AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card has finally penetrated the Steam Survey video card user-share table. The complete set of new-generation RDNA 4 graphics cards data from AMD is now nestled within the Steam gamer popularity tables, with the performance-leading RX 9070 XT highest placed at position 25. AMD took the wraps off the RX 9070 XT and regular RX 9070 at a special event in Feb 2025, with availability starting from March 2025. The RX 9060 XT was a Computex 2025 (~end of May) launch. So the charting of the family has been a long time coming.

Valve doesn’t publicly state a minimum share threshold for inclusion in the results table, but whatever formula lies behind it, the numbers must have climbed sufficiently by May 2026 for the complete Radeon RX 9000 family to now make the grade. Notably, with its newfound data, the RX 9070 XT's 1.35% share sits just a shade behind the RTX 5080, which has 1.52%.

Green Team context and AMD’s leading mystery GPU

Nvidia dominates the Steam GPUs chart, as you may expect. The current leader of the Steam GPUs pack is the time-tested Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 with a 4.02% share according to the newest survey. Positions two and three are the laptop (3.99%) and desktop (3.74%) versions of the RTX 4060, so some would call this Ada Lovelace GPU the real champion of champions.

Currently, the highest placed Red Team GPU is the nebulous ‘AMD Radeon Graphics’ at position 13 and 1.89% share. Some observers reckon this Steam entry impacts the tally of named models, as the Steam Client miscategorizes discrete models for some reason, perhaps due to some iGPU + GPU combos. There are also two other instances of ‘AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics’ in the table, muddying the waters.

At position 39, the RX 9060 XT has made its debut with a reported 0.72% share of Steam users gaming on this mid-ranger. The stats don’t differentiate between the 8GB and 16GB variants of this card.

We have to go all the way down to position 90 to see the Radeon RX 9070 non-XT graphics card. It has a user share of 0.18% according to the figures. For some reason, this efficiency king among GPUs has been present in the Steam Survey much longer than its brethren. We mentioned it popping up with just a 0.16% market share at the start of this year. The revised 0.18% figure doesn’t show spectacular growth, despite some of the praise heaped on this SKU. However, since the pricing of our current best-pick all-around enthusiast graphics card, the RX 9070 XT, can be so close, it’s probably not surprising that the non-XT is overshadowed.

AMD recently launched the RX 9070 GRE worldwide. This 12GB variant of the RX 9070 has been available for months in the Far East, but we aren’t surprised it hasn’t entered the Steam Survey yet (if it will ever make it).

Despite the ongoing memory shortage, AMD is going against the grain and reportedly developing a new entry-level RDNA 4 graphics card to compete with the RTX 5050: Videocardz reports that AMD is cooking up an RX 9050 graphics card based on the Navi 44 die.

Despite the name, the reported specs of the RX 9050 are very similar to the RX 9060 XT 8GB rather than the vanilla RX 9060. In fact, the RX 9050’s specs are so similar to its XT counterpart that the GPU has more cores than the vanilla RX 9060. Videocard’s report claims the RX 9050 will come with 2048 cores with a game clock of up to 1,920 MHz and a boost clock of up to 2,600 MHz. Memory is comprised of 8GB of GDDR6 operating at 18Gbps across a 128-bit bus. The GPU is also reported to come with a PCIe 5.0 x16 interface, two DisplayPort 2.1a ports, and one HDMI 2.1b port.

For the uninitiated, the RX 9060 XT 8GB also features 2048 cores, 8GB of memory, and a 128-bit memory bus. Where the two GPUs differ is in clock speeds — the RX 9060 XT has a 24% clock speed advantage over the RX 9050, featuring a boost frequency of up to 3.1 GHz. Memory bandwidth is also slightly higher thanks to the inclusion of 20 Gbps GDDR6 modules. There’s no word yet on the RX 9050’s target board power, but the recommended power supply requirements for the RX 9060 XT 8GB suggest it will consume more power than the RX 9050.

*Specs unconfirmed by AMD

The RX 9050’s unorthodox specifications (in reference to its nomenclature) suggest AMD wants a better SKU to compete against the RTX 5050, specifically one more powerful than the vanilla RX 9060. If this weren’t the case, AMD could easily have repurposed its existing vanilla RX 9060 to serve both the OEM and DIY markets instead of creating a new SKU (the RX 9060 is currently OEM-exclusive). We have seen a report of the RX 9060 outperforming the RTX 5050 by 20%, but that's only one test. As usual, if the GPU does exist, we'll need to wait for third-party testing before drawing any conclusions.

