When it comes to gaming PCs, nothing matters more than your graphics card. To push as many pixels as possible you’re going to want the fastest graphics card you can afford—but ever-shifting prices and product lineups make it difficult to keep track of what’s available, especially in the midst of a crippling GPU shortage.
In honor of keeping frame rates high, we decided to rank all the major available discrete GPUs from Nvidia GeForce and AMD Radeon, starting with the fastest graphics card available and working on down. This list focuses on each company’s most current GPU lineups, and doesn’t include significantly older graphics cards. You’ll find all GeForce RTX 20- and 30-series offerings, however, as well as AMD’s last two graphics card generations.
Price to performance is not a consideration here—just pure performance. Concrete example: The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is technically more powerful than the GeForce RTX 3070, and hence higher on this list, but it’s essentially tied in performance and the newer GeForce option is significantly cheaper at its recommended price, making it a better buy. That said, finding graphics cards anywhere near MSRP is extremely rare during the GPU shortage, so this guide can be used to help you wrap your head around the relative performance of any recent graphics cards you might manage to find, new or used.
We’ve verified this information through hours of blood, sweat, and benchmarking. Feel free to hit up the individual reviews to see our work in greater detail. Or, if you want more concrete buying advice for your specific budget or display resolution, be sure to read our guide to the best graphics cards for gaming. It provides much more information than this simple list, complete with discussion about considerations like value, various form factors, and what to look for in a customized model.
But if you just want to know if GPU A is faster than GPU B, starting with the current consumer gaming champion, read on. The higher up a graphics card is on this list, the faster and more powerful it is.
Editor’s note: This article was last updated to add the Radeon RX 6600 XT, GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, and RTX 3080 Ti to the list.
