Best & Worst GPUs of 2023 for Gaming: $100 to $2000 Video Cards

[Music] unlike CPUs the GPU Market has been an absolute mess for a year now but it's at least made for some pretty entertaining commentary like that time Nvidia tried to sell a $400 GPU for 1080p gaming 2016 called and it wants its resolution back which was apparently 1080P or when AMD fumbled the clear Victory AMD at this point needs to be rushed to the hospital to have an emergency extraction of it foot from its mouth the the 480 if you move the entire gauge you you turn it and the needle turns that doesn't mean the needle moved it means that the whole gauge moved so that's where we are Nvidia the good news is that we have a lot of footage of video cards surrounded by prop money so that'll probably be useful today we're revisiting all of the gpus currently relevant ranging from $100 to $2,000 now because if you hadn't noticed the RTX 490 has actually increased in price while everything else has mostly come down there's some good news too though some of the prices are coming down and they're actually looking pretty good the a750 suddenly is pretty compelling down to around 180 bucks or so at the time we're filming this the RX 7900 XT has dropped its price once again it's now down near $740 or wait a minute that sounds familiar again we're highly suspicious of the price climb in such close proximity to Black Friday which I really should have put a bet on that when when we uh called that one a couple weeks ago not that the odds probably would have been too favorable wouldn't have made much but uh we're going to be rounding up all the gpus today and looking at some of your options from again the low end to the high end and the point is to try and help point you in the right direction for builds coming up or upgrades before that this video is brought to you by the Arctic liquid freezer 2 Series Arctic ships its liquid freezer 2 in both AR argb and non-rgb variants and we found their coolers to be among the best performers for our CPU test benches we've bought several now and have them on our GPU and CPU test benches for daily use Arctic also has its P2 Max and p8 Max fans that we've been using in some of our ITX case reviews you can find links to all of these in the description below these videos are really fun we just published our best CPUs Roundup so if you want to check that one out after this it's on the channel this follow has a very similar format to it so like we said in the last one to set some expectations our best of series runs at the end of every year and the goal of it is kind of just a fun way to rapidly recap everything we've looked at and try to get back re familiarize ourselves and the audience with what's out there especially as the pricing changes so it's a fun way to recap some of the high points and the low ones we are going to be going over a bunch of cards though so for these videos we don't make them as chart dense as our reviews it's more of a flyover of what's out there to help situate you so if you want to learn more about any individual ual card that's in this video we'll link the reviews in the description below to help point you towards those for the extra depth along with the links to Newegg or Amazon or wherever you can buy it for pricing it's all over the place right now largely due to sales coming up there's a good amount of categories where it's come down so as mentioned the 7800 XT the a750 the RTX 490 unfortunately has gone up maybe City skylines too it's just that in demand and the audience for it has learned that that they need a 490 well maybe not literally but it definitely helps in that game for this one our pricing tables will have the lowest price that we saw from a first-party seller and for the upper bound when we set one that's kind of the this is where a lot of them can be found it's not the literal maximum price cuz then that number would be very high and very not a good deal so that's the background let's get started with the $100 to $200 price class and we'll work our way up from there this first category is a disaster as compared to previous years the $100 to $200 price class has long been one of the most popular just after the $200 to $300 range actually if you look at our view retention stats for the last year's Roundup you'll see that 200 300 is pretty much the most popular but today this is our list of options before even looking at the prices take a look at the release year column there's a single entry from 2023 a GPU being from this year doesn't make it necessarily good but it does affect pricing and obviously what's available Nvidia and AMD over were bought at the tail end of the pandemic Supply Ray and they got stuck with inventory leading to a delay in more affordable new cards the 2022 Roundup column shows prices for the ones that we wrote down during our best of summary last year the 1630 was about the same price the 1660 super was higher so that's come down and the 6600 is about the same the newest cards on the list would be definitely the Intel Ark