News Graphics Cards Ranked by Value, January 2023

[PlaneInTheSky]

After all, you did make the claim that it was due to drivers and superior encoding Nvidia made its 9:1 dominance.

Right. I can't imagine what else it would be.

It's not RTX because Nvidia has been outselling AMD in the consumer GPU market long before RTX.

It's not FPS/$, because AMD tends to offer slightly more FPS/$, yet people prefer Nvidia GPU.

When people are asked on forums why they buy Nvidia over AMD, the answers revolve largely around drivers, stability, and software including NVENC and CUDA.

 

[Lakitu_Runner]

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

What is missing is the fact that the performance of the GPU is limited by the refresh rate of the monitor. Soooo....if the highest refresh today is 360Hz for 1080p or 1440p, then any higher refresh the GPU can support is irrelevant and it only increases the price per FPS...same with 4K which is like say 165Hz is the highest refresh available. When the maximum refresh rate of a monitor is figured out, the newest cards are surely not as good of a value as depicted.

 

[SunMaster]

When people are asked on forums why they buy Nvidia over AMD, the answers revolve largely around drivers, stability, and software including NVENC and CUDA.

Do you think forum users are representative of the average gamer? I'm asking because it's the average gamer that's buying the bulk of GPUs - and make up the results e.g. Steam's hardware survey..

 

[PEnns]

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.

AMD drivers, again??

Each time I read about driver problems on this forum, 90% of the time it's Nvidia's bad drivers!!

 

[Avro Arrow]

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.

Ok, that's not very specific. What has Radeon software done to make you think this?

Think I am gonna be rocking a 3080 for the rest of my life at this point.

Well, there's your problem. I'd find AMD software lacking as well if I had an nVidia card that doesn't use AMD software.

Your post makes no sense in this regard.

 

[Avro Arrow]

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.

So, when's the last time that you had a Radeon GPU? I'm guessing that it has been years because even Linus Sebastian (of all people) has been praising AMD's drivers lately. I play Cyberpunk for hours on end without issue on an RX 6800 XT. How do you get better than rock-solid when it comes to stability?

 

[King_V]

The most recent OBS comparison from a major Youtuber is a comparison

Oh, a "major YouTuber"... that clinches it, then!

Clearly nobody here knows anything of what they're talking about, then.

/s

 

[korekan]

so the top card is not having best values then.

 

[kostas321]

In addition to managing the lifecycle of the 14 computers for my family, I've been doing procurement for large companies (banking, telecom and data centers, automotive) for the last 15 years.

Both on the private and corporate side I will take Intel and Nvidia over AMD each time:

• on launch and sometimes for years the drivers are a mess with amd products
• the supply of amd products is very random and at times you might not find them at all or with huge premiums because of the lack of availability
• overall intel and nvidia support are far easier to work with on the corporate side I was always able to get very good deals, fast replacements and contract adjustments
• for AI and machine learning work nvidia products work a lot better and time is literary money when executing simulations, as running something 2x as fast drastically cuts down the time to market in new product releases

I agree with most comments here. If you buy last gen's / 2 gens ago AMD products then all the drivers will work and you will get top bang for your buck and in another 1-2 years the product will likely have a small edge over its nvidia counter part as the driver support improves even further.

Both in private and in the corporate work I always preferred to pay the 20-30% extra to have the latest and greatest tech today, thus giving its users an immediate advantage and extending the lifespan of top-productivity time of the devices being bought. The math is simple: a 2500-3500 top desktop bought today will give me 5-7 years (corproate) and 7-10 years (at home). I could get something cheaper and older but I will have to replace it 3 years sooner, so the short term cost saving does not make up for the lost productivity each year and the longer life span.

 

[gwlaw99]

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.

There is a mistake in the AMD only chart. The 6750 is listed as $300. That is way too low. The Newegg link is $415 after $20 rebate.

 

[gwlaw99]

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.

CUDA cores are the normal GPU cores. You are thinking of the RT cores. DLSS can be used for increased performance without ray tracing.

 

[gwlaw99]

I am completely agnostic and AMD drivers are fine now, but last generation the 5700XT black screen issue was widespread for a long time.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

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).

Our CMS tables are horrific and there's literally nothing I can do about it. The devs that do the CMS stuff only care about the lowest common denominator stuff, and it's for dozens of different sites. Needless to say, TH isn't high enough in the pecking order to get serious changes made.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

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)

[SNIP]

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.

