News Graphics Cards Ranked by Value, January 2023

[Admin]

We look at the performance per dollar of the current and previous generation graphics cards and rank them by value.

Graphics Cards Ranked by Value, January 2023 : Read more

 

[PlaneInTheSky]

AMD has better FPS/$, yet Steam charts show Nvidia dominates the consumer GPU market.

If anything this shows that there are other factors at play. Nvidia has far more stable drivers and AMD has no real equivalent to NVENC, both these factors made me buy an Nvidia GPU.

 

[d33dave]

AMD has better FPS/$, yet Steam charts show Nvidia dominates the consumer GPU market.

If anything this shows that there are other factors at play. Nvidia has far more stable drivers and AMD has no real equivalent to NVENC, both these factors made me buy an Nvidia GPU.

Funny I have systems with both and find AMD drivers and software far better than Nvidia.

 

[LolaGT]

Three or four years ago.
Unless you've been under a rock (or a team green shill), you'd know that AMD drivers have been pretty decent and stable before the 6xxx was released.
They had to get it right, if not they probably would not even be in the race now.

Nvidia has far more stable drivers

 

[Neilbob]

AMD drivers [insert issue from 10 to 15 years ago here]

The drivers are perfectly fine and I'd bet an enormous number of people have no use whatsoever for NVENC, or indeed even know what it is. This is entirely a mindshare thing, even if it's clearly unwarranted much of the time.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

AMD has better FPS/$, yet Steam charts show Nvidia dominates the consumer GPU market.

If anything this shows that there are other factors at play. Nvidia has far more stable drivers and AMD has no real equivalent to NVENC, both these factors made me buy an Nvidia GPU.

Recent drivers from both companies have been fine in my experience. Maybe the occasional hiccup occurs, but that happens on both sides — and can usually be attributed to my frequent swapping of GPUs. As to "other factors," that's definitely true, but those factors mostly boil down to: "Nvidia has better mindshare among gamers, mostly due to legacy reputation and brand recognition." But there are things like DLSS and DXR (and the marketing for both) that help influence this.

AMD has had encoding support for ages, and while quality (in H.264) isn't as good as Nvidia or Intel, it's generally fine (and HEVC encoding is basically a tie). RDNA3 just revamped the encoders to improve quality, which may close the gap, but obviously that only applies to RDNA3 GPUs. The only real exception are the Navi 24 GPUs (RX 6500 XT and RX 6400) that lack the encoder, because they were originally intended to be paired with mobile chips that would have integrated graphics with an encoder.

 

[DiegoSynth]

AMD has better FPS/$, yet Steam charts show Nvidia dominates the consumer GPU market.

If anything this shows that there are other factors at play. Nvidia has far more stable drivers and AMD has no real equivalent to NVENC, both these factors made me buy an Nvidia GPU.

Cuda is also a key factor in many cases. There are programs that only work with Nvidia because of this.

By the way, I'm not sure what's up with all the writters / YouTubers considering RTX 2000 series pieces of museum: I don't know who you are trying to represent but it's just retarded to pretend they don't exist anymore and everyone is having an RTX 3000 minimum.

 

[SunMaster]

It is pretty weird to have a seperate «raytrace ranking». It’s like when Gibson took the wood species «african limba», renamed it Korina and touted special imaginary abilities. It’s quite far between raytrace addicts

 

[DavidLejdar]

CUDA cores are nice in concept, but barely any game makes use of them. A few more games support DLSS 3.0, but not that many (so far). And the list of games supporting DLSS in general is a bit longer. But the use thereof seems to be then mostly in combo with ray tracing (as it otherwise with the newer GPUs pushes the FPS beyond what many a gamer has a screen for, especially at below 4K) - and that's then talking about GPU with 400+W when going for 4K.

For me that's a lot of stuff I would pay for, while not necessarily using it, depending on the game and also when below 4K. That's why I went for a RX 6700 XT OC, where I apparently also paid extra for the RX I used only in one game so far, but a lot cheaper than to pay $1,000 more for all the "great stuff", which then doesn't mean that it is 3x graphically better even in the games which support it - in particular as games do usually get developed to run on consoles, where e.g. the PS5 has some 10.3 TFlops performance.

 

[BX4096]

Nice effort, but kind of meaningless considering its disconnect with real-world pricing. I tried checking prices of some of the cards against retail and not one of them matched in pricing even closely.

In my opinion, rankings like that need find a way to be dynamic and updated hourly to reflect current pricing from major retailers like Amazon or Newegg. Now that would really be useful.

 

[osiris11235]

It'd be great if you could enable tables that let you sort by specific columns. For me, the 1080p performance is irrelevant (but it's the default sort).

 

[JTWrenn]

I still find AMD software to be lacking in a lot of ways especially stability, but the truth is...this market has gone completely off the rails. Not totally sure why after the crypto crash and the giant move away from GPU crypto mining but unless they start to course correct soon I just don't see how this continues. Then you have games with ridiculous high specs coming out along side it and I just find the whole industry to have totally lost it's mind. Think I am gonna be rocking a 3080 for the rest of my life at this point.