a580 which just came out we have a review on the channel and the website and then the arc a750 from last year alongside the rc64 00 the 1630 and the 6500 XT as some of the most recent here but being the most recent doesn't necessarily make them the most relevant for price to Performance this year the Intel Arc a750 might actually be one of the best values right now our recent a580 benchmarks help give this some perspective in balers Gate 3 running at 1080p Ultra the a580 held a 64 FPS average with direct X and the a750 was just ahead of it at 66 not super impressive but Intel had problem with DX in this game and the Vulcan result is much more appropriate for Intel where they ranked at 79 and 75 FPS average the 6600 is the most relevant competition both in price and performance and it ran at 74 FPS average the 1660 super currently around $160 $165 time of writing runs far enough below these two options that we'd skip it in Total War Warhammer 3 at 1080p the a580 ran at 85 FPS average putting it ahead of the RX 6600 by 16% the a750 did even better at 94 FPS average average nearly GTX 1080ti performance levels Tomb Raider had the a750 at 103 FPS average allowing the 6600 a lead of about 22% in Final Fantasy 14 we have the 6600 about tied with the a580 and behind the a750 GPU entry in the same game at 1440p the a750 pulls ahead of the 6600 by upwards of 22% in t Arc a750 might be one of the best values right now at its new and maybe temporary $180 price point we've been seeing the a580 is close enough that generally we think you should make the $10 jump to the a750 that one is worth it the biggest problem with Intel remains its General reliability though Arc has massively improved specifically this year but it can still have problems with new games as it often needs hand tuning from Intel this is particularly problematic for anything that isn't directx12 or Vulcan as such we've been recommending that the primary buyer for an a750 should be enthusiasts who have troubleshooting skills patience and or a backup GPU that you could use if there is a problem or if you're not playing games on day one generally despite its Big Value uplift it's still not guaranteed that you can run a game well at launch Starfield is a great example of that for Arc and that's outside of the games issues Intel has been working on this one but it definitely wasn't a week one title for its gpus so if all that sounds like too much hassle or if you don't want to be in the it role for whomever you're buying or recommending the card for consider the 6600 as one of the best competitors in performance it's similar in price sometimes it's better than the a750 most of the times it's about the same and as for NVIDIA it's basically sitting this price class out right now probably rolling $100 bills into cigars and smoking them while watching The Peasant Le a750 and RX 6600 fight over scraps and pennies the next section is for $2 200 to $300 video cards which have historically been the most popular segment here's the options list the release your column looks at least a little bit healthier here the RTX 3050 is priced at $215 down from 270 to 300 when we did this Roundup last year and this card is irrelevant as compared to options from both AMD and Nvidia so we'll just ignore it the RX 6650 XT and the RX 6600 XT went up against the 3060 in last year's comparison even today the 6650 XT remains relevant and available typically around $220 at time of filment that'll probably drop with sales in a day or too so it might come down the RX 7600 is one of the two most relevant gpus in this price category currently around $240 to $270 it's already dropped and priced twice since launch the RTX 3060 TI is still somehow hanging around at $300 the RTX 4060 is the most modern Nvidia GPU to show up so far at $300 still and finally the 6700 XE remains at $300 after price drops since its launch despite technically being a generation old the 6700 XT is the most powerful by raw spec in this listing with its 6750 XT refresh currently in the next price class up we'll start by focusing on the 67 the 3060 TI and the 460 since they're all about $300 in our 4060 review we had the 360 TI outperforming the 4060 and Final Fantasy 14 at 1080p it's like 6% better the 6700 XT was further ahead still at 1440p the 6700 XT held a 141 FPS average to the 360 TI is 1 35 with the 4060 getting somewhat embarrassed at 119 FPS average but at least it wasn't a 4060 TI that would be really embarrassing if you look at it versus the 3060 TI in a lot of these benchmarks especially at higher resolutions like 4K in cyberpunk at 1080p we saw the 460 run at 86 FPS average behind the 360 TI again which itself roughly tied the 6700 XT F1 2022 at 4K had the 4060 behind the 360 TI again the 360 TI has bandwidth advantages here though and the 6700 XC even led the 4060 TI in this one in our a580 review and using balers Gate 3 at 1440p that chart had the 6700 XT nearly at the CPU limit with the 4060 trailing the 360 TI was technically ahead of the 6700 XT but functionally