My comment was specifically about the encoder hardware, sorry that wasn't clear. Software support is a different matter. So, yes, if you're doing OBS you're more likely to get lower quality results from AMD. But there are many things that affect the results, some in drivers, some in the software, and AMD clearly trails Nvidia in those areas. I did some testing of encoding performance and quality (outside of streaming) in the A380 review, though, which you can see the results here: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-arc-a380-review/5



AMD quality in H.264 is very poor. In HEVC, though, it's far closer. Is Nvidia better? Yes, though even there we get some oddities. For example, the GTX 1650 using Pascal NVENC actually generated better quality at 6Mpbs in this test when compared with the latest Ampere NVENC. I've been meaning to revisit this subject with the new RTX 40 and RX 7000 cards, but I just haven't had the time (nor managed to get everything working properly) yet. But even if AMD is worse in quality, what does that actually mean in practice?

Streaming with an AMD GPU, you may see more blockiness and occasional glitches. But you can get blockiness and glitches even on an Nvidia card if there are network congestion issues. And that's the real rub: network tends to be far more important for streaming than just about anything else. Bump your encoding quality from 3Mbps to 8Mbps and most of the quality issues are gone for 1080p. At 12Mbps, things cluster around the 90-95 mark for VMAF, with anything above 90 being difficult to spot differences ("visually comparable" or something is the description given for 90+ scores).

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

There is a mistake in the AMD only chart. The 6750 is listed as $300. That is way too low. The Newegg link is $415 after $20 rebate.

I'm confused by your post. The table clearly lists $400 for the RX 6750 XT, not $300. I did have a glitch in my spreadsheet when writing initially where I put $310 instead of $410, but I'm pretty sure I had fixed that long before the article went live. Am I not seeing something? And the Newegg card has a base price of $435, a code for $15 off (immediate price change), and then a $20 rebate promo as well. That makes it $400, assuming you actually use the rebate in time.

 

[husker]

When confronted with simple irrefutable math such as fps/price, those who don't like the result have to drag in some other argument as if that changes anything. Responses about driver stability, card popularity, or the authors ability to look up current pricing in his field of expertise, etc., just seem desperate and off the point.

 

[dan_L]

With all due respect, AMD's Adrenalin drivers have been quite stable for the last few years. I realize that my own experience is purely accedotal, but the AMD drivers on our desktops have been rock solid for at least 4 years while the NVIDIA drivers on our laptop has been problematic at best and has had lots of difficulty updating. I continue to be astounded at the number of people into tech who continue to repeat old tropes that simply are no longer valid. It's kind of like the folks who complain about every new version of Windows. If we listened to them, we'd still be running MS-DOS.

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.

 

[JTWrenn]

Ok, that's not very specific. What has Radeon software done to make you think this?

Well, there's your problem. I'd find AMD software lacking as well if I had an nVidia card that doesn't use AMD software.

Your post makes no sense in this regard.

I went from a 1070 to an amd rx 5700 xt card, and found that the only way to get it to run stable was to install the drivers but not the catalyst software. It was causing crashes, overheating, odd performance issues the works. I was on their site for months trying to figure it out when someone showed me how to install just the drivers, and poof everything was fine.

I am agnostic generally when it comes to hardware, and will give companies a shot every few generations...but that doesn't change that there were severe documented issues with recent software that was auto installed when installed drivers. I am not a fan boy making that up.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

I went from a 1070 to an amd rx 5700 xt card, and found that the only way to get it to run stable was to install the drivers but not the catalyst software. It was causing crashes, overheating, odd performance issues the works. I was on their site for months trying to figure it out when someone showed me how to install just the drivers, and poof everything was fine.

I am agnostic generally when it comes to hardware, and will give companies a shot every few generations...but that doesn't change that there were severe documented issues with recent software that was auto installed when installed drivers. I am not a fan boy making that up.

AMD had some documented issues with black screening and other problems on the original RDNA GPUs. Those launched in 2019 and weren't really acknowledged or fixed for about six months. I didn't personally experience the problem, but I swap GPUs all the time and my daily driver was running an Nvidia card, so who knows. That's the biggest problem I'm aware of with AMD, and to my knowledge there was nothing similar with RDNA 2 or RDNA 3 offerings. There also wasn't anything really this bad with the Vega and Polaris generation that I can recall.

 

[Avro Arrow]

I went from a 1070 to an amd rx 5700 xt card, and found that the only way to get it to run stable was to install the drivers but not the catalyst software. It was causing crashes, overheating, odd performance issues the works. I was on their site for months trying to figure it out when someone showed me how to install just the drivers, and poof everything was fine.

I am agnostic generally when it comes to hardware, and will give companies a shot every few generations...but that doesn't change that there were severe documented issues with recent software that was auto installed when installed drivers. I am not a fan boy making that up.