 

[RichardtST]

After poking around on youtube a while, it appears that AMD still does not work out of the box for Minecraft. Remember that 95% of the customer base is computer illiterate. If it doesn't work out of the box, then it doesn't work. Gamers start young. Gamers start with Minecraft. They grow up learning that Radeon doesn't work. Fix it so it works right out of the box. Match the NVidia FPS numbers with absolutely zero hocus pocus, and then make a few youtube videos about it. I still refuse to buy one because no one has proven that it works. So forget all this "AMD drivers are fine" garbage. They are not. If they don't work with MC, one of the simplest games on the planet, then they simply DO NOT WORK.

 

[King_V]

Sure seem to be a lot of people in this thread really enthused about baseless AMD driver-bashing...

 

[Sleepy_Hollowed]

This is a great analysis and a damning one as well for nVidia.

Unless you need physx for old games, ray tracing or CUDA, there's really not a lot of reason for buying anything other than AMD or 2 generations behind nVidia mid range cards.

If this generation stagnates (one can only hope) and middleware for games and developers focus on optimization, there's even less of a point to upgrade outside of dying cards.

Unless next generation has some sort of massive improvement, this will stay true, as there's just really so much you can do with machine learning upscaling, and the frame skipping is just so terrible in my opinion for anything but one player games that aren't too fast paced.

On the driver front, AMD drivers are SO SO stable nowadays, that they don't need to be updated for most new games, as they don't have as many hacks as nVidia, while on the other hand the nVidia ones are such a pain to constantly update, and they can have huge regressions on new games, but that's my two cents having both and testing them on a regular.

 

[pixelpusher220]

It'd be great if you could enable tables that let you sort by specific columns. For me, the 1080p performance is irrelevant (but it's the default sort).

or realize ppl use widescreens and can handle a FIVE COLUMN TABLE without a side scroll.

 

[SunMaster]

Cuda is also a key factor in many cases.

One, two, many?

 

[PlaneInTheSky]

AMD has had encoding support for ages, and while quality (in H.264) isn't as good as Nvidia or Intel, it's generally fine (and HEVC encoding is basically a tie).

I looked up to verify your statement. Because I remember AMD encoding to be horrible. This makes me highly sceptical of any statements to the contrary. There are lots of vocal AMD fans, which again, makes me very sceptical of any statements.

But your assessment that the AMD encoder is "generally fine" nowadays is not at all what I found.

The most recent OBS comparison from a major Youtuber is a comparison between an AMD 6900XT against and Nvidia RTX 2080. (mind you, the Nvidia 30 series has an ever better encoder, so he gave AMD a leg up here which he points out in the video)

These were his findings:

The Nvidia encoder does a much better job.

The AMD encoder has display artifacting, blockiness. Look at the wood grain on the Nvidia 2080, on the AMD one it's just mush.

The Nvidia encode is much clearer, crisper and sharper than it is on AMD.

At 6Mbit/s, the Nvidia encoder smashed it by comparison. The clips we are getting from the 6900XT were not horrific, but damn well close, there was half a person missing because of how blocky the AMD footage was. It wasn't unwatchable, but very unpleasant.

The Nvidia NVENC encoder is a better choice

AMD also seems to not care at all about implementing their encoders anywhere.

Clearly it is not a big push for them (AMD). They have nothing an end user can use that has implemented updates. OBS doesn't have it, FFMPEG doesn't have it. Handbrake doesn't have it.

I had to use an obscure Japanese Github build designed to be a plug-in for some Japanese program I have never heard of.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0pCpNT4b-Q

Final thoughts:

I have nothing against AMD, I still have several AMD Athlon 64 systems, X4 systems, etc. But as far as GPU go, I have become extremely sceptical, especially about the encoding of AMD GPU and AMD drivers. I have burnt my fingers several times trying to encode on AMD. If I ever buy an AMD GPU again, its encoder needs to be perfect and actually properly implemented. From all the independent data I found, AMD has anything but properly working video encoders. Nor does AMD seem to have any intention to have a properly working encoder any time soon.

The more statements I read about AMD encoders working fine, only to find out by researching myself that these statements are untrue, the more sceptical I become of any statements regarding AMD encoders and the more sceptical I become of AMD GPU.

It would serve AMD and tech sites if they admitted AMD GPU have major encoding problems instead of users burning their fingers, and deciding to never buy an AMD again. And if you look at the GPU Steam hardware survey where the top 10 GPU are all Nvidia, avoiding AMD GPU because of bad experiences with drivers and encoders, is exactly what most users have decided to do.

 

[Tac 25]

If anything this shows that there are other factors at play. Nvidia has far more stable drivers and AMD has no real equivalent to NVENC, both these factors made me buy an Nvidia GPU.

