The Best Graphics Cards 2020

[CharmsD]

Are you on duty today?... On Nvidia's front?

Rubbish.

Experience and business sense demand stability and warrant-ability for the two top tiers, people often upgrade from a base configuration when contemplating the purchase of a new computer. Graphics performance is an important criteria but it is not the only consideration, a weak third at best. The "affordable" class is a nod to AMD for their cards affordability and performance, they are lower cost out of the gate, although in the frames per second for a given resolution/refresh rate, may be weaker, the expected time-of-service prevails. In computing it is always reliability over "raw speed". These metrics are dynamic and frequently adjusted according to a host of external circumstances, configuration is not solely based on potential markups or personal whims.


I responded with my choices, so what are your's, and why?

 

[CharmsD]

I have lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of experience helping out others and real-life users, troubleshooting AMD GPU's and fixing issues, including my builds and others builds, again, both in real life and online. I'm a Professional IT Specialist III for NY State and have been doing this since the Voodoo cards in the early 90's, I have 10 times the hardware trouble-shooting experience of any writer on this site, I troubleshoot and work in the IT field for a living and I am good at what I do, with close to 15 years of working in IT and 20 years of working on computers, installing GPU's and playing with drivers, back to the 3DFX Glide days, all the way to now.

Not trying to dismay anyone else's experience or knowledge.
AMD's cards for the last 10 years have been subject to various issues, from weird bugs, glitches, freezes and a raft of other small and big hiccups and thats not something reviewers are going to experience as much with all new builds, it happens with real-life builds with real life systems and real life users, or users I deal with, not reviewers. It's common knowledge across any and every tech forum, and while Nvidia is not exempt from their problems, overall AMD's ecosystem on average has been inferior and more problematic, anyone trying to say otherwise is just ignoring the truth.
I like AMD and I''ve owned many Radeons over the years, albeit not lately!

Thanks for this post @amstech - explaining that, it's a fine line to walk between informing and - doing something else. You did a good job, it's appreciated. :}

 

[PEnnn]

The drivers aren't as bad as I've made them out to be, but they certainly aren't as good as others have claimed.
That all being said I am done now and forever staining Steve's reviews with my AMD driver rhetoric, as I really don't care that much and after reading some of my posts I've really come across the wrong way. My intention was to break through the AMD commentary bias on this site with valiant truth, not dismissive nonsense.
AMD's presence in the GPU market is vital to keeping Nvidia in check, and it actually bothers me they don't execute better.

Who are you and what have you done with the real Amstech IT Overlord..???

 

[Bluescreendeath]

Nothing happened, its a good card, I see the TI version at about a $50 premium ($229, vs $279).
A 1660 is a different GPU, the RTX 2060 at 'close prices' is simply a better choice, it's a more powerful GPU with some features designed to -- turn heads.

Gotcha. I got my 1660ti at 250 so I guess my price figures are skewed.

Is the 1660 a different architecture than the 1660Ti? I'd assume it'd just be a stripped down version of the 1660Ti with less cores or something.

 

[neeyik]

Is the 1660 a different architecture than the 1660Ti? I'd assume it'd just be a stripped down version of the 1660Ti with less cores or something.

GTX 1660 - uses the TU116 chip with 2 SM sections disabled (22 out of 24 active = 1408 shaders)
GTX 1660 Super - uses the same chip as above, but uses GDDR6 instead of GDDR 5
GTX 1660 Ti - also uses the TU116 chip, but with GDDR6 and all SM sections enabled, so 1536 shaders in total. However, it is clocked lower than the Super.

Default specs are (shaders/TMUs/ROPs/base clock/boost clock/memory bandwidth):
1660 = 1408 / 88 / 48 / 1540MHz / 1785 MHz / 192 GBps
1660 Super = 1408 / 88 / 48 / 1540MHz / 1785MHz / 336 GBps
1660 Ti = 1536 / 96 / 48 / 1500MHz / 1770MHz / 288 GBps

 

[NightAntilli]

Who are you and what have you done with the real Amstech IT Overlord..???

My exact thoughts lol.

In any case... This is a great list that I think is quite unbiased. It gives a fair chance to the cards of both nVidia and AMD. There is enough information for everyone to make up their own minds what they want to get, and that is a good thing.

It's sad to see that there are still the ones trying to blow the whole AMD driver issue thing out of proportion in an attempt to refrain people from using AMD products. Their products aren't perfect but are definitely viable to be used at this point.

No one really benefits from either the over-praising or the over-hating any particular manufacturer. Companies should be kept honest, but so should their fan bases. Whenever one company is too dominant, it's the consumer that ultimately pays the price. The company itself also suffers by becoming lazy and neglectful when things are too easy for them. Look at what happened to Intel and their CPUs.

