Nvidia has been releasing major improvements to its DLSS suite of neural rendering tech throughout 2026. The first major update came at CES with DLSS 4.5 upscaling (or "Super Resolution"), which introduced a more advanced and more computationally intensive transformer AI architecture for better image quality at lower input resolutions. The second was DLSS 4.5 Multi Frame Generation, which introduced 5x and 6x multipliers along with a dynamic mode that shifts multipliers on the fly for the smoothest gameplay experience.

Now, at Computex 2026, Nvidia has revealed DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, its advanced denoiser for better ray-traced and path-traced image quality in games.

For a refresher, DLSS Ray Reconstruction replaces hand-tuned denoisers with a neural rendering model that both infers what pixels should look like in noisy areas where light rays weren't cast and upscales the resulting image to a higher-resolution output. The model uses temporal and spatial inputs from game engines to produce its sharp, stable, and high-fidelity output images.

DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, coming in August, improves this set of techniques in three ways. Using an improved transformer architecture, it can process 35% more input data and uses 20% more parameters within the same compute budget as the previous-generation transformer architecture.

DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction also inherits better spatial awareness and processing of input data from DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution, resulting in more accurate lighting, more stable images, and clearer motion. Nvidia says the mew model has also been trained on a larger data set to improve its utilization of game inputs and offers developers more control over its temporal accumulation behavior, both of which result in improved image quality.

Unlike DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution, which incurs substantial performance penalties on older hardware, DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction will remain 100% compatible with every GeForce RTX GPU, including RTX 20-series and RTX 30-series products.

Nvidia touts a couple of scenarios where DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction makes a big difference in image quality, and the improved performance of the model is indeed easily visible.

In Pragmata, the flickering of a laser trap becomes much more dynamic, and it doesn't leave persistent artifacts when those same lasers deactivate.

And in Alan Wake II, a wall of TVs displaying nothing but static transforms from a mere suggestion into a crisp, convincing reproduction of CRT snow. And the reflections from those TVs on the nearby floor also becomes much more dynamic and lifelike.

Ray Reconstruction has always been the most specialized of the DLSS model family, so it's perhaps unsurprising that it's the last of the three to be updated this year. Nvidia says it'll come to 27 games in August via the Nvidia App, including hits like Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy, Pragmata, and Resident Evil Requiem. And of course, it's fully compatible with the Blackwell GPU on the RTX Spark.

The benefits of Ray Reconstruction will soon move beyond games, too. Nvidia is bringing this model to Blender, where it will replace slow denoisers that incur significant wait times for the viewport to re-stabilize every time the camera is moved. Along with Nvidia Optix, Ray Reconstruction in Blender promises a much more interactive viewport experience and near-final image quality, resulting in a better representation of one's creative vision and less disruption to the creative flow state.

We'll be going hands-on with some of Nvidia's latest products and releases at Computex 2026, and it's likely we'll be able to see DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction in action. Stay tuned for more details as we get them.

The annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) kicks off this week, and it’s happening against the backdrop of considerable turmoil in both the games industry proper and the AI-driven hardware supply shock that’s delaying mid-cycle and next-gen gaming hardware. In that context, it’s no surprise that Nvidia isn't bringing new GeForce cards to the show. Instead, the company is focusing on software performance enhancements and game tech integrations for upcoming titles.

The biggest news the company is sharing at GDC is that Dynamic Multi Frame Generation, announced back at CES, will be arriving on March 31, along with extended 5x and 6x modes. Unlike the current MFG implementation, which only offers a constant frame rate multiplier, Dynamic MFG can shift gears on the fly in order to maintain a target frame rate.

All together, Dynamic MFG with 5x and 6x modes will likely be most useful to gamers with high-refresh-rate displays who want to ensure their systems are always hitting the lofty FPS numbers necessary to keep their screens operating near their peak output rates.

In tandem with the already available DLSS 4.5, which provides noticeably better image quality than past implementations even at relatively low input resolutions, gamers with RTX 50-series cards will soon have even more tools at their disposal in pursuit of a consistently smooth gaming experience.