I often use NVENC with Handbrake. Using it to convert large mp4 files, so they would be easier to upload to youtube. Also using it to make video files smaller for saving to usb flash drives. Really useful tool, espescially on my older pc's where the cpu is weak, I let the gpu handle the encoding.

 

[PlaneInTheSky]

I often use NVENC with Handbrake. Using it to convert large mp4 files, so they would be easier to upload to youtube. Also using it to make video files smaller for saving to usb flash drives. Really useful tool, espescially on my older pc's where the cpu is weak, I let the gpu handle the encoding.

Same. For fast encodes I enable NVENC in handbrake, it's about 3 times faster than using CPU x264 encoding. CUDA is used when I use DaVinci. And for OBS NVENC is always turned on.

That's 3 mainstream video programs that use Nvidia's encoding features. I have tried the AMD AMF encoder for OBS in the past, it was a disaster. AMD has no CUDA equivalent for DaVinci and using DaVinci without CUDA is way too slow.

 

[SunMaster]

And if you look at the GPU Steam hardware survey where the top 10 GPU are all Nvidia, avoiding AMD GPU because of bad experiences with drivers and encoders, is exactly what most users have decided to do.

You are seing ghosts in broad daylight. Most users will never ever use any kind of encoding, let alone base their purchase on it. There's a saying that noone ever get got fired for buying Intel. Or was it Microsoft. Or Oracle. You can replace Intel with any market leader. Most people aren't browsing the forums, or places like this one. Most people make a purchase based on brand perception of superior performance.

 

[Elusive Ruse]

Recent drivers from both companies have been fine in my experience. Maybe the occasional hiccup occurs, but that happens on both sides — and can usually be attributed to my frequent swapping of GPUs. As to "other factors," that's definitely true, but those factors mostly boil down to: "Nvidia has better mindshare among gamers, mostly due to legacy reputation and brand recognition." But there are things like DLSS and DXR (and the marketing for both) that help influence this.

AMD has had encoding support for ages, and while quality (in H.264) isn't as good as Nvidia or Intel, it's generally fine (and HEVC encoding is basically a tie). RDNA3 just revamped the encoders to improve quality, which may close the gap, but obviously that only applies to RDNA3 GPUs. The only real exception are the Navi 24 GPUs (RX 6500 XT and RX 6400) that lack the encoder, because they were originally intended to be paired with mobile chips that would have integrated graphics with an encoder.

You are right about RNDA3 making a meaningful leap, RNDA2 was mostly a great performer for games only purposes. It's regrettable it also coincided with prices getting out of hand yet again.

 

[Tac 25]

Same. For fast encodes I enable NVENC in handbrake, it's about 3 times faster than using CPU x264 encoding. CUDA is used when I use DaVinci. And for OBS NVENC is always turned on.

That's 3 mainstream video programs that use Nvidia's encoding features. I have tried the AMD AMF encoder for OBS in the past, it was a disaster. AMD has no CUDA equivalent for DaVinci and using DaVinci without CUDA is way too slow.

oh, forgot to say. I'm glad NVENC is also enabled even in Nvidia's older card like a 1050ti. Because encoding recorded game videos with a 2600K cpu would take forever (lol), with a 1050ti it's so much faster. OBS was recommended to me by friends in a discord gaming community.. but I never really got to try the program, because Geforce Experience is enough as a recording tool. Basically, I play a game.. Geforce Experience records it in HD quality, the output file size would be around 3GB to 7GB for a 10-20 min video, since I always use highest settings for good quality. Then Handbrake would reduce the file size in just a few minutes using Nvenc H264.

and lastly, just one tip. I suggest using the "Constant Framerate" option if you're going to encode very large files with Handbrake Nvenc. The file comes out better that way.

 

[PlaneInTheSky]

Most users will never ever use any kind of encoding, let alone base their purchase on it.

Simply not true.

There are millions of people editing video to upload to Youtube, TikTok. A platform like Twitch has 30 million daily visitors watching content encoded with OBS and NVENC.

People using DaVinci, Premiere, etc. People using Plex, ripping optical media. Or just people uploading a video from their smartphone and editing it.

The use of video is widespread, so is the use of NVENC and CUDA.

I believe AMD's lack of interest in supporting GPU accelerated encoding, has to do with the fact GPU encoders undermine CPU sales.

Instead of having to spend thousands of $ on an expensive multicore threadripper or Xeon workstation PC...You can throw a $200 GPU with NVENC and CUDA into a system with a $100 i3, use DaVinci for free, and you have a professional video editing PC.

 

[SunMaster]

Simply not true. There are millions of people editing video to upload to Youtube, TikTok, Twitch etc. People using DaVinci, Premiere, etc. People using Plex, ripping optical media. Or just people uploading a video from their smartphone and editing it.

I'm not arguing the usefulness of hardware encoding. But for the vast majority of users it's a non-issue. The fact that it's important to you doesn't put it high up on the average users. After all, you did make the claim that it was due to drivers and superior encoding Nvidia made its 9:1 dominance.

Anyway, this is beating a dead horse.