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Here are our picks of the best graphics cards of 2023 in the best performance and best value categories.
Choosing the best graphics card may be a difficult task. It is a principal component for the purposes of gaming and content creation. And there are a lot of things to check: performance, efficiency, features, and price. Here are some of the best options for you:
Best Graphics Card from NVIDIA: GeForce RTX 4090
GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card. Image credit: NVIDIA
NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4090 is the fastest graphics card currently available, with an Ada AD102 GPU, 16384 GPU cores, and a whopping 24 GB of GDDR6X at 21 Gbps.
It is 55% faster on average than its predecessor, the 3090 Ti. It also tops its closest rival Radeon RX 7900 XTX by around 7% on average. The superiority though comes at a steep difference in price: the leader is 50-60% more expensive than its rival as of the time of writing this article (approximately $1500 vs $950).
Of course, to utilize the full potential of GeForce RTX 4090, you must have a high refresh rate 4K or even 8K monitor, as well as a fast CPU and a large power supply. Naturally, you may need even more upgrades for the rest of your system to fully profit from this card. By the way, you should note that this card will devour 450 watts of electrical power, so you should factor in the higher electricity costs.
But it certainly allows for exceptional performance both for gaming and content creation. It can even cope with demanding artificial intelligence tasks.
Best Graphics Card from AMD: Radeon RX 7900 XTX
Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card. Image credit: AMD
Radeon RX 7900 XTX has AMD’s fastest GPU. It uses Navi 31 architecture, and contains a chip with 12288 GPU cores. Its amount of video RAM is also great: 24 GB GDDR6 at 20 Gbps.
It’s a great card for rasterization and an ideal choice if you don’t care much for ray tracing. It is significantly faster than its predecessors but doesn’t dramatically increase power use. This card may also be used for professional tasks but is relatively weak in deep learning AI workloads.
Despite being marginally slower than GeForce RTX 4090, AMD’s offering is much more reasonably priced. By the way, at 355-watt TBP it uses about 20-22% less electricity than RTX 4090 which is why you will not burn the planet with too much heat. Although if you are climate-conscious, you should explore somewhat less-performing but more power-efficient alternatives.
Best Budget Graphics Card from NVIDIA: GeForce RTX 3060
GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card. Image credit: NVIDIA
It is a great choice for those who are looking to get good performance in modern computer games without too much investment. With GeForce RTX 3060 you will achieve good results at resolutions 1080p and 1440p. It has 12GB GDDR6 VRAM onboard which provides for good compatibility with future gaming releases.
Despite having a relatively limited 192-bit memory bus, and being slightly more expensive than Radeon RX 6650 XT (approximately $300 vs. $250), the competing offering from AMD, GeForce RTX 3060 is a very strong contender.
We almost forgot to mention that this budget model from NVIDIA does quite impressively with ray tracing and DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), and it draws just up to 170 watts of power.
Best Budget Graphics Card from AMD: Radeon RX 6650 XT
Radeon RX 6650 XT graphics card. Image credit: AMD
This card is an excellent choice if you are looking for the best value in terms of what you get for your money. This model from AMD has a good 1080p performance, it is often able to deal with 1440p resolutions quite well too, and has a power-efficient design. But, it contains only 8GB of VRAM and struggles with ray tracing, and is also limited to a 128-bit memory interface.
If ray tracing feat is your aim, you should go for NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3060 which can sometimes offer up to twice better performance with DirectX raytracing tech.
On the strong side, RX 6650 XT has faster memory speeds compared to its predecessor RX 6600 XT (16Gbps vs. 18Gbps). Also, it only weighs 740g and it has a rather compact size with dimensions of 220x132x45mm. It also uses just 180 watts of power – quite a bit less than the top-performing cards both from NVIDIA and AMD.
And the best thing for those on a tight budget is that RX 6650 XT It is now available well below the manufacturer-suggested retail price of around $250 and is an exceptionally good choice in its price category.
Final word
If you are looking for the best-performing flagship models, you should choose either NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 or AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX. But if you seek to get the best bang for the buck, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 and AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT will save you tons of money, eat less energy, and will still achieve impressive results at lower resolutions.
Written by Giedrius Pakalka and Alius Noreika
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