GPU Performance Hierarchy: Video Cards Ranked

When you want to run games or do high-end creative work like 4K video editing, your graphics card plays the biggest role in determining performance. Get a good GPU, and you can play recent games at smooth frame rates; get a great one and you can enjoy those games at high resolution, with the special effects turned up. 

To help you decide which graphics card you need, we've developed the GPU hierarchy below, which ranks all the current chips from fastest to slowest. For comparison purposes, we've assigned each a score where the fastest card gets 100 and all others are graded relative to it. These numbers are based on the geometric mean fps from our Far Cry 5, Forza Motorsport 7, and Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation benchmarks, giving us a good mix of game genres and APIs.

News and Product Updates

This week we finally got to take a look at the performance of Nvidia’s most-affordable RTX card, the GeForce RTX 2070. And while it consistently outperforms a GTX 1080, the Founders Edition model sells for $600, making it tough to recommend, especially since we still don’t know the oh-so-important details about how it—and the other RTX cards—perform in games that take advantage of the company’s ray tracing and AI features. In other words, we’re still waiting on too many of Nvidia’s Turing promises.

Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Ti is the logical choice for uncompromising 4K gaming, though if you're willing to dial-back detail settings in some games for fluid gameplay, the RTX 2080 and GTX 1080 Ti are 4K-capable as well.

AMD’s Radeon RX Vega 64 and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1080 occupy a lower performance tier. They’re ideal for running at 2560x1440 using the highest quality presets. And as you can see, they score similarly in our index.

The GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, Radeon RX Vega 56, and GeForce GTX 1070 don’t land far from each other, either. All three cards are capable of great frame rates at 2560x1440, and they’re all good options for driving a VR head-mounted display.

There’s a larger group of Radeon RX 580, GeForce GTX 1060 6GB, GeForce GTX 1060 3GB, and Radeon RX 570 boards that excel at 1920x1080. They can even be made serviceable at 2560x1440 if you dial down your detail settings far enough. But beware: insufficient GDDR5 memory on cards like the 3GB GeForce GTX 1060 may cause severe performance issues at higher resolutions. That model is usually faster than Radeon RX 570. However, because we benchmark Forza at 2560x1440 using High settings, its 3GB just aren’t enough, skewing the score lower.

The same thing happens in the next category, where GeForce GTX 1050 appears much slower than Radeon RX 560 due to the former’s 2GB of memory, hurting it in our Forza Motorsports 7 benchmark. Gaming at 1920x1080 or 1280x720 is far more realistic with these cards.

Finally, Radeon RX 550 and GeForce GT 1030 close out this generation’s hierarchy with performance well-suited to popular eSports titles.

Test System & Configuration

Legacy GPU Hierarchy

Tom's Hardware readers accustomed to referencing our legacy desktop GPU hierarchy with historical comparisons dating back to the 1990s will find them below Here we group cards into performance tiers, pairing disparate generations where overlap occurs.

For even more information, check out our Graphics Card Buyer's Guide.

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