It’s a great option for 120Hz or 144Hz gaming monitors. Source: Nvidia You should be able to play ray tracing games at lower resolutions. With the added bonus of Tensor cores, this is also the graphics card to get if you want ray tracing on a budget. Source: Nvidia For example, Metro Exodus plays fine on Ultra settings, at 1440p, and was still playable with ray tracing enabled. Even at 1440p, most games don’t reveal any loss in detail. It outperforms the RTX 2060 by 10%, and even nearly matches the RTX 2070. The increase in VRAM to 8GB means it can easily handle most creative tasks, including video editing and content creation, and also gives it a longer shelf-life. With 2176 CUDA cores, 34 SMs, and a boost clock of up to 1650 MHz, it’s definitely got enough power for the vast majority of people. This is the best mid-range offering available. The question can’t be just how good it is (otherwise we’d easily recommend a 3k Titan), but how much bang you’re getting for your buck, and whether you can get better value elsewhere. Money is obviously a top priority for consumers.
It’s easy to get sucked into wanting the best specs, but in a lot of cases, you just don’t need them all.įor example, if you’re a gamer that only plays 1080p games, the power needed for 4k gaming or the latest RT technology isn’t a requirement. Instead of just picking the most powerful card, we always bear the user purpose in mind. Testing heat and noise is also very useful, as effective cooling is essential to ensure peak performance and longevity. Although benchmarks are often only tested in gaming and aren’t 100% reliable, they give a much better picture of how different GPUs perform against each other than specs alone. Therefore, real-world testing and benchmarks are incredibly important. Of course we take the above features into account.īut it’s hard to tell how GPU’s will perform in real life just from the specs, especially if they are similar. How We Choose GPUs Features and Performance Many need two slots, and take care that it can release its heat comfortably.Īnother thing to check is that it has the correct ports so you don’t need to buy an adaptor, and also that you have an adequate power supply. So make sure you get one that supports your native resolution, and will fit into your slots. There’s no point spending a ton of money on something that won’t fit, or will be limited by your computer’s display. Bonus: Compatibilityįinally, it’s important to stress that a good GPU for you must be one that is actually compatible with your computer.
Some users like to take advantage of manual overclocking. The boost speed is designed to allow it to work faster for short bursts temporarily when necessary. 1000MHz means it oscillates 1 million times a second.Ĭlock speed usually gives a slight edge over two similar competing GPU’s, particularly boost speed. Clock speedĬlock speed is the number of times the silicon oscillates per second, e.g. Ray tracing shows things like shadows, reflections, refractions, and global illumination much more accurately, making images appear life-like. RT and Tensor cores, the latest big development in graphics cards, are crucial if you want to take advantage of ray tracing technology. It’s important to be aware that the number of CUDA Cores and Stream Processors can’t be directly compared as they are built differently for example, a card with 2000 odd stream processors may be equivalent to around 1000 CUDA cores. Therefore the more you have, the more powerful the GPU will be and better it will be able to render stunning visuals. They’re akin to parallel processors, and process all the data that is fed into and out of the GPU.įor example, they perform graphic calculations that are resolved visually to the user. ArchitectureĬUDA Cores (Nvidia) or Stream Processors (AMD) are the same type of thing across the two manufacturers. There are many features of GPUs, but here’s the main three to look out for: Bandwidth and memoryīandwidth is the maximum rate of data transfer and, for example, GDDR5 provides twice as much bandwidth as GDDR3 (clocked at the same rate).ĤGB is really necessary for 1080p, whilst 8GB memory is ideal for 4K gaming. Read on to find out which GPU is best for you. We cover the best general card as well as the best for 1080p vs 4k gaming, laptops, video-editing and budget users. The lines between Nvidia and AMD are becoming more blurred and all the different model variations can make your head spin.įortunately, we’ve scoured them all to deliver a detailed roundup of the best graphic cards. A good graphics card is essential for high performance, but which one should you get?