The ones doing whatever they can to deliberately try to make one company appear more dominant over the other are being destructive to us all. So please, cut the nonsense.

 

[Tantor]

In my opinion the Radeon VII is still the best AMD card.

My Radeon VII Furmark scores are always ahead of the 5700xts, 2070 supers, and right behind the 2080s. My latest 1080p run was 11524, just behind a 2080ti at 12836. The 2080tis cost at least $400 more than an RVII.

The RVII has gotten an undeserved rap. Despite rumors that it's EOL'd, it's still readily available on Newegg. Despite rumors that Vega is going away, we read that it's alive and well in the new 4000 series GPUs. It's fully supported in Radeon Software. It doesn't have the recent 'black screen' problem you see with the Navis. With automatic undervolting, the heat and noise issues don't seem to be a problem.

Frankly, I don't care if it costs $60 more than a 2070 super. ($540 vs $599) It should, because it's faster. Anyway, people spend far more on frivolous things like RGB, 14 phase VRMs, PCIe 4, etc.

 

[krizby]

Lol this article assume the RTX 2070 is selling at 500usd which is a huge oversight. In fact the newly revived RTX 2070 is selling at 400usd
gigabyte rtx 2070
msi rtx 2070
gigabyte rtx 2070
At 400usd the original 2070 basically kills the 2060 Super and offer a more complete package than the 5700XT (driver stability + features, albeit indistinguishably slower than 5700XT)

 

[Bluescreendeath]

Lol this article assume the RTX 2070 is selling at 500usd which is a huge oversight. In fact the newly revived RTX 2070 is selling at 400usd
gigabyte rtx 2070
msi rtx 2070
gigabyte rtx 2070
At 400usd the original 2070 basically kills the 2060 Super and offer a more complete package than the 5700XT (driver stability + features, albeit indistinguishably slower than 5700XT)

The article is talking about the 2070 Super, not the 2070 regular edition. The 2070 regular is $400, whereas the 2070 Super is indeed around $500.

What they are really out of date on is the RX5700 prices. An RX5700 is not above $400, but hovers around $350 right now - and thus should be in the midrange section and be compared with the 5600XT and 2060.

 

[Ravalo]

In my opinion the Radeon VII is still the best AMD card.

My Radeon VII Furmark scores are always ahead of the 5700xts, 2070 supers, and right behind the 2080s. My latest 1080p run was 11524, just behind a 2080ti at 12836. The 2080tis cost at least $400 more than an RVII.

the reason its behind a 2080ti is because its actually a radeon instinct card but slightly optimized for gaming, its workstation and video editing performance is an amazing value but in gaming its barely any better than the rx 5700 xt
it was a very misunderstood card at its time because of how quickly amd tried to respond to the rtx 2080/2080 ti without taking the time to optimize its gaming performance to its full potential, if they only took a bit more time maybe it would’ve been the best value card of 2019-2020 (RTX titan workstation performance and 2080ti gaming performance for 1/6 and 1/2 the price respectively)

 

[neeyik]

The reason why the Radeon VII is behind the RTX 2080 Ti is that it simply doesn't have the same level of hardware capability, rather than any lack of optimisation. It has fewer FP32 SIMD units, fewer TMUs, fewer ROPs, and fewer triangle setup engines - the VII's monstrous memory bandwidth can't make up for all of that.

It's real disadvantage, though, comes from the fundamental GPU architecture being used. As good as GCN 5.1 is, there are various elements to it that don't help, such as the fact that shader units execute a full wavefront over 4 cycles or that the wavefronts are always 64 work units in size. The former causes problems the minute the work units want to alter instructions on the outcome of the instructions already being processed, I.e. branching sequences; the latter places a heavy load on the finite resources the GPU has to offer. This is why AMD altered this in RDNA - switching to smaller wavefronts by default and altering the hardware design so that they can be execute in one cycle, all of which places less stress on resources, ultimately permitting better shader efficiency.

The Radeon VII is a fantastic compute card, irrespective of what price it was launched at, but it was very much a product stop-gap for AMD.

 

[BadMF]

Cheap - RX 580/590
Middle - 1060/2060 KO /2070 - non TI
High - 2080 / 2080 TI

Middle - 5600xt / 5700xt is what the article says tyvm

 

[pyro226]

I don't understand why certain GPU are colored with different colors (green, orange, or uncolored). I can't tell if this is recommendation level or something else. It's not stated in the artilce, nor is it apparent from reading nor my knowledge of the cards. My only guess is that it recommends recommendation level (green = recommended, orange = previous winnner? heasitant recommendation? avoid? I've yet to figure it out). What do the colors mean?

 

[MaestroIT]

Got my 2070 Super in february last year, and I am glad I did so, enjoying high end gaming during the Covid closure, and escaped the chip shortage...