Nonetheless,thetestsinthisfeature do bring home the point that, if
you’rethinkingofupgradingyour graphics card, you need to know if
yourcurrentonereallyis thebottleneck. If you’re only using a 1080p
monitortoplayesportstitles,then you don’t need a £700 graphics card.ESSENTIAL
Forbasic1080pgaming,youcan get away with quite a basic graphics
card,evenif youplayfairlymodern, competitive titles. Just be sure to
turndownthein-gamedetailsettings. For esports games at 1080p,
Nvidia’sGeForceGTX 1650 (the modern cousin of the GTX 1050) is fine,
butforanymoredemandinggames we recommend stepping up to the
GTX 1660 or,evenbetter,AMD’s Radeon RX Vega56.MIDRANGE
Thenextstepupisgamingat2,560 x 1,440, for which AMD’s
RadeonRX 5700 iscurrentlythe performance king. However,
whiletheRadeonRX 5700 does offer fast frame rates, it
doesn’thaveanydedicatedhardware for real-time ray tracing,
whichenablesmuchmorerealistic lighting and reflections
ingames.If you’remorelikelyto be playing games with ray
tracing(suchasControl,Metro Exodus and Battlefield V), then
werecommendsteppingupto the GeForce RTX 2060 Super- theMSIcardwetestedforthis feature is a good example.
TOPDOG
If you’relookingtospendbig,you want to be running a display with at
leasta resolutionof2,560x 1,440 to make the most of a top-end card
though.The£500RTX 2070 Super is a great option for those seeking
tobalancetheultimateinperformance and image quality with price. If
youwanttoplaygamesat4K,you can get away with a mid-range card
foresports,butformoregraphically demanding games, you ideally
wanttostepuptoNvidia’sGeForce RTX 2080 Super. Even that GPU
struggleswithraytracingattrue 4K though – if you want to play games
at4Kwithallthebellsandwhistles, you’re looking at the ultimate top
dog– theverypriceyGeForceRTX 2080 Ti.Moving up to the RTX 2060 Super sees all the
numbers leap up, although that’s hardly surprising for
such a big jump in price. We didn’t test a GeForce GTX
1660 Super (see p30) or Radeon RX Vega56 for this
specific feature, but in our other tests, these cards
have proved themselves to be decent choices in the
middle ground.
The RTX 2060 Super proved ample for playing
these games at both resolutions. Only in ROTTR and
AOTS did it not hit 60fps at 4K. What’s telling here are
the huge leaps in the most graphically intensive
games, at both 1080p and 4K. In the likes of PUBG
and ROTTR, the frame rate more than quadrupled.
Even in the likes of CS:GO, the frame rate tripled at 4K.
However, at 1080p, we see our first sign of why
balancing your hardware is important. In Dota 2,
performance only increased from 127fps to 179fps
compared to the GTX 1050, while in CS:GO it went
from 147fps to 197fps. Those are still substantial
leaps, but if your main focus is playing competitive
games at a high frame rate, and you only have a 1080p monitor,
there’s clearly potential for you to save some money by getting a
cheaper graphics card.
Finally, the RTX 2080 Super costs twice the price of the RTX 2060
Super, yet the largest increase in average frame rate in these tests was just
34 per cent, while most of the larger increases were only around 20 per
cent. What’s more, for three out of the five games at 1080p, and two out of
five games at 4K, there was no meaningful increase in performance at all.
The RTX 2080 Super represents the peak of sub-£1,000
graphics performance at the moment, and our graphics card tests in
other, more demanding games show that you do indeed get a clear
benefit if you’re enabling new features, such as real-time ray
tracing, at higher resolutions.
IF YOU’RE THINKING OF UPGRADING YOUR
GRAPHICS CARD, YOU NEED TO KNOW IF
YOUR CURRENT ONE IS THE BOTTLENECK
MSI’s Gaming X RTX 2060 Super enables you to
turn on some ray-tracing eye candyAMD’s latest Navi GPUs offer very fast performance
in the mid-range price bracket, but there are no ray-
tracing abilities