The Best Graphics Cards: What's the Best GPU for Your Budget?

[fadingfool]

RX560 - increased price for old tech?!? Is this the 'trade war' or what? Why would I buy the 560 when the 570 is just a lousy ten spot more?

The only reason is if your PSU doesn't have a six pin or any spare power (that you can use an adapter with) that you need for the 570. To anyone gaming at 1080p or less I would recommend the 570 - it can pretty much play anything at high settings at 1080p. I was very impressed with how good it was for the price and I am saying this with a 1080Ti in my main rig.

 

[Markoni35]

The Radeon VII makes far more sense for what it really is: a rebadged Radeon Instinct M150. $700 for a highly capable OpenCL compute accelerator is an absolute steal.

Exactly so. If you have a software that knows how to use that hardware, it's a beast. No other card on the market has 1000 GB/s data transfer rate. The best and most expensive Nvidia Titan has around 600 GB/s. If you have an app (e.g. physics simulation, or maybe crypto-cracking) that can properly feed those hungry cores, it's a beast.

Unfortunately, nowadays games don't know how to properly use available hardware, so large portions of GPUs are unused, large portions of CPUs are unused. It's mostly lazy programming, by lazy programmers, and crappy programming languages that evolve too slowly.

 

[m3tavision]

AMD's rDNA is better at games than Nvidia's Turing.

rDNA is half it's size and when bigger-rDNA hits, there is very little Nvidia is going to be able to do, with Ampere. Nvidia is going to have to come out with a different architecture than Turing, to beat RDNA.

 

[Cycloid Torus]

I'm going to wait on news about the RX 5500 and comparisons with the GTX 1650 Super. Clustering around $150, I'm wondering if they might 'get competitive' in price. Since I'm not an edgy gamer, 1080p at medium is good for me.

 

[treetops]

You can get the 5700 at $300 pretty regular now, sometimes even lower. And the 5700 xt also seems to spike down to as of late. $340 for a xt at microcenter ^^. Almost justifies the cost of slapping a 240 mm aio on the xt to mpt oc it ^^

240 mm aio 65$
https://www.amazon.com/Cooler-Maste...words=all+in+one+cooler&qid=1576651135&sr=8-4
5700 xt $340
https://slickdeals.net/deals/video-card/

 

[krizby]

This clip show why save 30 bucks and buy the RX 580 is not a wise investment lol. After 2 years at only 4hours of gaming a day (rookie number), the RX 580 would have cost you 33usd/64eur more in electricity bill, not to mention the the cost of running AC in the summer (I have AC on 24/7 throughout the year :/). Conclusion: be a man and fork up some cash for more efficient hardware, even if the performance is the same.

 

[Nobina]

This clip show why save 30 bucks and buy the RX 580 is not a wise investment lol. After 2 years at only 4hours of gaming a day (rookie number), the RX 580 would have cost you 33usd/64eur more in electricity bill, not to mention the the cost of running AC in the summer (I have AC on 24/7 throughout the year :/). Conclusion: be a man and fork up some cash for more efficient hardware, even if the performance is the same.

$33 over two years is somehow a lot? What the **** are you talking about?

 

[krizby]

$33 over two years is somehow a lot? What the **** are you talking about?

The difference between 5500XT 8GB and RX580 is 30usd ?

 

[brucek]

Didn't the 1060 come out almost a year earlier than the rx580? That's a lot of time to build up a lead, and a lot of people to put in the "I'm good until 1-3 generations from now so not shopping again for a while" bucket.

Even so I think we may also fall into the enthusiast analysis trap where we judge based both on a lot of information and willingness to customize, while the mass market may have neither. For example, I don't know if you were bundling together laptop chips with desktop chips, but on the laptop side for sure a lot of volume decisions are made by the laptop manufacturer before the end customer gets a chance. Same on the desktop side to the extent people are buying pre-builts vs. rolling their own.

 

[loki1944]

The steam survey isn't an accurate representation of the GPU market. They don't provide their testing methodology and it has known bugs / exploits.

For example, Internet Cafes have the same machine registered in the survey on a per user basis, so in effect the same machine can be counted hundreds of times. Steam sees these people logged into steam on a new machine and thinks they changed their hardware. In addition to that, you can invoke the steam survey via command line. This means it's possible for anyone to change their specs either via software (virtual machine or otherwise) or by simply swapping a single piece of hardware and then call the survey again.