Pricing is still unknown as well, but it is likely that AMD will target the RTX 5050’s street pricing with the RX 9050. The cheapest RTX 5050 at the time of writing is $289.

If AMD has a new GPU to announce, we'll likely hear about it at Computex 2026, which kicks off in Taipei in just a few weeks. AMD won't have a Computex keynote this year, breaking with its usual live event schedule, but AMD's AIB partners will undoubtedly be ready to show off RX 9050 models if the GPU is indeed real.

AMD has added a graphics card called Radeon 9060 XL, that does not officially exist, into the list of products supported by its ROCm 6.4.2 software stack, noticed a VideoCardz reader. However, the Radeon 9060 XL may not be a name of a new product, but simply a typo on AMD's part.

AMD's list of products supported by the ROCm 6.4.2 software stack includes the company's latest Radeon RX 9070 XT, RX 9070, RX 9070 GRE, RX 9060 XT, and RX 9060 XL, but lacks the RX 9060 model. While the document correctly points the latest Radeon RX 9000-series graphics cards to the gfx1200 and gfx1201 processors (as LLVM targets for compilers), it for some reason attributes them to the RDNA 3 microarchitecture, which is incorrect as they belong to the RDNA 4 family of GPUs.

Given that the document incorrectly describes microarchitecture of AMD's latest Radeon RX 9000-series graphics processors, it may as well call the Radeon RX 9060 the Radeon RX 9060 XL - as the unit most likely carries the Navi 44 XL processor.

While ATI Technologies, which became AMD's graphics products group (after AMD acquired ATI in 2006), used the 'XL' moniker for select products (e.g., Radeon X1800XL in 2005 and for OEM-only versions), starting from the Radeon HD 3000 series onward (with models like HD 3770, HD 4870, HD 5970, HD 6970, R9 290X, RX 480, RX 7900 XTX, etc.), AMD abandoned the 'XL' branding, but retained the moniker to mark cut-down versions of its GPUs: for example, the Radeon RX 7900 GRE carries the Navi 31 XL processor.

AMD’s new Radeon RX 9060 8GB non-XT is the fifth card in the RDNA 4 family, arriving quietly and without a retail shelf debut. Like the RX 9070 GRE before it, this one is meant for OEM systems—prebuilt rigs you can actually buy in places like South Korea, but not yet in most other markets.

That didn’t stop South Korean YouTuber Technosaurus from cracking open a newly purchased desktop, pulling out the card, and putting it through some benchmarks.

On paper, the RX 9060 is supposed to slot neatly between Nvidia’s RTX 5050 and AMD’s own RX 9060 XT. Under the hood, it’s a cut-down Navi 44 GPU featuring 28 compute units, 1,792 shaders, 28 ray tracing cores, and 8GB of GDDR6 over a 128-bit bus. It runs just shy of 3 GHz, sips about 135 watts under load, and, in this case, came in Sapphire’s compact Pulse variant. The drop from the XT’s 32 CUs doesn’t sound like much, and as it turns out, in practice, it isn’t.

Technosaurus ran the RX 9060 through nine modern games at 1080p with every slider cranked. What emerged was a surprisingly tight race: the RX 9060 landed within 2% of the RTX 5060 and just 6% shy of the RX 9060 XT, which is close enough that you’d need a benchmark overlay to tell them apart, as shown below. The real beatdown came against the RTX 5050, which only managed about 80% of the RX 9060’s frame rates—a gap big enough to see and feel in-game.

In a press release obtained by Tom's Hardware today, AMD announced the Radeon RX 9060, a new entry-level GPU that is said to be optimized for 1080p gaming. Notably, the new graphics card will not be available for purchase through retail channels, but will only be available with PCs offered by "select system integrators."

AMD hasn’t shared the full specifications of the RX 9060 yet, but it will be based on the same RDNA 4 architecture shared by the RX 9070 XT and the RX 9060 XT. This GPU has 28 RDNA 4 compute units, down from 32 on the RX 9060 XT.

Assuming clocks similar to those of the RX 9060 XT, the RX 9060 could deliver up to 22.43 TFLOPS of shader power, down about 12.5% from the RX 9060 XT. It will feature 8GB of GDDR6 memory running at as-yet-undisclosed speeds and will offer support for FSR 4 upscaling.