Well, now that you've given some context, it makes more sense and I believe you because I had terrible issues with my RX 5700 XT. The thing is, it turned out to not be the drivers. I was getting power-off resets with loud buzzing green screens. I remember thinking to myself "Drivers can't cause a power-off reset, they can just crash to the desktop." and so I was mystified.

I decided to try an experiment. I pulled the RX 5700 XT out of my PC and put my R9 Fury back in and kept the same drivers installed because they supported both cards. When I did that, all the instability immediately ceased. If the drivers had been the problem, the R9 Fury wouldn't have been stable either but it was rock-solid. I RMA'd the card with XFX and those monkeys sent me a replacement with a VRAM error so I had to RMA it again and I made sure to let them know that THEY were paying ALL of the shipping this time around. I remember wanting to strangle whoever was stupid enough to send back another defective card but I kept my cool because yelling doesn't get anyone anywhere. It turned out that keeping my cool was the right decision.

The model I had purchased was the XFX RX 5700 XT Triple Dissipation, which was a basic model. I always buy basic models because I don't feel like spending an extra $100 for maybe a 3% performance uplift. Well, the one they sent me back was one of their upscale models called the THICC-III. When installing it, I immediately noticed that instead of having one 8-pin connector and one 6-pin connector like the Triple Dissipation, it had two 8-pin connectors. I'm thinking that the 8+6 must have been insufficient for the GPUs power needs and XFX just basically screwed it up.

What really puzzled me was that no reviewers had encountered these problems with the cards. Then I realised that reviewers generally only get upper-level cards like Powercolor Red Devils, Sapphire Nitros, XFX THICC-III's and ASUS TUF or ROG Strix models. You never see them with models like Gigabyte Eagle, ASRock Challenger or Powercolor Fighter models. I think that maybe the problem there was that the upper-level models all had 8+8 connectors so the power issue wasn't there.

I have no doubt that you experienced problems with your RX 5700 XT but I do seriously doubt that it was the drivers. Through all of this, I didn't change the installed drivers because the R9 Fury was fine with them and I still wasn't sure that it wasn't the drivers. I can safely say now however that it wasn't the drivers at all because when I slapped that THICC-III into my PC, with the exact same drivers that the Triple Dissipation had, the THICC-III was as rock-solid as my R9 Fury Nitro.

The same driver package that I used is more than likely the same driver package that you used. If it was rock-solid in my rig, then I have to assume that you, like me, had a hardware problem that appeared to be a driver problem and if I didn't know what I know, then I would've assumed it was the driver as well. That's just normal because driver issues tend to be more common than issues of other kinds and if the odds seem to be that it's the drivers, then who can blame people for making that assumption? Certainly not me and I also don't blame people for not wanting to deal with issues like that because who would want to?

There are so many things that can go wrong that appear to be the video driver but really aren't. The last time I had any driver issues that I can remember were with my twin Gigabyte HD 7970s in Crossfire and it was just that the screen sometimes scaled larger than my display so things were cut off at the edges of the screen. All I had to do to fix that was bring up the Catalyst screen and toggle GPU scaling. I had to do it about twice a week and it was somewhat annoying but nothing that was truly bothersome.

As I look back, I can honestly say that I've never had any issues with Adrenalin drivers. I did have a Windows update (of all things) that caused some screen-tearing and it forced me to go back to the previous driver package but I know that was Windows' fault because everything was fine before that update. A lot of people would have probably defaulted to blaming the Adrenalin driver for that and I wouldn't blame them. I even came across one person who had issues that they wanted to blame on the Adrenalin driver n a build they did because they were getting really low FPS. I took a look at their system and the dumb tool hadn't installed the X470 Chipset drivers for his motherboard. What a gonk!

 

[Avro Arrow]

AMD had some documented issues with black screening and other problems on the original RDNA GPUs. Those launched in 2019 and weren't really acknowledged or fixed for about six months. I didn't personally experience the problem, but I swap GPUs all the time and my daily driver was running an Nvidia card, so who knows. That's the biggest problem I'm aware of with AMD, and to my knowledge there was nothing similar with RDNA 2 or RDNA 3 offerings. There also wasn't anything really this bad with the Vega and Polaris generation that I can recall.

I was getting a loud buzzing green screen accompanied by a power-off reset. To this day I'm not certain what caused it but I know that it wasn't the drivers because the same driver installation was rock-solid with my Sapphire R9 Fury Nitro. I honestly think that it had to be the power delivery because, you know, people who have been building a long time notice little differences like one card having 8+6 power connectors and the replacement having 8+8.