they were tied here from this set of results the 4060 appears less relevant than it probably should be the 3060 TI and the 6700 XT are better options if the price is identical the 6700 XT in particular is strong looking at Starfield at 1080p high before the recent biggest patch the 6700 XT led the 4060 by 177% or more some games are better than others here at $300 assuming you absolutely cannot spend more we'd go for the 6700 XT the 4060 is one of the best value 40 series cards but it objectively isn't as powerful as these currently equal price options from last gen the lower end of the $200 to $300 range is pretty healthy we'd go for the 6650 XT or the 7600 if you're down below the $300 Mark the 6650 is basically an overclocked 6600 XTS so you can check the 6600 XT in our charts and estimate a couple percentage points higher at $220 that's the best deal in its price class the 7600 fluctuates it trades places with the 6600 XT in gaming regularly sometimes with leads that are noticeable and it's not a bad option at the new $240 price point today now for the $300 to $400 category this one is somewhat empty there's not a lot going on here we get reappearances from the 6700 XD the 360 TI and the 4060 but we didn't include them on this table since they're already available one tier down the 6750 XT pops up around $320 at one of the cheaper prices we saw it at or commonly $330 since that's just a slightly higher end 6700 XT it was a refresh that's not a bad deal the 4060 TI also makes an appearance at $330 to $360 with which is down from its $400 launch price for the 8 GB model it's weird to still see the 3070 around as well but it is it's Hing in there the same goes for the RX 6800 which is a 2020 card our original review of the 4060 TI was pretty straightforward do not buy now some months later and with the price drop from $400 we still think you probably shouldn't buy it the 4060 TI's price didn't fall in a vacuum the competitors like the 6750 XT 6700 they came down all onside it and they're close competitors most of our tests show them head-to-head with the 4060 TI if you're not going to leverage features like nvidia's Ray reconstruction which is really just kind of a feature in cyberpunk right now or nvidia's reflex or its rate tracing feature set the 6700 XT and the 6750 XT make much more sense for rasterization performance at the value since they are typically cheaper as well that's even even truer at high resolutions the 4060 TI struggles there somewhat famously our original 4060 TI review showed several cases where the 3060 TI outmatched it in higher resolution testing this led Nvidia to sort of make a mockery of itself with its own product from a prior generation THX 6800 is maybe worth consideration at the $370 price point back when we originally reviewed the card we found the 6800 XT was commonly 10 to 15% ahead of the 6800 really depending on the game though there were some larger boosts in scenarios like rate tracing pushing up closer to that 18 to 20% range but it was situational NV video will have a compelling card eventually here with the 4060 TI but right now it's not there yet it needs to come down more and it's not high-end enough to survive on the merits of features like dlss and Ray reconstruction alone ultimately at the top of the $200 to $300 range and the bottom of this $300 to $400 range the 6700 XT and its refresh remain relevant picks that's a big roll reversal from when the 67 XT first launched at $480 and as we said in that review it was a time when literally anything would sell the GPU Market was wildly different time to speed this up we're widening the range now and looking at the $400 to $750 price category which makes this a lot more interesting that's because there's the most movement just because there's so many cards here this table gives an idea for common options we saw the 7700 XTS appearing at 4 $130 dropping price already most of them though are still at the MSRP of $450 but you'd be better off buying the 6,800 from the last round of charts or one of the other cards the 460 TI 16 GB also began popping up at around that same $430 price point which is a sharp fall off from the original launch price still not worth buying though the 4060 TI 16 GB is just not fast enough to benefit from the memory capacity increase so you might as well just ignore that it exists the 6800 XT at 4 $470 is compelling especially as it's cheaper than the 7800 XT and it often trades places with it it's especially a way better buy than a $450 7700 XT we saw the 6800 XT outperform the 7800 XT in several tests in our review Thanks to its higher CU count among other changes looking back at the table briefly the 470 runs 515 to $550 which is actually getting to a decent price point for the 470 and the 6950 XT is at 90 now which is a great price for that card if you can find one still in stock the 7900 XT has finally Fallen back down to $740 to $750 let's start with the 7800 XT a few weeks ago we ran a revisit of this GPU using the powercolor hellhound as our test platform