AMD's decision to make the RX 9060 available only through system integrators (i.e., in prebuilt systems) seems like an unfortunate one. Even with only 8GB of VRAM, this product could have been an appealing upgrade for system builders on tight budgets.

RX 9060 XT 8GB cards are currently available for about $250 to $300, depending on the retailer, and an even cheaper RDNA 4 card could have been compelling. Without an official MSRP, however, we have only a limited idea of how the RX 9060 would have been positioned in the Radeon RX 9000-series product family.

AMD also plans to release a new Adrenalin driver update for its range of GPUs that expands support for a handful of newly released games. Driver version 25.8.1 will soon be available for download and offers optimized gameplay in Mafia: The Old Country, Mecha Break, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, and the newly updated Unreal Engine 5 release of Valorant. The latest release is also said to offer support for the upcoming Battlefield 6 open beta, which is expected to roll out later this week.

While AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4) is officially supported by a limited number of games, the latest update also expands support for the upscaling tech to more titles. These include Cyberpunk 2077, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, Mafia: The Old Country, Arena Breakout: Infinite, Game of Thrones: Kingsroad, Wreckfest 2, and Lies of P.

The limited availability of FSR 4 stands in stark contrast to Nvidia’s latest DLSS 4 upscaling, which is currently supported in over 125 games and applications. While AMD is clearly working on expanding FSR 4 support, the technology is restricted to the company's latest Radeon RX 9000 series graphics cards, which further limits its reach. Still, it's good to see the technology come to more titles.

There’s not a lot about the upcoming AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT that remains a mystery after AMD’s launch presentation, and its AIB partner boards being displayed all over Computex. However, Slovakia-based tech site HW Cooling recently enjoyed a Gigabyte factory tour, where they managed to snap a nice, clear shot of an upcoming RX 9060 XT graphics card PCB. There are lots of other interesting photos and details, too, if you care to check their full story.

The PCB is accompanied by a typical Gigabyte codename, which in this case is ‘R906XTG.’ We reckon that the PCB is therefore from one of Gigabyte’s pair of Radeon RX 9060 XT Gaming graphics cards – either the 8GB or 16GB model, we can’t tell from the image, and the -16GB or -8GD Gigabyte short code is missing from the model number. Gigabyte has announced four RX 9060 XT SKUs so far. They’re all dual-slot triple-fan cards.

Refocusing on the image, we saw the diminutive Navi 44 GPU in the flesh at Computex, so that isn’t new, but we can see it here where it should be, flanked by a quartet of GDDR6 memory chips from SK hynix at 12 o’clock and three o’clock. As we don’t know whether this is the 8GB or 16GB Gigabyte RX 9060 XT Gaming PCB, we aren’t sure whether there are another four VRAM chips installed on the other side of the PCB.

Above and to the right of the central GPU and VRAM area, Gigabyte has placed a single 8-pin power connector. Along the bottom edge is the lauded PCIe 5.0 x16 interface. AMD’s decision to feature only three display outputs, as you can see on the left side of this photo, hasn’t been warmly welcomed, though.

AMD's latest RX 9060 XT GPUs continue the saga of bifurcating mainstream options into different memory configurations for market segmentation. According to AMD's Frank Azor, the 8GB flavor of the RX 9060 XT is designed to cater to the needs of the majority of gamers, who play at 1080p.

Gamers and developers have long bemoaned constrained memory capacities with modern GPUs. Even at 1080p, many demanding AAA titles can overwhelm 8GB GPUs, as confirmed by professional testing with cards like the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB. Despite sufficient raw horsepower, the constrained framebuffer often forces you to compromise on graphical fidelity or even resolution for a playable framerate. Nvidia's RTX 5060 GPUs have been at the epicenter of this criticism, to the point where an older RTX 3060 12GB can outperform them in certain scenarios.

There were rumors that AMD might scrap the 8GB model, following the backlash faced by Nvidia. This proved to be inaccurate, as the product was likely too far in the pipeline to be axed. While the GPUs are still almost two weeks away from launch, enthusiasts have already begun raising concerns about the viability of the 8GB model. AMD's Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions and Gaming Marketing, Frank Azor, stepped in to justify their rationale, stating these GPUs target the "majority of gamers," who play at 1080p.

