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. If you’re shopping around and want to know whether an AMD RX 5600 XT is faster than an Nvidia GTX 1660 Super, and by how much, you’ve come to the right place.

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 and GeForce RTX 3080, has pushed everything down a couple of rungs. However, we’re not done with the new GPUs yet. Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3070 arrives in late October, and AMD’s Big Navi will be revealed on October 28, with cards likely following soon after. (AMD also teased RX 6000 series performance, though didn’t explicitly name the GPU in question.) 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 Benchmarks: Which Cards Ranked Highest?

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 takes top honors for raw performance, with a 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.

Nearly as potent as the 3090 is the GeForce RTX 3080, nominally priced at $700 (if you can find one in stock). It’s about 10% slower than the 3090 at less than half the price. It also makes all of Nvidia’s previous generation GPUs suddenly look a bit weak.

If we include the Titan RTX, Nvidia now owns the top nine positions on the hierarchy, with AMD’s best result being the Radeon VII in 10th place. The thing is, AMD’s RX 5700 XT is nearly as fast for less money, and the real competition from AMD will come in the form of Big Navi, which is slated to launch in late October or early November. The scuttlebutt right now is that the future RX 6900 XT might be able to match the RTX 3080, but we’ll have to wait for the cards to launch before we can confirm that.

The Nvidia Ampere architecture and AMD Big Navi should also bring about feature parity, in that AMD will finally support ray tracing. It’s not entirely clear how AMD’s ray tracing performance will compare to Nvidia’s RT cores, though. Based on some of what we’ve seen from the Xbox Series X console, AMD may just be using shader calculations with a bit of extra hardware to do the BVH traversal that Nvidia’s RTX cards do in RT cores. It’s definitely something to keep an eye on in the coming days.

If you’re in the market for a new sub-$500 graphics card right now, honestly, just wait. Wait a month or two and find out how the RTX 3070 and RX 6000 cards compare to the other GPUs. More importantly, find out how much they’ll cost. Right now, the performance gap between RTX 3080 and the next closest GPU is quite large, and we expect the new GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia to propagate down the list and shake things up.

Consider the current $400-$500 leaders, the RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 from AMD, and the RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super from Nvidia. They’re fine cards, and were even great options to purchase last year. But in one month, we expect a $500 card that will offer roughly RTX 2080 Ti levels of performance. Sure, that’s about $100 more than the 2060 Super and 5700 XT … but it’s also 30-50% higher performance. And we’ll probably see RTX 3060 and maybe RTX 3060 Ti before the end of the year, along with RX 6800 and RX 6700 cards — all very likely priced in the $300-$500 range.

Again, then: WAIT! Don’t buy an expensive new GPU today only to see it eclipsed by the next generation hardware in a few weeks. 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. Brand new RX 570 cards are still hanging around in the $120-$130 range, and if you’re willing to take a chance on a used card from eBay, you can find a GTX 1070 or RX 590 for around $200.

Sticking with recent new GPUs, though, 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

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. The new mix of games and settings make for much larger differences between some of the GPUs, where previously the CPU and lower settings made things look much closer.

Note that while some of the games in our GPU benchmark suite support DirectX Raytracing (DXR) and Nvidia’s RTX 30-series and 20-series GPUs, we have not tested with DXR enabled here. That’s because none of AMD’s current cards can run DXR, and while Nvidia does support DXR on certain GTX models, ray tracing performance on Pascal cards isn’t great. For now, only Nvidia RTX GPUs are worth using for ray tracing games; we may begin with universal ray tracing performance comparisons once AMD’s Big Navi arrives later this year.

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 the Titan V/Xp/X (Maxwell), giving us 42 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 fullsize (1920×1080) 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.