I sent back my XFX RX 5700 XT Triple Dissipation (went through more crap with XFX that you can read in my previous post) and they sent me back a THICC-III. When I was installing the THICC-III, I was astonished to see that its PCI-Express supplementary power connectors were 8+8 instead of the 8+6 that I remembered were on the Triple Dissipation. I thought that I was losing it and went to xfxforce to look at pictures. Sure enough, the Triple Dissipation only had 8+6.

Now, being a base model, I don't think that a single reviewer had ever even seen a Triple Dissipation because you guys tend to receive upscale models like:

ASRock - Phantom Gaming D instead of Challenger
ASUS - ROG Strix or TUF instead of Dual or KO
Gigabyte - AORUS or AORUS Master instead of Eagle or Gaming
MSi - Gaming X Trio instead of Ventus
Powercolor - Red Devil instead of Fighter
Sapphire - Nitro instead of Pulse
XFX - THICC-III or MERC instead of Triple Dissipation or QICK

I'd say it's possible that none of the upscale models had 8+6 pin connectors so they never experienced instability from inadequate power delivery. At the same time, the best-selling versions of cards are the more basic models (for obvious reasons). After all, you used the same drivers as everyone else so if it were the drivers, you would have had the same problems at some point. Since you didn't, there was nothing wrong with the drivers. Simple logic.

 

[motocros1]

it might be just me but i'm thinking some knock off chinese model shouldn't be included in the fps/$ measurement. especially since the next legitimate graphics card company is a substantial amount higher

 

[JTWrenn]

The same driver package that I used is more than likely the same driver package that you used. If it was rock-solid in my rig, then I have to assume that you, like me, had a hardware problem that appeared to be a driver problem and if I didn't know what I know, then I would've assumed it was the driver as well.

I get the thought process, but I checked for voltage, other drives the works. The only fix that worked was removing the accompanying software and instead just installing the drivers without Catalyst(I think that is what it is called). I believe the issues had to do with the overlay and a number of other oddities with that software at the time. I was also not the only person who had the issue.

It is always possible it was some form of software fighting other software, but I reinstalled without the AMD software, just the drivers, and it fixed 99% of the issue. It wasn't a horrible experience, just worse than what I had with nvidia.

I think the winds are shifting but you gotta play off of your personal experiences to judge hardware manufacturers because a lot of it comes down to how you interact with hardware software and support. Never had as many problems with Nvidia....so I will wait another few gens before dipping into amd again.

 

[JTWrenn]

AMD had some documented issues with black screening and other problems on the original RDNA GPUs. Those launched in 2019 and weren't really acknowledged or fixed for about six months. I didn't personally experience the problem, but I swap GPUs all the time and my daily driver was running an Nvidia card, so who knows. That's the biggest problem I'm aware of with AMD, and to my knowledge there was nothing similar with RDNA 2 or RDNA 3 offerings. There also wasn't anything really this bad with the Vega and Polaris generation that I can recall.

That was a big part of what turned me off on it, there was no response at all for a very long time and the community figured it out. Odd thing was it was never really blown out there, found the solution that it was the software not the hardware someplace else. Now that is just what fixed my particular issue, so who knows what else might have done it, but it felt very bush league at the time.

Everyone has their own luck/style and how it pairs with companies luck/style is odd sometimes. I half thing fan boys of either AMD or NVIDIA just happen to like specific PSU's that happen to fit the gpu's they are buying. So much luck because the idea of standards have totally flown out the window.

 

[Avro Arrow]

I get the thought process, but I checked for voltage, other drives the works. The only fix that worked was removing the accompanying software and instead just installing the drivers without Catalyst(I think that is what it is called). I believe the issues had to do with the overlay and a number of other oddities with that software at the time. I was also not the only person who had the issue.

It is always possible it was some form of software fighting other software, but I reinstalled without the AMD software, just the drivers, and it fixed 99% of the issue. It wasn't a horrible experience, just worse than what I had with nvidia.

I think the winds are shifting but you gotta play off of your personal experiences to judge hardware manufacturers because a lot of it comes down to how you interact with hardware software and support. Never had as many problems with Nvidia....so I will wait another few gens before dipping into amd again.

Catalyst... that hasn't been the name of the driver package since... I dunno, a decade maybe. They've been called "Crimson" and "Adrenalin" since then.

I see what you're saying though. The thing is, if the drivers were problematic, re-installing them wouldn't have fixed anything because they would've still been the same drivers. That points to something else, but I have no idea what.