AMD has seized the opportunity presented by Computex 2025 to announce the chipmaker's third addition to the Radeon RX 9000 series. The newly unveiled Radeon RX 9060 XT complements the previously released Radeon RX 9070 and Radeon RX 9070 XT, strengthening AMD's RDNA 4 gaming portfolio to compete with the best graphics cards.

The Radeon RX 9060 XT serves as the successor to the Radeon RX 7600 XT, which was introduced in January 2024. Although it has only been a little less than a year and a half since the previous RDNA 3 graphics card has been out, the release of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, coupled with the recent coming of the GeForce RTX 5060, means AMD needs a contender to compete within that market segment. Thus, the Radeon RX 9060 XT couldn't have arrived at a better time.

AMD provided renders of the Radeon RX 9060 XT solely for artistic and illustration purposes. Similar to the Radeon RX 9700 series situation, AMD isn't releasing any reference or MBA (Made by AMD) Radeon RX 9060 XT cards. However, the chipmaker's partners will offer reference-clocked models that should stick to or close to the MSRP.

Up until this point, AMD has been using the Navi 48 silicon for its Radeon RX 9070-series graphics cards; however, given the Navi 48's size and the Radeon RX 9060 XT's lower specifications, it wouldn't be a wise business decision to use the aforementioned silicon. Instead, AMD has introduced a smaller piece of RDNA 4 silicon shaped like Navi 44. As a result, the Radeon RX 9060 XT is the first SKU to leverage this silicon, and it probably won't be the last.

The Radeon RX 9060 XT transitions to a complete PCIe 5.0 x16 interface, opposite the Radeon RX 7600 XT, which was restricted to a PCIe 4.0 x8. For the past couple of generations, AMD has used the x8 interface for its Radeon RX x600-series graphics cards, such as the Radeon RX 7600 XT or Radeon RX 6600 XT. These SKUs typically use smaller silicon, and sometimes even silicon for mobile graphics cards, so a x16 interface usually doesn't offer substantial benefits. However, the latest GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB debacle has shown up to a 10% performance hit when used on a PCIe 4.0 interface. Sticking with an x16 interface for the Radeon RX 9060 XT is a sound move.

Navi 44 shares characteristics similar to Navi 48 in design and manufacturing processes. AMD's new silicon continues to sport a monolithic design and is manufactured using the same TSMC's N4P (4nm) FinFET process node. The Navi 44 silicon has a die size of 199 mm² with up to 29.7 billion transistors.

In contrast, Navi 33, which is used in the current Radeon RX 7600 XT, is built on TSMC's N6 (6nm) FinFET process. The silicon for Navi 33 is 204 mm² and contains up to 13.3 billion transistors, resulting in a density of 65.2 million transistors per mm². AMD decreased the die size of Navi 44 by approximately 2% relative to Navi 33, which is not a major reduction. However, Navi 44's transistor count has substantially improved, housing up to 2.2X more transistors than Navi 33. It works out to an impressive density of 149.2 million transistors per mm².

In addition to enhancing performance and transistor count, TSMC's N4P FinFET manufacturing process also boasts improvements in power efficiency. However, we'll have to wait for a full review of the Radeon RX 9060 XT to measure how efficient the graphics card is compared to the Radeon RX 7600 XT.

AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT Specifications

The Radeon RX 9060 XT utilizes the full Navi 44 silicon, thus having access to all 32 Compute Units (CUs) equivalent to 2,048 Stream Processors (SPs). That's the exact core specifications as the Radeon RX 7600 XT. Therefore, the Radeon RX 9060 XT's performance uplift comes from the prowess of the new RDNA 4 CUs.

The graphics card also has 32 third-generation Ray Tracing cores, which can double the throughput compared to the second-generation counterparts inside the Radeon RX 7600 XT. Meanwhile, the 64 onboard second-generation AI accelerators can deliver up to 821 TOPS.

The Radeon RX 9060 XT boasts a 3,130 MHz boost clock, even higher than the Radeon RX 9070 series. Compared to its predecessor, the Radeon RX 9060 XT has a 14% higher boost clock speed, translating to around 13% higher FP32 performance on paper.

According to AMD's provided gaming benchmarks, the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB is up to 6% faster than the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB across 40 tested titles at 1440p (2560x1440) resolution with Ultra settings. AMD's selection does raise some eyebrows. It would have been a fairer comparison if the chipmaker had used the 16GB variant of the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti instead of the 8GB variant.