Given the tradeoffs around input latency associated with MFG, now might seem like a natural time for Nvidia to offer an update on its Reflex 2 with Frame Warp latency-reduction tech, which has been stuck in "Coming Soon" status ever since the Blackwell GPU launch over a year ago. That isn't changing any time soon, however, as Nvidia only said to "stay tuned" regarding the technology in our briefing ahead of today's announcements.

DLSS 4.5 and Dynamic MFG will no doubt prove useful as Nvidia’s developer partners continue to integrate resource-intensive path-traced lighting effects in their titles. Nvidia says the upcoming Control Resonant and 007: First Light will both feature path-traced effects, and those titles will join the recently launched Resident Evil Requiem and the upcoming Pragmata as just a sampling of games that will incorporate these demanding rendering techniques.

Nvidia is also extending its RTX Mega Geometry technology to help CD Projekt Red create richer forested vistas in the upcoming The Witcher IV. This enhanced version of the tech allows for selective updates of ray-tracing data structures, along with support for finer-grained opacity micromaps, to allow for real-time ray tracing of even such complex scenes as an entire forest.

RTX Mega Geometry works best on the Blackwell architecture thanks to optimizations in the fourth-generation RT Cores present in those GPUs. The Witcher IV isn’t slated to arrive before 2027, but Blackwell gamers can be just a bit more smug in the meantime about the fact that the RT effects in that title will be optimized for their particular GPUs.

Generative AI aficionados are also getting a nod at GDC. Most locally generated assets are created through ComfyUI, and while that app’s node-based approach is familiar to those already versed in content-creation pipelines, it can be intimidating for those just dipping their toes into local AI workflows.

Nvidia has worked with ComfyUI to bring a new, more user-friendly “app view” interface to the table at GDC, and the company also touts the improvements it’s made to resource utilization in some workflows through the creation of better quantizations of models like LTX-2. Thanks to those improvements, creators can iterate more quickly on generative content on a broader range of hardware.

Even in the absence of new GPUs thus far in 2026, Nvidia’s GDC showing gives RTX 50-series owners a bit of a reason to be excited about being on the cutting edge of both gaming and AI. It’s a bit easier to swallow the absence of faster hardware when existing GPUs can upscale higher-quality frames and generate more of them if higher output frame rates are required, and while DLSS 4.5 works best on both RTX 40-series and 50-series GPUs, MFG remains a Blackwell-exclusive feature. Unless and until the AI chip crunch abates, getting more out of existing hardware is likely to be the way of things for the foreseeable future.

Battlefield 6 is one of the most anticipated games of the year, more so because of its friendly system requirements that let it be played even on modest hardware. One of the ways the game’s developers were able to achieve this was by side-stepping any ray tracing technologies.

“No, we are not going to have ray tracing when the game launches, and we don’t have any plans in the near future for it either,” Studio Technical Director Christian Buhl of Ripple Effect, one of the studios behind BF6, told ComicBook.com. “That was because we wanted to focus on performance. We wanted to make sure that all of our effort was focused on making the game as [optimized] as possible for the default settings and the default users. So, we just made the decision relatively early on that we weren’t going to do ray tracing and, again, it was mostly so that we could focus on making sure it was performance for everyone else.”

This decision means that gamers can easily play the game and get good performance, even when running older hardware. The only unfortunate thing is that the title uses EA’s Javelin anti-cheat feature, which requires Secure Boot. This precludes the Steam Deck and other Linux-based devices from running the game, so players avoiding Windows won’t be able to play BF6.

The Battlefield franchise is Call of Duty’s biggest competitor, and it stands out by having a destructible environment. This makes it more realistic and gives players more tactical choices, especially when facing an entrenched enemy. Since FPS shooters focus more on tactics and gameplay like this, we can consider ray tracing as a rather unnecessary eye-candy feature that will only make the title less accessible to gamers.

This is similar to Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which launched last year, and also did not have ray tracing enabled in the game. There is a workaround to force the feature if you have a good enough graphics card, but it might cause some issues.

