It’s been two full years since we’ve put together a guide to the best GPUs you can buy, and that’s because the market has been buzzing for two years now. During that time, we recommend keeping it as long as possible, as well as spending a fair amount of time researching the options used, even if there wasn’t much traction there either.
It seems like things are finally starting to get better, at least a little bit, and while we still have a long way to go, we understand that many of you are done waiting and just want to buy something, so what should you buy? We cover five price ranges from bottom to top, let’s get to it.
Radeon RX 6500 XT at the recommended retail price or buy used
For those of you looking to spend as little as possible, the cheapest new graphics card is the ill-fated Radeon RX 6500 XT. In short, it is a bad product with many problems and too many costs. However, there’s no choice under $ 450, so if you’re in dire need of a new graphics card and the used market is out of the question, this is it.
Honestly, we’d rather wait or do something else with our time than playing games when we spend $ 270 on a graphics card that can’t even hit 60fps in new games like Cyberpunk 2077 or Dying Light 2. The lowest possible quality settings a 1080p is approximate. This is aging like milk.
Alternatively, if you have access to the second-hand market, we recommend looking at the Radeon RX 570 4GB, which is usually available for under $ 200 and is probably a better product. For the same money, around $ 270, a used Radeon 5500 XT 4GB or GTX 1650 Super are better products, so consider those instead if you can find them.
But of course, if you can get your hands on an RX 6500 XT for a suggested retail price of $ 200, then that’s probably the way to go. However, be aware that if it reaches this price in a few months, other GPUs are likely to have dropped in price as well, so be sure to check all your options before buying.
AMD Radeon RX 6600
You don’t get much for $ 270 with the 6500 XT, as we just noted. So what do you need to enjoy today’s games at decent quality settings, while still having enough room to be useful for years to come?
For this, the AMD Radeon RX 6600 is an option, with some models reaching $ 450, although most still go above $ 500. In some markets, such as Australia, some RX 6600 cards are available for $ 650 AUD, which is roughly what you pay for an RTX 3050. In the US, apart from Newegg, the cheaper RTX 3050 is currently being sold by a third-party offered for $ 600. Sellers. Meanwhile, the RTX 3060, which should compete with the RX 6600 in terms of performance, costs over $ 750.
In other words, there are currently no alternatives, new or used, to the RX 6600, so it’s an easy choice. While we weren’t happy with the RX 6600 when it was released, it proved to be a solid offering in today’s market with good availability. It is also better than the 6500 XT because it supports more than two display outputs, dual PCIe bandwidth, dual VRAM capability, hardware encoding and AV1 decoding, basically it’s a true graphics card.
It also destroys the RTX 3050 for basic raster performance, so unless the GeForce GPU is at least 20% cheaper than the RX 6600, it’s not worth buying.
Video card: AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT
Now, if you want to buy a graphics card and want more performance, but don’t want to spend more than $ 1,000, what’s the best thing to do? We think it would be the Radeon RX 6700 XT. At its original recommended price, it was a good product that gave the RTX 3070 good value for money.
The Radeon 6700 XT offers about 40% more performance than the RX 6600, supports full PCIe x16 bandwidth, increases VRAM capacity to 12GB, and can be purchased in today’s market for around $ 900. you’re paying a 100% premium for 40% better performance, so we recommend using the RX 6600 if possible.
For about this level of Nvidia performance, you’ll be paying a lot more, with the RTX 3070 starting at $ 1,100 and the new 3070 Ti starting at $ 1,200. Unless you’re shopping specifically to play with ray tracing / DLSS enabled, the 6700 XT is a better deal at $ 900.
Video card: AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT
Considering how crazy the market is – and has been for 2 years now – graphics cards that once looked stupid may not be that stupid anymore … depending on how you look at them. Like the GeForce RTX 3090, we found that this product doesn’t make sense after launch. At MSRP, the price was more than 50% higher than the 6800 XT due to a single-digit performance improvement, averaging around 8%.
Aside from a relatively small performance increase, the 6900 XT has nothing extra. The memory capacity and bandwidth were the same, so aside from a few more cores to make that 8% jump, it was pretty much the same product … a lot more money. However, in today’s market, the Radeon 6900 XT usually only costs 10% more than the 6800 XT, so if you’re willing to lose $ 1,500 you might as well buy the flagship model.
Nvidia GPUs are significantly more expensive, which makes them harder for most gamers to justify. The base RTX 3080 starts at $ 1,600, and since it’s usually slower than the 6900 XT, it doesn’t make sense. The new 12GB version of the 3080 starts at $ 1,650, although most models go over $ 1,800, while the 3080 Ti starts at an absurd $ 2,000.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090
The GeForce RTX 3090 is still the fastest GPU you can buy, but it was ridiculous for the recommended price, let alone $ 3,000. We understand that some people actually buy these high-end products, so who makes the best gaming GPU? This is a battle between the 6900 XT and the RTX 3090.
Technically, the RTX 3090 is a much better product. It supports DLSS, which is useful for improving performance at high resolutions, but also offers much higher ray tracing performance. When it comes to grid performance, the GeForce tends to be the fastest product with 4K and 24GB of GDDR6X memory, which is very interesting for those who care about bragging rights.
The big problem with the RTX 3090 is, of course, the price. It originally cost $ 500 more than the 6900 XT (a hefty 50% surcharge), but today the typical asking price is closer to $ 3,100, which makes it about 94% more expensive than the 6900 XT, which means that you’re essentially buying two 6900 XTs they might buy. The price of one piece is 3090.