GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy: Graphics Cards Ranked

Our GPU benchmarks performance hierarchy ranks all the current and previous generation graphics cards, including all of the best graphics cards, in terms of performance. Whether it's playing games or doing high-end creative work like 4K video editing, your graphics card typically plays the biggest role in determining performance, and even the best gaming CPUs take a second role.

Note that the table below is based solely on the scores from performance-based GPU benchmarks. We have a separate article that lists the best graphics cards, based on all factors, including price, graphics card power consumption, and overall efficiency. We've updated the tables and charts with the latest Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 results as well.

If you're looking for Black Friday Graphics Card Deals, we have an article on that subject, but there's bad news as well. Component shortages, particularly on graphics cards, mean you're unlikely to find a great deal on anything recent. Maybe later in 2021 we'll have a decent supply of GPUs.

For more savings, check our list of best Black Friday deals overall, best Black Friday monitor deals, best Black Friday SSD deals, best Black Friday CPU deals, best Black Friday graphics card deals, best Black Friday laptop deals, best Black Friday gaming PC deals and best Black Friday Raspberry Pi deals.

To help you decide which graphics card you need, we've created this GPU hierarchy consisting of dozens of GPU benchmarks in the table below. Everything is ranked from fastest to slowest, using the results from our test suite consisting of nine games for our GPU benchmarks, running at 'medium' and 'ultra' settings with resolutions of 1080p, 1440p, and 4K. For comparison purposes, the fastest card, based on the combination of all nine GPU benchmarks, three resolutions, and two settings, gets normalized to 100 percent, and all others are graded relative to it.

The arrival of Nvidia's Ampere architecture, along with the GeForce RTX 3090, GeForce RTX 3080, and GeForce RTX 3070, has pushed everything down a couple of rungs. However, we're not done with the new GPUs yet. Besides the just-released RTX 3070, AMD's Big Navi was revealed on October 28, with the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT set to launch on November 18, and the RX 6900 XT coming on December 8. Those will further change the GPU benchmarks landscape.

Of course it's not just about playing games. Many applications use the GPU for other work, and we've covered some of the GPU benchmarks in our RTX 3090 review. 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'd be able to play 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 equally well. 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 game play and GPU benchmarks. And integrated graphics ... well, we tested that as well, and the results aren't pretty. (See the very bottom of the list for those entries.)

GPU Ranking

GPU Benchmarks: Which Cards Ranked Highest?

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 takes top honors for raw performance, with a composite score of 152.5 fps across all 54 tests. That's the 100% mark, though it's worth noting that it also scored 98.8 fps at 4K ultra. It's also a $1,500 graphics card, which is out of reach of most gamers.

Not too far behind the 3090 are the Radeon RX 6800 XT and GeForce RTX 3080, nominally priced at $650 and $700, respectively (if you can find one in stock). The 6800 XT technically comes in faster by our ranking formula, though it's important to note that the current results don't include ray tracing or DLSS in any form. Add those in and the 3080 easily beats the 6800 XT. Either way, the new generation of GPUs makes all of Nvidia's previous generation GPUs suddenly look a bit weak. The same goes for the Radeon RX 6800 and GeForce RTX 3070, which match or beat the outgoing RTX 2080 Ti with a starting price of just %580 or $500, respectively.

AMD's Navi 21, aka Big Navi, GPUs finally break into the top three overall, even including Titan cards. That's something AMD hasn't managed since the Vega 64 launch (where it came in third). AMD is also mostly at feature parity with Nvidia now, with both companies supporting ray tracing. Except, Nvidia has Tensor cores that help with other tasks like DLSS, Nvidia Broadcast, RTX Voice, and potentially more, plus Nvidia's ray tracing performance is definitely still faster in the majority of DXR (DirectX Raytracing) games.

If you're in the market for a new sub-$500 graphics card right now, you should wait a month or two and find out how future RX 6000 and RTX 30-series cards stack up. The RTX 3070 looks decent for $500, but RTX 3060 Ti leaks are all over, indicating the cards will arrive soon, potentially with a $400-$450 starting price. Unfortunately, it's still a terrible time to buy a graphics card, as all of the most desirable GPUs are either out of stock or seriously overpriced.

Consider the current $350-$400 (give or take) leaders, the RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 from AMD, and the RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2060 from Nvidia. They're fine cards, and were even great options to purchase last year. But the new $500 RTX 3070 offers roughly RTX 2080 Ti levels of performance. Sure, that's about $100 more than the 2060 Super and 5700 XT, but it's also 50-60% higher performance. And we'll probably see RTX 3060 Ti and maybe RTX 3060 before the end of the year, with RX 6700 XT and/or RX 6700 cards coming in early 2021— all very likely priced in the $300-$500 range.

If you can find a reasonable deal on a latest generation GPU right now, great! But don't pay more for a previous gen GPU just because there aren't enough RX 6800 series or RTX 30-series GPUs to meet the current demand. Eventually, supply will catch up, and that will be the right time to buy. If you can't wait, our advice is to just try and find any old GPU that still works to hold you over. Even a budget card will suffice, and at least those aren't likely to be completely obliterated before 2021 rolls in.

