THE PAST TWO YEARS of pandemic-induced
scarcity and supply chain disruption, coupled with
cryptocurrency mining mania, have for many dashed
hopes of a new graphics card. Nearly 18 months after
the launch of AMD’s Radeon RX 6000-series and
Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs, Steam data
shows only 15 percent of gamers use Ampere cards,
and under one percent use AMD’s RDNA 2 chips.
But plenty of graphics cards are still fast enough
to play today’s demanding games. To help put things
in perspective, we rounded up all the major GPUs
from the past six years (plus a few from further
back) and put them to the test. Which cards still have
staying power and which have fallen by the wayside?
Our requirement is that each card needs to work with
Windows 11, so join us as we delve through GPUs past.
From ultra-
budget offerings
to extreme
Titan cards and
everything in
between, we’ve
put in hours of
benchmarking to
bring you a guide
to GPU hierarchy.JUN 2022 MAXIMU MPC 27