocks, rather than receiving a factory-overclocked boost like their 16GB siblings.

Late on Tuesday, AMD announced its financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2025, posting its highest quarterly revenue ever. The company's results were driven by sales of expensive client and datacenter CPUs as well as improved sales of Instinct MI300-series AI accelerators. However, the company's gaming earnings dropped mainly due to the slowdown of console sales. But while the company's revenues in Q1 set records, AMD warned that the U.S. export tariffs may hit its sales by around $1.5 billion in 2025.

AMD posted a revenue of $7.438 billion for the first quarter of 2025, up 36% year-over-year. When it comes to earnings, this is the best quarter posted by AMD throughout its history. In fact, it is more than AMD earned for the whole year 2019. AMD's gross profit totaled $3.736 billion, whereas its net income achieved $709 million for the quarter (up a whopping 2,139% for the same quarter a year ago) as its gross margin hit 50%.

"We delivered an outstanding start to 2025 as year-over-year growth accelerated for the fourth consecutive quarter driven by strength in our core businesses and expanding data center and AI momentum," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD chair and CEO. "Despite the dynamic macro and regulatory environment, our first quarter results and second quarter outlook highlight the strength of our differentiated product portfolio and consistent execution positioning us well for strong growth in 2025."

In the first quarter, AMD's Client and Gaming division generated $2.9 billion in revenue, reflecting a 28% increase compared to the same period last year. The Client subsegment contributed $2.3 billion, marking a 68% rise year-on-year, largely fueled by high interest in the latest generation of Ryzen AI processors and a product mix that included more premium parts (such as Ryzen 9000 X3D for desktops and Ryzen AI 300-series for laptops).

In contrast, revenue from the Gaming subsegment declined 30% to $647 million, mainly due to reduced contributions from AMD's semi-custom system-on-chips for Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation game consoles. Nonetheless, AMD expressed optimism about sales of its latest Radeon RX 9070-series graphics cards for desktop PCs based on the RDNA 4 architecture.

AMD's Data Center division reported $3.7 billion in revenue in Q1 2025, reflecting a 57% rise compared to the same quarter last year. This sharp increase was primarily fueled by continued momentum in server processor, particularly the 5th Generation EPYC CPUs. Nonetheless, AMD says that sales of its Instinct MI300-series accelerators for AI also inreased. Specifically, AMD, highlighted new deployments of of its AI GPUs with Core42, Oracle, and Siemens.

AMD's Embedded products unit generated $823 million in the first quarter, a 3% decrease from the prior year. This decline reflected varied conditions across end markets, with some areas showing strength while others struggling. Specifically, the launch of the EPYC Embedded 9005 processors, which are being integrated into IBM's latest storage systems and Cisco's high-end network security appliances, positively affected performance of the division. In addition, AMD also began shipments of Spartan UltraScale+ FPGAs and second-generation Versal AI Edge SoCs. However, demand for other products was a mixed bag.

Looking ahead to the second quarter of 2025, AMD anticipates revenue to be around $7.4 billion ±$300 million. However, the company's profitability is expected to be impacted by a one-time $800 million inventory-related charge tied to the recently imposed U.S. export controls, which will lower the reported gross margin to around 43%. Without this adjustment, the gross margin would be around 54%.

With AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics cards tipped for a Computex unveiling (the Taipei-hosted show begins just two weeks from today, on May 20), it isn’t a surprise to see retailers preparing and accidentally publishing product pages. VideoCardz unearthed a prime example of this phenomenon today, with a screenshot and link to Brazilian electronics outlet Terabyteshop. The retailer has published a page (link still live at the time of writing) with a smattering of details and an image showing a Gigabyte GV-R9060XTGAMING OC-16GD. The product’s slightly more human-friendly name is the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9060 XT Gaming OC 16GB.

Slightly frustratingly, this early spotting of an RX 9060 XT in retail is from a store with just this single product example – a 16GB model. Though we have seen quite confident reports stating AMD hasn’t canceled its plans for an 8GB version of this card, the Gigabyte listing doesn’t help affirm or reject such a product's upcoming existence. Terabyteshop’s listing is missing any key availability or pricing details, too, but the Gigabyte product code and specs look genuine.

This particular WindForce model of the RX 9060 XT looks a lot like Gigabyte’s Radeon RX 9070 Gaming OC model. It is a pretty big cooler to strap on this lower power card, surely overkill, but we don’t have precise indications for the release product's TGP – likely under 200W.

