GPU Performance Hierarchy 2019: Video Cards Ranked

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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 one of the best GPUs for gaming 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 frames per second (fps) from our Far Cry 5, Forza Horizon 4 and Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation benchmarks, giving us a good mix of game genres and APIs.

And if you're curious about how your last-generation Nvidia Pascal (10-series) card will handle cutting-edge ray tracing effects, check out our Ray Tracing On Nvidia’s Pascal Architecture, Benchmarked. Just keep in mind there were only a few games (and a few demos) available when we wrote this. So future ray tracing-enabled games may be more (or less) demanding.

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After the release of the less-than-stellar GTX 1650 from Nvidia, news about new cards was slow for a bit. We took a look at the premium mid-range GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gaming OC 6G from Gigabyte. And mention of AMD Radeon 640 and 630 recently surfaced in AMD's Adrenaline driver. But looking at the device IDs, it seems likely these cards are just re-brands of existing low-end Polaris silicon.

But at Computex 2019, AMD's CEO Lisa Su revealed more details about its upcoming Navi cards, including branding, which will be Radeon RX 5000 series. AMD showed an RX 5700 flagship beating Nvidia's RTX 2070 by about 10% in one benchmark. Important details like pricing and availability are still up in the air, but the company is expected to deliver many more details at an event at E3. So we should know much more about AMD's new cards come the second week of June.

Nvidia’s GeForce 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 Vega 7  GeForce RTX 2080 and GeForce GTX 1080 Ti are 4K-capable as well.

The AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 and the Nvidia 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 RTX 2060, GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, Radeon RX Vega 56 and GeForce GTX 1070 don’t land far from each other, either. All four 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 590, Radeon RX 580, GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB), GeForce GTX 1060 (3GB), GeForce GTX 1650 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.

This also affects the next category, where GeForce GTX 1050 appears slower than Radeon RX 560 due to the former’s 2GB of memory, hurting it in some games, like Forza. 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.

MORE: Best Graphics

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

MORE: AMD Radeon RX 480 Roundup

MORE: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 Roundup

MORE: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Roundup

MORE: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Roundup

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