In contrast to the Radeon RX 7600 XT, which was only available with 16GB of GDDR6 memory, AMD offers the Radeon RX 9060 XT in 8GB and 16GB flavors. Regardless of the variant, the memory operates at 20 Gbps across a 128-bit interface. The Radeon RX 9060 XT delivers a memory bandwidth of up to 320 GB/s, 11% more than the existing Radeon RX 7600 XT. Meanwhile, the capacity of Infinity Cache remains the same on the Radeon RX 9060 XT.

The Radeon RX 9060 XT's TBP (Total Board Power) varies between the 8GB and 16GB models. The former is rated for 150W, and the latter is slightly higher at 160W. They're 21% and 16% lower than the Radeon RX 7600 XT, respectively. In any event, gamers can rest easy as the Radeon RX 9060 XT only employs a single 8-pin PCIe power connector.

RDNA 4 has permitted the Radeon RX 9060 XT to feature upgraded display outputs. It offers DisplayPort 2.1a and HDMI 2.1b support, contrary to the Radeon RX 7600 XT's DisplayPort 2.1 and HDMI 2.1a. The Radeon RX 9060 XT only provides two DisplayPort 2.1a outputs and a single HDMI 2.1 port, one less DisplayPort 2.1a output than the Radeon RX 9070 series.

FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4) launched alongside the Radeon RX 9000 series with initial support for 30 games. AMD expects the list to extend beyond 60 by the Radeon RX 9060 XT's launch date. The chipmaker is also preparing FSR Redstone, powered by machine learning, for a 2H launch. FSR Redstone will bring some cool features, such as neural radiance caching, machine learning ray regeneration, and machine learning frame generation.

Photographs of a cancelled AMD RX 7000-series prototype have reportedly surfaced on X. According to GOKForFree, the GPU seems to be a working sample of what could have been the Radeon RX 7500. When tested using GPU-Z, it was shown to have 6GB of memory with a 96-bit bus, 1,536 shading units, and 64 ROPs.

By comparison, the AMD Radeon RX 7600 has 8GB of GDDR6 memory with a 128-bit bus, 2,048 shading units, and 64 ROPs. The graphics card was an incremental upgrade from the RX 6650 XT and competes directly with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060.

On the other hand, TechPowerUp lists an unreleased AMD Radeon RX 7500 XT with the same memory size as the unknown card, but with fewer shading units (1,024) and ROPs (32). So, it could be that this unknown GPU is the actual RX 7500 XT, with the details listed by TechPowerUp as those for the vanilla RX 7500. After all, it’s unlikely that AMD will release an XT version of a base-spec GPU.

With its expected Computex unveiling just a week away, the key specifications of AMD’s Radeon RX 9600 XT appear to have spilled forth onto the internet.

The tip comes from prolific leakster momomo_us, but we had to double-take as the otherwise detailed post doesn’t mention the assumed subject of the leak. However, any kind of leak requires a pinch of salt, and this aligns roughly with expectations of the aforementioned 9600 XT, so let’s just add a few more grains and take a closer look.

Decoding the above, we have perhaps a reference and OC model RX 9060 XT being highlighted. The faster card can boost its Navi 44 XT RDNA 4 GPU with 2,048 Stream Processors (SPs) to 3.32 GHz, and has a game clock of 2.78 GHz. While it therefore has half the number of shaders as the potent RX 9070 XT, its boost clock is nearly 12% faster. Moreover, it boosts to almost 32% faster GPU clocks than the RX 9070 model.

Reports from multiple independent reviewers and publications suggest that Nvidia is barring access to pre-release drivers for the upcoming budget-oriented RTX 5060. Apparently, Nvidia is dropping drivers for RTX 5060 GPUs with the retail embargo. Igor's Lab, HardwareLuxx, and Hardware Unboxed have all posted about the issue on their websites or on social media.

Without the drivers, proper day-one reviews from tech publications will be impossible, and the drivers will drop as many reviewers travel to Computex in Taipei.

Nvidia typically optimized pre-release drivers as part of the review kit. Nvidia typically releases the public-facing enablement drivers for a new GPU on the day of its retail launch. If proper drivers aren't installed, the system may either fail to detect the GPU or the results obtained from benchmarking the card will be unreliable at best.

Nvidia didn't send RTX 5060 Ti 8GB models to reviewers, leading them to acquire retail units at their own expense. As expected, that GPU struggles at 4K, at 1440p, and even at 1080p in a handful of titles compared to its 16GB sibling. The RTX 5060 and its 8GB may face similar woes, but that's at least somewhat counteracted by its cheaper price point. It's conceivable that internal software issues may be causing driver delays, if you want to give Nvidia the benefit of the doubt.

With AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics cards tipped for a Computex unveiling (the Taipei-hosted show begins just two weeks from today, on May 20), it isn’t a surprise to see retailers preparing and accidentally publishing product pages. VideoCardz unearthed a prime example of this phenomenon today, with a screenshot and link to Brazilian electronics outlet Terabyteshop. The retailer has published a page (link still live at the time of writing) with a smattering of details and an image showing a Gigabyte GV-R9060XTGAMING OC-16GD. The product’s slightly more human-friendly name is the Gigabyte Radeon RX 9060 XT Gaming OC 16GB.

Slightly frustratingly, this early spotting of an RX 9060 XT in retail is from a store with just this single product example – a 16GB model. Though we have seen quite confident reports stating AMD hasn’t canceled its plans for an 8GB version of this card, the Gigabyte listing doesn’t help affirm or reject such a product's upcoming existence. Terabyteshop’s listing is missing any key availability or pricing details, too, but the Gigabyte product code and specs look genuine.

This particular WindForce model of the RX 9060 XT looks a lot like Gigabyte’s Radeon RX 9070 Gaming OC model. It is a pretty big cooler to strap on this lower power card, surely overkill, but we don’t have precise indications for the release product's TGP – likely under 200W.

Shipping graphics cards with just 8GB of VRAM is tantamount to "bringing a butter knife to a gunfight," opines the Grok AI, built-into Twitter/X. The AI agent was commenting on a thread about the recent RTX 5060 Ti 8GB performance analysis – one which showed this model may be up to 10% slower than the 16GB variant in popular games. Elon Musk's humorous AI is powered by hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs, so there is a little irony in it disparaging the same brand of silicon that gave it life.

PC enthusiasts were already braced for new generation SKUs arriving with as little as 8GB onboard - before graphics cards like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti were officially launched. Nevertheless, seeing these fears materialize was still painful. And this feeling of disappointment now looks set to continue, with the drip-drip of analysis of GPU commentators sharing benchmarks and 'told you so' tales. We must also add in to the unhappy mix the certainty that newer titles will only be pushing VRAM demands higher.

Grok - this 'humorous AI' isn't joking, or hallucinating

Responding to PunmasterStp on X, Grok highlighted that "Modern AAA games are chomping through VRAM faster than a kid with a bag of candy—especially at 1440p or 4K with all those juicy high-res textures and ray tracing bells and whistles." It went on to contrast the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB and 16GB variants. Users of the former will see it prematurely age with "stutters, texture pop-ins, and even crashes in heavy hitters like Hogwarts Legacy and Space Marine 2," Grok said. Meanwhile, the latter model, with 16GB, was said to be comfortably "cruising" in some of the same titles.

Grok continued with its unvarnished RTX 5060 Ti 8GB takedown by stating that "If you’re planning to game for the next few years without constantly tweaking settings down to potato mode, 8GB just ain’t gonna cut it." Potato mode seems a bit harsh, but the message is clear to those eyeing their budget and new/used 8GB graphics cards – save up more or adjust your expectations and preferences.

AMD is also expected to launch 8GB '60 card(s) shortly

It seems that AMD's RX 9060 XT 8GB is still on track, despite rumors suggesting otherwise, per Benchlife. The publication claims, through its sources, that AMD has no plans to cancel this 8GB VRAM product or halt supply to board partners. It's important to note that these cancellation rumors might not be completely baseless. Given the performance limitations of Nvidia's RTX 5060 Ti 8GB, AMD may be inclined to prioritize the RX 9060 XT 16GB over its 8GB sibling, but that's just speculation.

The RX 9060 XT branding was officially confirmed by AMD during the RX 9000 reveal at CES. It would only be a matter of time before the official announcement, which is reportedly set for Computex in just three weeks. Taking a page out of Nvidia's playbook, AMD's RX 9060 XT has been rumored to launch in two VRAM capacities: 8GB and 16GB. This further segments AMD's RDNA 4 portfolio, though we expect these GPUs to hit the $350 price point.

With an expected price difference of $30-$50, the 16GB model seems like the obvious choice, but it begs the question of why the 8GB model exists at all, considering a potential RX 9060 non-XT 8GB in the future, if it even exists.