In addition, it's worth nothing that the steam survey still has almost a quarter of users on dual cores and a third with a monitor resolution below 1080p. These may be PCs from less wealthy countries but either way, they certainly do not represent what I'd consider an average gaming PC today or even budget.

You're making the assumption that the average pc gamer needs hardware to play the latest demanding games, but you don't need much to play LoL, HotS, CSGO, Hearthstone, Minecraft; even Apex Legends will run on a Q2Q. The average gamer cares more about good enough for the most played games.

 

[Gahl1k]

$33 over two years is somehow a lot? What the **** are you talking about?

It actually matters because we are talking about budget gamers here and high electricity costs hurt (especially in poor countries where this card is largely sold).

There's another reason why buying the RX 580 is a bad idea. Most people who buy that card are on budget, and during their PC building process, they usually skimp on the PSU to spend that extra money on "performance parts," then you get tons of posts on hardware forums complaining about BSoD/No Signal/No BOOT/No POST or 1-star reviews of dead/fried RX 580s.

 

[Gahl1k]

Recommending the RX 5700/XT without mentioning the drivers status is a bad advice.

Buying an RX 5700 was the second worst decision in my entire life.

 

[amghwk]

Not sure what is the problem with the so-called "AMD driver issues/status/problems", (especially those who have so called problems never mention what problems they face, but only repeating the decades-old meme), but purchasing the Sapphire Pulse 5700XT has been the best purchase these past few years. And I came from Nvidia.

 

[Azshadi]

Not sure what is the problem with the so-called "AMD driver issues/status/problems", (especially those who have so called problems never mention what problems they face, but only repeating the decades-old meme), but purchasing the Sapphire Pulse 5700XT has been the best purchase these past few years. And I came from Nvidia.

Ahem :

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/e5nolw

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Exper...er-Here-s-a-possible-workaround.447101.0.html
https://community.amd.com/thread/246027

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/du4m2f

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/dhom80

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/d1wr93

While the above mentioned GPU isn't a bad one by any means the out-of-the-box experience is by far the worst thing about it. Unless you're willing to invest time in undervolting, workarounds, etc. this is clearly not the card for average gamer, but if it is it's quite impressive for the price-tag. Having experienced both camps for this bracket all I can say is nVidia offers a better out-of-the-box experience by a hefty margin. In this bracket both camps got interesting offerings though, you can't go wrong with either one but down the line one will require more investment in tweaking than the other. Just my 2 cents.

 

[Shadowboxer]

I think there is more to a comparison than just average frame rate numbers. The performance is being compared but the quality isn’t. And from 20+ years of building I can emphatically state that Nvidia cards are far better quality than Radeon cards in general, they have better temps, better driver support, they tend to be quieter, they have more features and are supported for longer on average. This needs to be factored in, it’s the reason why most people are happy to pay more for Nvidia equivalent performance.

I know some on here won’t be happy with my comment but if you want to avoid annoyances like having to reinstall Windows because your latest AMD driver install wrecked your current install then you need to do your research.

 

[Ravalo]

I think there is more to a comparison than just average frame rate numbers. The performance is being compared but the quality isn’t. And from 20+ years of building I can emphatically state that Nvidia cards are far better quality than Radeon cards in general, they have better temps, better driver support, they tend to be quieter, they have more features and are supported for longer on average. This needs to be factored in, it’s the reason why most people are happy to pay more for Nvidia equivalent performance.

I know some on here won’t be happy with my comment but if you want to avoid annoyances like having to reinstall Windows because your latest AMD driver install wrecked your current install then you need to do your research.

You know, its a bit weird because I only had to reinstall windows once because win7 wasn’t detecting my new SSD

Other times I just had to reboot, reinstall the driver and that was it (I still have a mini itx rx 560)
The only real issue I’ve had is that the computer would crash when playing a game after overclocking it past 1300 mhz (it wouldn’t even show artifacting)

 

[Evernessince]

Ahem :

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/e5nolw

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Exper...er-Here-s-a-possible-workaround.447101.0.html
https://community.amd.com/thread/246027

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/du4m2f

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/dhom80

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/d1wr93

While the above mentioned GPU isn't a bad one by any means the out-of-the-box experience is by far the worst thing about it. Unless you're willing to invest time in undervolting, workarounds, etc. this is clearly not the card for average gamer, but if it is it's quite impressive for the price-tag. Having experienced both camps for this bracket all I can say is nVidia offers a better out-of-the-box experience by a hefty margin. In this bracket both camps got interesting offerings though, you can't go wrong with either one but down the line one will require more investment in tweaking than the other. Just my 2 cents.