Fast-paced games that cater to a massive player base will likely not want to have ray tracing turned on. Aside from the additional strain this feature puts on GPUs, it also means additional backend work for developers. So, by dropping it altogether, the team behind the title can focus more on optimizing the game and making it run great on as many gaming PCs as possible, instead of making the title look better to the privileged few who have powerful GPUs.

Epic Games just unleashed Unreal Engine 5.6 (UE 5.6), the latest version of its powerful engine designed for game developers and other professionals. According to the company, one of the main targets of this update is to allow current-gen consoles, high-end PCs, and powerful mobile devices to hit 60 fps while using hardware ray tracing. Epic Games achieved this by offloading some tasks from the CPU to the GPU, which allows its Lumen Global Illumination system to achieve higher performance.

Aside from this, it also released an experimental module called Fast Geometry Streaming Plugin. This feature aims to improve open-world loading speeds even as developers add more static objects while still maintaining constant frame rates. There’s also asynchronous physics state creation and destruction, which improves the loading of any asset with any kind of in-game physical interaction without interfering with the main processes necessary to run the game.

The company also said that it has updated the device profiles in UE 5.6, ensuring graphics settings are adjusted automatically for the latest consoles, mobile devices, and PC hardware. All these updates will make it easier for developers to optimize their games and deliver at least 60 fps of gaming performance, even with ray tracing. Epic Games then showed off UE 5.6’s capabilities by previewing The Witcher 4 on PlayStation 5, running out of the box at 60 fps with ray tracing turned on.

Earlier in the week, we reported on an Nvidia driver change which opened up crazy new possibilities for PC DIYers. However, the dreams of Intel Core 2 system makers enjoying outlandish high jinks with Nvidia RTX50 GPUs have now partially evaporated. Twitter(X)-based tech enthusiast Bob Pony, who first surfaced the driver change, is back, but his tales of “struggles,” aren’t exactly the news we wanted to hear.

To recap, the latest Nvidia GeForce driver re-enabled support for Intel processors dating back to the Core 2 era, as it no longer required CPU support for the POPCNT instruction. That is all well and good, and Pony took to Twitter yesterday to “happily confirm that it's possible to use an NVIDIA RTX 50 series graphics card in an old system such as an Intel Core 2 Quad.” Specifically, they partnered their old Core 2 Quad Q9450 with an unashamedly modern RTX 5060 Ti. “It works!” Pony celebrated, and tipped followers to avoid trying the same with an RTX 5060 non-Ti due to its PCIe x8 interface.

What happened next is that Pony quickly went from fiddling around in Windows 11 to trying to get some modern games running on their May-to-September combo.

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.

Prime Day exceptional graphics card deals

These are a few of the standout deals from Amazon's 2026 Prime Day event, which is currently taking place. Be sure to check out our full list of the best Prime Day graphics card deals, too. The GPU Benchmarks Hierarchy continues below.

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.

Ancient Legacy GPU Hierarchy

Below is our legacy desktop GPU hierarchy dating back to the late 1990s. We have not tested most of these cards in many years, driver support has ended on most models, and the relative rankings are pretty coarse. Note that we also don't factor in memory bandwidth or features like AMD's Infinity Cache or Nvidia's larger L2 cache on Ada Lovelace. The list below is mostly intended to show relative performance between architectures from a similar time period.

We sorted the table by the theoretical GFLOPS, though on architectures that don't support unified shaders, we only have data for "Gops/s" (giga operations per second). That's GeForce 7 and Radeon X1000 and earlier — basically anything from before 2007. We've put an asterisk (*) next to the GPU names for those cards, and they comprise the latter part of the table. Comparing pre-2007 GPUs against each other should be relatively meaningful, but trying to compare those older GPUs against newer GPUs gets a bit convoluted.

These results are, at best, merely theoretical and we don't have any recent benchmarks for most of the GPUs. As one recent example, AMD's RX 7900 GRE ranks above the RTX 4070 Ti Super, even though Nvidia's card nearly matches the RX 7900 XT in rasterization performance and easily beats even the 7900 XTX in ray tracing performance. Take the following with a healthy dose of skepticism and a liberal sprinkling of salt, in other words, but it does contain a list of just about every major desktop GPU from the past 25 years.