Benchlife purports, through its sources, that AMD has no plans to cancel or halt the supply of the RX 9060 XT 8GB. While it is technically possible to convert existing 8GB designs to 16GB, the PCBs must be designed with extra routing, pads, and clearance for the added modules. Since the 8GB variant was likely designed before the performance limitations of the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB became clear, it's too far in the pipeline to be axed now.

Like Bethesda's Oblivion Remastered, it looks like we're getting another shadow drop this month, this time from AMD. Pre-orders for the Radeon RX 9070 GRE are now live at major e-commerce retailers in China, with deliveries expected to begin on May 8. Adding the 'officially confirmed' stamp to this news, the product page for the RX 9070 GRE has gone live on AMD's website, detailing all the specifications.

The RX 9070 GRE has been generating buzz in the news since early April. Consistent with AMD's past GRE releases, it was almost confirmed that the RX 9070 GRE would be region locked to China, at least initially. While the RX 7900 GRE set a precedent for later global launches, that was largely to rival Nvidia's RTX 4070 Super. The RX 9070 GRE sits between the RX 9070 and the yet-to-launch RX 9060 XT. That's what we would naturally assume; however, a price almost identical to the faster RX 9070 hints AMD might be replacing the latter with the GRE, at least in China.

In terms of specifications, the RX 9070 GRE wields 48 Compute Units, for a total of 3,072 Stream Processors, 25% fewer than the RX 9070 XT. It likely sticks to the same Navi 48 core as seen in the RX 9070 series, along with a 192-bit interface for 12GB of 18 Gbps GDDR6 VRAM. The boost clocks are up there at 2.79 GHz, right between the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT. The GPU has a 220W TGP, matching RX 9070, and AMD recommends a 650W PSU for it. Most models should be powered by 2x 8-pin connectors, and some AIBs might even carry over existing RX 9070 board designs due to the similar power specifications.

The slower GDDR6 modules and narrower 192-bit interface chop the memory bandwidth by 32.5% compared to the rest of the lineup. Depending on how RDNA 4 scales with bandwidth, this might slightly impact performance. As seen before, there's a decent chance you can extract some gains by overclocking the memory, but let's wait for official tests.

AMD, through its first-party metrics, is claiming 6% better performance than the RX 7900 GRE on average across a set of 30 games at 1440p Ultra. That's a lot better than what we initially predicted, and underlines RDNA 4's per Compute Unit improvements in rasterization. But we'll need to see third-party/independent reviews before jumping to conclusions.

Nvidia's budget-friendly RTX 5060 GPUs are rumored to hit shelves on May 19th, according to VideoCardz's sources. This release window falls just a day before Computex, and a day after AMD's RX 9060 XT series, allegedly.

Nvidia is reportedly relaying the embargo timelines to AIB partners as we speak, which is likely the origin of this leak. Since embargoes are always subject to change, we should treat this leak with skepticism.

Last week, Nvidia unveiled the RTX 5060 family of Blackwell GPUs, including the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB/16GB ($429/$379) and the RTX 5060 ($299), with the latter slated for an unspecified launch date next month. Contrary to a typical one-day gap between the review and sales embargoes, VideoCardz reports that for the RTX 5060, both will be lifted on the same day: May 19th. Instead of relying on Nvidia's skewed first-party benchmarks, interested customers should wait for independent reviews before jumping the gun.

With the sharp spike in shader count and bandwidth, you could be looking at 20-30% higher performance than the RTX 4060, but that's just a rough estimate. Equipped with the GB206 core, the RTX 5060 features 3,840 CUDA cores, 25% more than the RTX 4060, along with a 128-bit interface for 8GB of memory. Thanks to the adoption of GDDR7, there is a 64% increase in memory bandwidth (from 288 GB/s to 448 GB/s), which will prove useful in memory-intensive tasks.

Originally anticipated by early June, a new rumor suggests that AMD's RX 9060 XT GPUs could hit shelves on May 18, a shift of around two or three weeks. This leak originates from Board Channels, a network of sources allegedly linked to board partners. The same source also claims the RX 9070 GRE, a recurring subject in many leaks nowadays, has, purportedly, been pushed back to the fourth quarter, and we might have a good explanation for that.

