Cost Per Frame: Best Value Graphics Cards in Early 2025

[BogdanR]

It was by pure luck I managed to score an ASUS Prime RX 9070 XT OC Edition from Canada Computers at 959 cad (650 usd approx. at the time of buying). At this price the 9070xt is a phenomenal buy, yielding $5.46 per frame at 1440 and an unmatched $8.9 at 4K.

If AMD manages to keep these cards somewhere around $650 they would definitely take over the “upper” midrange market. If only. Steam was already interested in my new configuration… the numbers will grow along with the interest, at the right price.

The card’s performance in both raster and ray tracing is excellent at this price, plus FSR/ game support and drivers can only improve.

I sure hope AMD will not miss the opportunity of getting one of these cards in the hands of all the interested people. It may be a fool’s hope.

 

[maxxcool7421]

Pricing is absurd right now, and AMD’s stance “we can’t do anything, we just sell the chip” is BS. Many companies control their products pricing, they could easily step in and say hey, this is to much, make their own reference cards, or lower the chip cost to the AIBs with a clause they won’t gouge prices because they can with NVIDIA. They’re not going to gain any market share with these prices.

no they cant. they are still too small. if AIB's stop selling thier cards then amd loses.. amd knows this and puts up with it ... while selling 30,000$ instinct, and ai soc's for 50% of nvidia to rake in the cash.

also STOCKHOLDERS run amd and nvidia so NEITHER can actually do jack ssss to sell cheap cards.

 

[RudyBob]

Seems to me a lot of time was spent crunching numbers for an article that is superfluous. It recalls to my mind a time in the distant path when my young wife said, "Look, it's marked down to $20 from $120. It's not entirely the same but that how I look at "cost per frame". It really costs you less to spend more or we won't raise the toll to $15 only $9 and save you thousands

 

[EvilRebar]

Well, as it turns out, most gamers are of the opinion that raytracing doesn't produce enough ROI for the cost of admission...and they are right. Rasterization may be considered "obsolete" because it's not the new hotness (it's like, what 30 years old at least), but that's beside the point. Two things can be true, at the same time: raytracing is the future AND the hardware is currently not worth the price of admission.

"Most gamers" aren't buying these premium cards. People buying high end cards want to enjoy the eye candy. Sure you can run any game on low settings to salvage poorly balanced cards, but RT is transformative in a number of titles and will only become more important as we go forward. It's insane to save 15% or whatever to completely tank your visuals. I'm currently running path traced titles at 120FPS+ at 3440x1440 on a $1K card. It's very possible for people who settle for say 60FPS @ 1440p to enjoy without a monster card.

The price differences are minimal over the life of a card, and you're cherry picking a moment where the new is sold out and the old is EOL.

If you go with one vendor, your card can handle transformative RT experiences. If you go with the other at roughly the same price, you can't.

 

[sreams]

4070 Super "Real Price" is $585? Cheapest on Newegg is $780. Where are you guys finding these prices?

 

[gingerbill]

Thank god their are lots of good games that run on old hardware . I will never pay these extortionate prices for a GPU.

 

[techstrike]

A Really good article.

God job to the writer!

 

[dalpilot]

I am so glad I'm not a serious gamer any more. The last game I played seriously (other than RTS games which don't really rely on high end video - more CPU focused as I only play single person versions - no online against others) was Mech Warrior back in the 1997-2000 era. Haven't played a FPS since them except playing around with remastered Doom (more out of curiosity). I can't imagine playing more for the GPU than the rest of the system combined (I.e. case, PS, CPU, CPU Cooler (air only, not interested in water coolers), motherboard, and memory). I'm sure you could put together a nice system (sans GPU) for less than $1,000. Oh, and figuring it by how much it costs/month still doesn't make it any easier. I recently upgraded two of my systems from RX 580 to RTX 3050 just to have enough graphics power to run newer 1440P monitors (up from 1080P).