#ThrowbackThursday With the venerable GeForce GTX 980 having celebrated its third birthday, in the world of GPUs that puts it squarely over the hill. Even the GTX 1080 is over a year old already, however the performance bump in this last generation was very significant. From the GTX 480 to the GTX 1080, how much faster are today's GPUs?
How bad is bottlenecking these days? Well, that all depends on how bad you are at pairing hardware. Any experienced system builder will tell you it's important to build a balanced system, especially if you want the best bang for your buck.
Recently we put together a "Top 5 Worst CPUs" feature as a fun side article and readers loved it. The requests came in for a similar article looking at graphics chips and so we're going to have a go at that today.
By using the Core i7-7700K and Ryzen 5 1600, each with the Vega 64 and GTX 1080 at 1080p and 1440p we have some very interesting results to go over. Further, we suspect these are typical hardware combinations many are considering for building a new high-end rig when gaming is a big factor.
It's time for another GPU battle, though this one is a bit different with GPUs under $100: from AMD we have the Radeon RX 550 and on Nvidia's side is the GeForce GT 1030. Our focus will be primarily on eSports titles including CS:GO, Overwatch and Dota 2 running on a Ryzen 3 test bench.
This might be the biggest GPU benchmarking session in TechSpot's history, it's so large that we almost gave up after accepting the challenge. After about a week's worth of testing, we have an incredible amount of data to pour over for a total of 32 titles benchmarked in this article.
The Radeon RX Vega 56 will come in at $400, priced to match the value monster that's been the GTX 1070. For that same reason, Vega 56 looks to be the best value proposition of AMD's new offerings. Let's see what's on offer.
The Aorus GTX 1070 Gaming Box is an external graphics box that won't break the bank, offering compatible graphics acceleration for Thunderbolt 3 laptops, so you can keep using your favorite ultraportable and game at will, using this most practical solution.
Enter the Radeon RX 560, AMD's last ditch effort to reclaim the entry-level market segment for this generation. Compared to its predecessor, the RX 560 packs 14% more cores that are slightly faster clocked for good measure. But the GTX 1050 enjoyed of a comfortable 18% lead against AMD's last-gen GPU, so it'll be interesting to see what this means for the RX 560.
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds pre-release build has been available since March, and by the first month it had sold well over a million copies. So the game is popular, but it's also known for not being greatly optimized. I've been messing around with a few CPU and GPU combinations over the past week, seeing which hardware deliver the most value.
Breaking from our usual benchmarking of new graphics cards, today we're revisiting one of the most powerful GPUs you could've purchased four years ago. The GeForce GTX 780 launched in May 2013 with a mighty impressive showing. At launch, the GTX 780 was ~24% faster than the GTX 680 and 16% faster than the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition.
Codemasters' long-running rally game has returned for its twelfth lap, launching to largely positive reviews last Tuesday on PC, Xbox and PS4. With updated drivers from AMD and Nvidia arriving just a few days later, it seemed like an ideal time to see how the title runs on current and previous-generation GPUs.
Galax's GTX 1070 Katana caught our attention for counting itself among the few single-slot gaming graphics cards available today. In fact, to the best of our knowledge, this is the only single-slot, air-cooled GTX 1070 in the world, as anything with a thermal design power of 75 watts or higher is typically paired with a dual-slot cooler for the added heat dissipation.
In an effort to continue stirring the hornet's nest, we're back with even more benchmarks (29 games total), this time pitting the Radeon RX 570 against the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB. All things considered, which of these mid-range GPUs makes the most sense to purchase?
Earlier this year we decided to dust off the venerable GTX 980 Ti along with the Radeon R9 Fury X to see how they were getting on it modern titles and what, if anything, had changed. Since then we've had loads of requests to create a similar article comparing the Radeon R9 390 and GeForce GTX 970. So that's exactly what we're doing.