It seems that AMD's RX 9060 XT 8GB is still on track, despite rumors suggesting otherwise, per Benchlife. The publication claims, through its sources, that AMD has no plans to cancel this 8GB VRAM product or halt supply to board partners. It's important to note that these cancellation rumors might not be completely baseless. Given the performance limitations of Nvidia's RTX 5060 Ti 8GB, AMD may be inclined to prioritize the RX 9060 XT 16GB over its 8GB sibling, but that's just speculation.

The RX 9060 XT branding was officially confirmed by AMD during the RX 9000 reveal at CES. It would only be a matter of time before the official announcement, which is reportedly set for Computex in just three weeks. Taking a page out of Nvidia's playbook, AMD's RX 9060 XT has been rumored to launch in two VRAM capacities: 8GB and 16GB. This further segments AMD's RDNA 4 portfolio, though we expect these GPUs to hit the $350 price point.

With an expected price difference of $30-$50, the 16GB model seems like the obvious choice, but it begs the question of why the 8GB model exists at all, considering a potential RX 9060 non-XT 8GB in the future, if it even exists.

Benchlife purports, through its sources, that AMD has no plans to cancel or halt the supply of the RX 9060 XT 8GB. While it is technically possible to convert existing 8GB designs to 16GB, the PCBs must be designed with extra routing, pads, and clearance for the added modules. Since the 8GB variant was likely designed before the performance limitations of the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB became clear, it's too far in the pipeline to be axed now.

Like Bethesda's Oblivion Remastered, it looks like we're getting another shadow drop this month, this time from AMD. Pre-orders for the Radeon RX 9070 GRE are now live at major e-commerce retailers in China, with deliveries expected to begin on May 8. Adding the 'officially confirmed' stamp to this news, the product page for the RX 9070 GRE has gone live on AMD's website, detailing all the specifications.

The RX 9070 GRE has been generating buzz in the news since early April. Consistent with AMD's past GRE releases, it was almost confirmed that the RX 9070 GRE would be region locked to China, at least initially. While the RX 7900 GRE set a precedent for later global launches, that was largely to rival Nvidia's RTX 4070 Super. The RX 9070 GRE sits between the RX 9070 and the yet-to-launch RX 9060 XT. That's what we would naturally assume; however, a price almost identical to the faster RX 9070 hints AMD might be replacing the latter with the GRE, at least in China.

In terms of specifications, the RX 9070 GRE wields 48 Compute Units, for a total of 3,072 Stream Processors, 25% fewer than the RX 9070 XT. It likely sticks to the same Navi 48 core as seen in the RX 9070 series, along with a 192-bit interface for 12GB of 18 Gbps GDDR6 VRAM. The boost clocks are up there at 2.79 GHz, right between the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT. The GPU has a 220W TGP, matching RX 9070, and AMD recommends a 650W PSU for it. Most models should be powered by 2x 8-pin connectors, and some AIBs might even carry over existing RX 9070 board designs due to the similar power specifications.

The slower GDDR6 modules and narrower 192-bit interface chop the memory bandwidth by 32.5% compared to the rest of the lineup. Depending on how RDNA 4 scales with bandwidth, this might slightly impact performance. As seen before, there's a decent chance you can extract some gains by overclocking the memory, but let's wait for official tests.

AMD, through its first-party metrics, is claiming 6% better performance than the RX 7900 GRE on average across a set of 30 games at 1440p Ultra. That's a lot better than what we initially predicted, and underlines RDNA 4's per Compute Unit improvements in rasterization. But we'll need to see third-party/independent reviews before jumping to conclusions.

AMD is reportedly preparing to debut its RDNA 4 workstation GPU offerings for desktops, presumably under the Radeon Pro W9000 family. As put forwaard by Hoang Anh Phu, who frequently obtains inside scoops, AMD is considering using the Navi 48 XTW die for its top-end SKUs, paired with 32GB of video memory, likely GDDR6. As always, this leak shouldn't be taken as definitive, but there's likely some truth to it given the proximity of Computex next month, followed by AMD's Advancing AI event in June.

Radeon PRO GPUs are aimed at workstation setups, rivaling Nvidia's (former) Quadro or (now incumbent) RTX PRO offerings for prosumers. These graphics cards bridge the gap between consumers and server domains, for applications like AI, HPC, DCC, CGI, CAD, VR/AR, and the list goes on.

It seems that AMD is sticking to more conservative figures for its flagship workstation offerings this generation. That's somewhat expected since Navi 48 (356mm²) is in the same ballpark as GB203 (378mm²), found in the RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell. Nvidia's top-end GB202 at 750mm², is home to the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell featuring a massive 96GB frame buffer.

Navi 48, with its 256-bit interface, enables either 16GB of memory (via eight 32-bit channels) or a theoretical maximum of 32GB in clamshell mode, which is the exact configuration being reported here.

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.