That brings us to the bottom third of the list, the home of true budget GPUs like the GTX 1650 Super, RX 5500 XT, and more. These cards give up a lot of performance in order to keep pricing down, and there are older generation GPUs that can perform just as well (or better) if you shop around. But component shortages are affecting even budget GPUs, and we've seen prices on many of these cards increase 10% or more in the past month alone.

Sticking with recent new GPUs, the GTX 1660 Super, 1650 Super, and RX 5600 XT are the best options for $250 or less. And again, the higher you go on price, the more likely you are to see new GPUs arrive before the end of the year that make current cards look anemic.

We don't recommend going below the GTX 1650 Super, though if you already have such a card you don't have to upgrade. There are tons of light and indie games that will run just fine on ... well, practically anything! Even Intel's integrated graphics solutions are often sufficient, particularly more recent variants like UHD 630 and Iris Plus. But there's still a better option if you're on an extreme budget.

If you're looking at something like an RX 550 or GT 1030, you should consider AMD's integrated graphics on its Ryzen APUs as a viable alternative. If you have an older PC and are looking at adding a GPU, a motherboard and CPU upgrade might end up being a better option. Or not, as even a basic motherboard, CPU, and RAM can set you back $200 or more.

We're interested in seeing what happens with the next generation of integrated graphics as well. Tiger Lake just launched for laptops, potentially doubling the performance of Ice Lake graphics and maybe even taking the lead for iGPU performance from AMD. AMD also has Zen 3 and potentially updated Zen 2 APUs with faster graphics coming as well.

Okay, maybe buying a basic GPU isn't a bad idea rather than dealing with a full motherboard and CPU upgrade (depending on what sort of CPU you're rocking). Provided you can provide at least a 6-pin PEG power connector, though, we recommend going for at least something at the RX 570 level or above rather than picking up a lesser graphics card.

Also worth noting is that the scoring assigned to each GPU uses all six test resolutions and settings, except on integrated graphics where we scale the result — because, come on, no one is going to try and run Borderlands 3 at 4K on an iGPU. (It will probably just crash.) If you want to check performance at just 1080p medium, or one of the other options, you can see the ranking order for the main GPUs in the charts below.

Test System for GPU Benchmarks

• Intel Core i9-9900K
• Corsair H150i Pro RGB
• MSI MEG Z390 Ace
• Corsair 32GB DDR4-3200 (2x 16GB)
• XPG SX8200 Pro 2TB
• Windows 10 Pro (1909)

Our overall GPU benchmarks scores are based on the geometric mean frames per second (fps) of our testing of Borderlands 3, The Division 2, Far Cry 5, Final Fantasy XIV, Forza Horizon 4, Metro Exodus, Red Dead Redemption 2, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Strange Brigade. If you want to do your own GPU benchmarking, see our complete list of the best GPU tests, which includes a lot more games and synthetic tests as well.

That's nine games, six settings and over 40 cards from the current and previous generations. We have a solid mix of game genres and APIs, plus AMD and Nvidia promoted titles, making this the definitive GPU benchmarks and performance hierarchy for gaming purposes. Due to the mix of various generations of GPUs, note that we don't include ray tracing or DLSS testing in any of the figures. That does penalize Nvidia's RTX cards quite a bit, and the RX 6800 series as well, since previous generation GPUs can't even try to run ray tracing in most games.

GPU Benchmarks and Performance Hierarchy Charts

Here you can see the average performance charts for our testing at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K (medium and ultra on all three). If you want to see the full suite of individual game tests, check out the charts in our Best Graphics Cards article. We've focused on the 'executive summary' and have omitted individual game charts as well as a few GPUs that don't fully qualify. We've left off the integrated graphics solutions as well as many older GPUs, plus omitted the Titan cards. That gives us 32 GPUs in the charts, color coded for your viewing pleasure.

Yes, we know the labels on the charts are tiny. We've also included links to the full-size (1920x1080) images below each chart for those on smaller devices that want to be able to read them.

Again, our GPU benchmarks scoring uses the geometric mean of all 54 scores (nine games, three resolutions, two settings). The geomean is a slightly 'better' weighting than a pure average, though it doesn't massively change the results. Either way, including all 54 scores means the fastest cards are somewhat penalized because they run into CPU limitations at 1080p and even 1440p, and the slower GPUs can also end up penalized because they were never intended to run games at 1440p or 4K.

If you intend to play at 1440p or 4K, the charts below can help you focus in on just those results. For example, the RTX 3080 overall scored 20.8% higher than the RTX 2080 Ti, but if you only look at 4K ultra performance, it's 33.5% faster.

Legacy GPU Hierarchy

Below is our legacy desktop GPU hierarchy with historical comparisons dating back to the 1990s. We have not tested most of these cards in many years, driver support has ended on many of the models, and the relative rankings are relatively coarse. We group cards into performance tiers, pairing disparate generations where overlap occurs.

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

MORE: Best Graphics Cards for Gaming

MORE: Graphics Card Power Consumption Tested

MORE: How to Stress-Test Graphics Cards (Like We Do)

Want to comment on this story? Let us know what you think in the Tom's Hardware Forums.