Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
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.
- MORE: Best Graphics Cards
- MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
- MORE: All Graphics Content