we bought the card for $720 or so which was a $180 reduction from the original MSRP we were thrilled about the find and we were excited to share it but within days the price shot back up to $800 when we posted that video we said we'd expect it to come back down again just in time for uh sales for Black Friday and it did its current price of $740 leaves just enough room for a doorbuster sale in one to two days to bring it back down to that $720 price we saw about a month ago we wouldn't be surprised if they did that manipulative retail practices aside and this is shared across all major retailers the card itself is actually a great pickup at 720 to 740 bucks we were lukewarm on it at $800 as it was in direct competition with the 470 TI there but this 720 to 740 range makes it much more interesting the 6950 XT might outshine it though at $590 those are headed into Extinction unfortunately but they're close performers to the 7900 XT we have a few charts from our 7900 XT revisit you can look at to see how close they are sometimes if you want the full details on these cards and how they compare to say a 4070 TI you can check out the revisit as well these are strong performers in rasterization especially at higher resolutions and they compete closely enough in rate tracing to be worth considering at this price class coming down in price the RTX 470 enters the fold in competition with the 7800 XT and 7700 XT the easiest way to look at the 470 versus the 7800 XT would be in our two charts from the review conclusion the 7800 XT had advantages anywhere from a couple percentage points to 23% over the 470 in nonr traced workloads with a few losses here in rate tracing the 470 was ahead from 5% to 15% if you really care about Ray tracing performance and especially if you might like features like Ray reconstruction and we have a whole separate piece on that if you want to see how it looks there's pros and cons but in these situations the 470 becomes much more relevant than in pure rasterization we would choose the 4070 at this price class for anyone eyeing games that are RT heavy and if you intend to actually play with rt on the $750 and up class is wild and shows you where Nidia is focusing its new generation options are slim the 4070 TI somewhat appears one step down but has a lot of options in the $750 to $850 range that however manages to look cheap compared to the 490s new price we'll come back to that amd's RX 7900 XTX also remains in this upper pricing although reduced from a $22,000 launch price it's around $920 to $950 commonly the 480 is around $1,115 at the cheapest right now from what we saw to $1,200 on average and then the RTX 490 has again gone up in price and it's the only one in this entire list of gpus that has gone in the wrong direction maybe that's because of sanctions or something or maybe they just have the market cornered but the cards are rarely in stock right now now and they also have somehow appreciated in value these used to be around $1,600 at the quote unquote low end of the 490 stack in terms of performance the 490 definitely distances itself from the rest of the pack this time in ways that were previously unheard of for NVIDIA product lineup we talked about this when we reviewed the 490 traditionally the best card to the second best card were much closer together there were times when we saw Titans that were like 4% better than the next best card down while being $400 more money but those times appear to be gone because with the 40 series that Gap is wide enough between the 480 and the 490 to fit a mid-range GPU in this is also true in the way of rate tracing performance where the 490 is commonly 50% ahead of the 480 so the 490 does its best to establish value by providing actual scaling over the 4080 but we can live without higher frame rate to save a lot of money the larger place that this provides value is the memory for our workloads internally when rendering videos in Premiere using Cuda we've actually found that our renders complete slower on an RTX 480 than they did on an RTX 3090 that's because the 3090 is 24 gbes of memory gets fully leveraged in our rendering workloads whereas the 480 16 GB limits us severely and can slow render times down upwards of 50% the 490 Works around this with 24 GB of memory capacity and for people who might do some gaming but also use their machine for work in a way that can leverage the memory like for us it's kind of hard to find an alternative these days one of our render machines uses a 4090 for this reason and we'd bet a lot of professional users even though they would win at the prize would be sort of willing to pay the price to increase the speed of work for other machines we kept 3090 is because we need that memory in them as for the cards below this the 7900 XTX is difficult to justify against the 7900x xt's new and low price generally speaking if you are more value oriented we would suggest the 7800 XT over the XTX given how large the price Gap is now the 4070 TI remains worthy of consideration for heavy RT