You do know you can find of boatload of threads on the Nvidia forum (or any forum) with users experiencing issues as well. Anecdotal accounts of non-qualified professionals with little statistical significance mean nearly nothing. First you'd need to verify that the problem is actually with the product in question. Can't tell you how many times I've helped people on forums who "thought" it was one thing and it turned out to be another. Of course that's why they are asking for help in the first place, they aren't sure. Second, you need some level of statistical significance. In other words, you need more then a handful of verified accounts of the issue. The more then better. Typically the more widely available a product, the more accounts you need. Just through the laws of probability, the more of a product that exists, the more there will be accounts of issues. That's why you need to consider the total amount of products in the wild.

 

[grumblguts]

No brainier.
hands down the best price performance.

https://imgur.com/b9XwPA3

 

[pcnthuziast]

If next gen consoles will have 16gb of gfx memory, when will pc? I realize workstation cards can have over that amount already, but nvidia's top gaming card has 11 and amd doesn't have the gpu horsepower to fully utilize the volume of memory they put on a lot of their cards.

 

[Nobina]

It actually matters because we are talking about budget gamers here and high electricity costs hurt (especially in poor countries where this card is largely sold).

There's another reason why buying the RX 580 is a bad idea. Most people who buy that card are on budget, and during their PC building process, they usually skimp on the PSU to spend that extra money on "performance parts," then you get tons of posts on hardware forums complaining about BSoD/No Signal/No BOOT/No POST or 1-star reviews of dead/fried RX 580s.

No. 30 bucks does not matter over 2 years. Stop saying dumb ****, please. I live in a "poor" country.

 

[newstark2042]

A year later ,I still smile at my Gigabyte gaming oc 1080 Ti in my rig.

not much when running RDR2

 

[newstark2042]

Recommending the RX 5700/XT without mentioning the drivers status is a bad advice.

Buying an RX 5700 was the second worst decision in my entire life.

can I have your 5700? I give you a 1070ti lol

 

[Azshadi]

You do know you can find of boatload of threads on the Nvidia forum (or any forum) with users experiencing issues as well. Anecdotal accounts of non-qualified professionals with little statistical significance mean nearly nothing. First you'd need to verify that the problem is actually with the product in question. Can't tell you how many times I've helped people on forums who "thought" it was one thing and it turned out to be another. Of course that's why they are asking for help in the first place, they aren't sure. Second, you need some level of statistical significance. In other words, you need more then a handful of verified accounts of the issue. The more then better. Typically the more widely available a product, the more accounts you need. Just through the laws of probability, the more of a product that exists, the more there will be accounts of issues. That's why you need to consider the total amount of products in the wild.

Yeah I know it takes more than a couple of reddit posts to paint the big picture. But from my own experience my point stands. It's perfectly fine if people disagree with it, I just threw in my 2 cents on the matter. Probs I should've edited the post to include "my personal view on the matter" . All and all I'm trying to be as unbiased as I can be. At the end of the day neither Nvidia or AMD or whatever have any sway over my decision, it all comes down to the user's experience with the product, for example if a Nvidia product let me down in the past, I'd think twice about buying into that product stack. My goal isn't to make a company rich nor supporting the underdog because they're all chasing the same goal: profit.

 

[NightAntilli]

Yeah I know it takes more than a couple of reddit posts to paint the big picture. But from my own experience my point stands. It's perfectly fine if people disagree with it, I just threw in my 2 cents on the matter. Probs I should've edited the post to include "my personal view on the matter" . All and all I'm trying to be as unbiased as I can be. At the end of the day neither Nvidia or AMD or whatever have any sway over my decision, it all comes down to the user's experience with the product, for example if a Nvidia product let me down in the past, I'd think twice about buying into that product stack. My goal isn't to make a company rich nor supporting the underdog because they're all chasing the same goal: profit.

Want to be as unbiased as you can be? I have three things for you... Just to show the other side compared to the popular belief that AMD drivers suck and nVidia drivers are great.

1) This article;
https://www.techradar.com/news/amd-beats-nvidia-in-the-battle-for-the-most-stable-drivers

2) This video;

3)
This post of mine;
https://www.techspot.com/community/...ory-bandwidth-jump.257900/page-2#post-1779816

 

[QuantumPhysics]

The EVGA 2080Ti Black was the best for my budget.

I wanted a card that was future proof for at least 3 years and could run anything the market could throw at it.

When I upgrade my computer, DDR5 memory and a 4080Ti will probably be available.