AMD updated its RDNA 4 nomenclature to align with Nvidia's "X0X0" convention, probably to simplify customer understanding, even if it comes at the expense of its original identity. The RX 9060 XT family will reportedly offer 8GB and 16GB memory configurations, shifting to the budget Navi 44 die with 2,048 shaders (32 CUs) and clock speeds north of 3 GHz. Leaked specifications suggest the RX 9070 GRE, on the other hand, is equipped with a cut-down Navi 48 die packing 3,072 shaders (48 CUs) and a 12GB frame buffer.

Despite initially being suggested for a Computex reveal, followed by a launch in early June, Board Channels alleges that AMD is expediting the RX 9060 XT for launch just before Computex. By launch, we're assuming the source refers to on-shelf inventory. More interestingly, the mid-range RX 9070 GRE is apparently delayed from early May to October or November, just before 11.11 (Singles' Day in China), the largest online and offline shopping event globally.

Chinese graphics card manufacturer Zephyr (via 孤城Hardware) has launched the Radeon RX 6500, a never-before-seen graphics card from AMD. While the Radeon RX 6500 is unlikely to beat any of the best graphics cards today, the Navi 24-powered graphics card might be a good solution for some budget gamers.

The Radeon RX 6500 graphics card is currently absent from Zephyr's website. Identifying it as part of Zephyr's lineup relies solely on the logos present on the cooling fans. This Radeon RX 6500 ITX version isn't the only offering from Zephyr, as the manufacturer has listed the Radeon RX 6500LP, which features a low-profile, single-slot design utilizing a blower-type cooling system.

Surprisingly, the Radeon RX 6500 uses the same Navi 24 (codename Beige Goby) silicon as the 2022-era Radeon RX 6500 XT. It's the same full die with 1,024 Streaming Processors (SPs), 33% more SPs than the Radeon RX 6400. Performance-wise, the Radeon RX 6500 should be faster than the RX 6400 but still lags behind the Radeon RX 6500 XT due to substantial clock speed reductions to keep the TDP below 100W.

AMD Radeon RX 6500 Specifications

The clock speeds for the Radeon RX 6500 ITX version are unknown, but Zephyr listed the Radeon RX 6500LP with a 1,728 MHz base clock and 2,066 MHz boost clock. We expect the ITX SKU to feature similar clock speeds since it has the same 55W TDP as the blower SKU. As a result, the Radeon RX 6500 has a 25% lower base clock and 27% lower boost clock than the Radeon RX 6500 XT.

While the Radeon RX 6500's core specifications resemble the Radeon RX 6500 XT, the memory subsystem is from the Radeon RX 6400. It has the identical 4GB of GDDR6 memory operating at 16 Gbps across a 64-bit memory interface. The configuration results in a memory bandwidth up to 128 GB/s, 11% below the Radeon RX 6500 XT.

Mixing and matching the core and memory specifications allows Zephyr to keep the Radeon RX 6500's TDP at 55W. This is only 4% higher than the Radeon RX 6400, but a whopping 49% lower than the Radeon RX 6500 XT. The 55W TDP means the Radeon RX 6500 doesn't require any external PCIe power connectors. In addition to the dual-slot ITX design that's only 6.7 inches (171mm) long, the Radeon RX 6500 is an excellent fit for SFF builds or prebuilt upgrades.

AMD is reportedly preparing to debut its RDNA 4 workstation GPU offerings for desktops, presumably under the Radeon Pro W9000 family. As put forwaard by Hoang Anh Phu, who frequently obtains inside scoops, AMD is considering using the Navi 48 XTW die for its top-end SKUs, paired with 32GB of video memory, likely GDDR6. As always, this leak shouldn't be taken as definitive, but there's likely some truth to it given the proximity of Computex next month, followed by AMD's Advancing AI event in June.

Radeon PRO GPUs are aimed at workstation setups, rivaling Nvidia's (former) Quadro or (now incumbent) RTX PRO offerings for prosumers. These graphics cards bridge the gap between consumers and server domains, for applications like AI, HPC, DCC, CGI, CAD, VR/AR, and the list goes on.

It seems that AMD is sticking to more conservative figures for its flagship workstation offerings this generation. That's somewhat expected since Navi 48 (356mm²) is in the same ballpark as GB203 (378mm²), found in the RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell. Nvidia's top-end GB202 at 750mm², is home to the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell featuring a massive 96GB frame buffer.

Navi 48, with its 256-bit interface, enables either 16GB of memory (via eight 32-bit channels) or a theoretical maximum of 32GB in clamshell mode, which is the exact configuration being reported here.

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.

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.