users especially and the 4080 we're still not big fans of the pricing is just too far out of bounds yet it lacks the professional advantages offered by the 490 where again people with a use case like ours or anything else that might need the memory but doesn't need Quadro type stuff you're basically just forced into buying it and there's not a lot you can do unless you are okay with just running your stuff slower so of this list then the biggest thing to remember is that Nvidia will soon be refreshing it's at least 4080 and 4070 TI cards maybe among others so these categories will soon change you'll want to keep that in mind because it's probably not too far away from today when those start dropping and finally the biggest disappointment category this one's pretty hard they're a lot of options out there it's just there's so many to choose from we decided to go with a trend we've done this a couple times over the year actually probably most the time for this category we've done this but we went with the trend because it's not just AMD or Nvidia that launched one particularly disappointing product over the past year it's both of them doing a cost-saving measure where AMD and Nvidia have both made cuts to Hardware while retaining Olden naming schema despite a name being semi arbitrary it still sets a customer expectation we've been the most disappointed in last generation Parts beating or equaling parts of a new generation with the same naming just incremented in the first digit the RX 7800 XT is a great example of this from AMD where the reduced CU count and other changes often allow the 6800 XT to best it in many scenarios this is despite the price drop because it's just confusing for the average consumer especially one who kind of checks out of the industry for a couple years and comes back to this the same is true for NVIDIA the RTX 4060 TI was embarrassingly beaten by its own 3060 TI at higher resolutions and that's largely due to the memory choices and the bus choices that Nvidia made we'd like to see the manufacturers keep the naming more in line with what consumers already understand or keep the hardware more in line with it so that's it for the gpus Roundup this one gpus are always a little more difficult than CPUs to round up at the end of the year because there's so damn many SKS and it's not like CPUs normally there's a clear iation of okay this is a sort of Eco part that's lower power this is an OC part this is HDT part you have a little bit of that with the gpus but uh because there are multiple Generations being sold from now three vendors it gets a lot muddier to sort through so uh for this hopefully that helps just narrow down the options in each price range so then you can look into the individual reviews for those and generally speaking the things to keep in mind are that Intel has gotten a lot more relevant this year versus when we did this type of content last year the biggest downside is still just that we don't feel comfortable recommending it for uh if you're helping someone build a computer and they have really no technical ability to troubleshoot and it's going to be your job to take care of it if there's a problem we wouldn't recommend it in that situation for example but it's definitely way better the performance is up a lot still has trouble with Day One games for depends on the API in most cases but still some trouble there uh they have been smoothing things out a lot drivers are completely overhauled we'll talk about that in a video coming up very soon but then on the AMD and Nvidia side Nvidia seems mostly focused at sort of that high end right now and the 4090 it's just it's it's sad to see because everything else has come down a little bit or at least if it's a relatively new card it stayed about the same where it was the 490 must just be in so much demand or something especially with the sanctions that have been in the news for a couple months now that the prices have unfortunately gone up either way that'll get you up to speed check out the best CPUs round up after this the CPU prices are a lot more exciting in terms of good deals and values right now so if you want something as a to lift up your spirits about PC Hardware pricing check that out and the 7900x TV visit is worth watching as well because we talk about some of the value perspective there and that's relevant right now with the sales going on thanks for watching subscribe for more go to store. gam access.net to help us out directly and actually we just published that CP Roundup as an crical too on Gamers nexus.net if you'd like to read it and we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 680,547

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, best gpus, best graphics cards, best graphics cards 2023, best gpus for gaming 2023, best gaming gpus 2023, best video cards, rx 6750 xt vs 6700 xt, rtx 4070 vs rx 6700 xt, rtx 4070 ti vs rx 7900 xt, intel a750 vs rx 6600

Id: EJGfQ5AgB3g

Length: 25min 33sec (1533 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 23 2023