WELCOME TO THE MODERN ERA
Midway through 2022, Windows 11 is
coming up to its first anniversary and
it looks as though the pandemic may
finally be subsiding. It’s also the second
anniversary of the current graphics
architectures from AMD and Nvidia,
RDNA 2 and Ampere, so it’s a good time
for a look at the state of the GPU industry.
But we’re not just interested in the latest
offerings, we want to see how previous-
generation GPUs stack up, so we’ve
rounded up a huge collection of graphics
cards and tested every one in a system
that’s about as modern as it comes.
We’re running a Core i9-12900K CPU,
cooled by a Corsair H150i Elite Capellix
AIO. Our motherboard is an MSI Z690-A
Pro WiFi DDR4, a small concession to
sanity since DDR5 prices are high and the
change in memory doesn’t necessarily
improve performance. We have 2x 16GB
of Corsair DDR4-3600 16-18-18 memory,
which has worked flawlessly with the XMP
profile enabled, and a large and spacious
2TB M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD in the form of the
Crucial P5 Plus. All of this is powered by
a 1200W Cooler Master 80 Plus Gold PSU,
which might have seemed overkill until
Nvidia rolled out the RTX 3090 Ti.
Using a state-of-the-art CPU and
motherboard with many of the graphics
cards we’ve collected won’t matter much
for performance, but we wanted to show
every GPU in the best light possible. The
Core i9-12900K reigns as the fastest
CPU for gaming purposes, thanks to its
high single-threaded performance and
clock speeds. We’ll still encounter CPU
bottlenecks in some games, such as
Microsoft Flight Simulator when running
at 1080p, but we’ve tried to remove them.
We could have tested at higher
resolutions to ensure that the CPU isn’t
the limiting factor, but that presents a
completely different set of problems.
Modern GPUs with more than 8GB of
VRAM might be able to run maxed out
settings and resolutions up to 4K, but older
and slower GPUs are another story. Even
with limiting our testing to 1080p, running
ultra quality settings wasn’t possible in
at least one game, Red Dead Redemption
2 , unless the card had at least 4GB. That
sets the stage for the results, but first,
let’s talk about the games we’re testing.
We’ve benchmarked eight games in our
standard test suite: Borderlands 3, Far
Cry 6, Flight Simulator, Forza Horizon 5,
Horizon Zero Dawn, Red Dead Redemption
2 , Total War: Warhammer 3, and Watch
Dogs Legion. In addition to those, we also
tested six more games on cards that have
hardware ray tracing support: Bright
Memory Infinite, Control Ultimate Edition,
Cyberpunk 2077, Fortnite, Metro Exodus
Enhanced Edition, and Minecraft. All six
games use multiple ray tracing effects,
which we feel is important to highlight
the image fidelity and performance
requirements of RT hardware.
Every GPU was tested multiple times
at each setting and scores were selected
after eliminating any outliers, to provide
the best set of comparable results. We
also tested at higher resolutions, where
it makes sense. The total amount of
data gathered includes thousands of
benchmark runs, conducted over several
months, using the most up-to-date
drivers available at the time of testing.
Our choice of hardware wasn’t without
its problems, particularly on some of the
older graphics cards.
GPU STATE OF PLAY
PERFORMANCE AT 1080P ULTRA (FPS)
Over 50 GPUs, spanning the
past five generations of GPU
architectures, put to the test.
RTX 30-SERIES
RTX 3050
RTX 3060
RTX 3060 Ti
RTX 3070
RTX 3070 Ti
RTX 3080
RTX 3080 Ti
RTX 3080 12GB
RTX 3090
RTX 3090 Ti
00 FPS
20
40
60
80
100
120
140 FPS
RTX 6000-SERIES
RX 6500 XT
RX 6600
RX 6600 XT
RX 6700 XT
RX 6800
RX 6800 XT
RX 6900 XT
NVIDIA 20/16-SERIES
GTX 1650
GTX 1650 Super
GTX 1660
GTX 1660 Ti
GTX 1660 Super
GTX 2060
GTX 2060 Super
GTX 2070
GTX 2070 Super
GTX 2080
GTX 2080 Super
GTX 2080 Ti
Titan RTX
RTX 5000-SERIES
RX 5500 XT 4GB
RX 5500 XT 8GB
RX 5600 XT
RX 5700
RX 5700 XT
VEGA/500-SERIES
RX 560 4GB
RX 570 4GB
RX 580 8GB
RX 590
RX Vega 56
RX Vega 64
Radeon VII
GTX 10-SERIES
GTX 1050*
GTX 1050 Ti
GTX 1060 3GB*
GTX 1060 6GB
GTX 1070
GTX 1070 Ti
GTX 1080
GTX 1080 Ti
LEGACY
RTX 780*
GTX 970
GTX 980
R9 390
R9 Fury X
GTX 980 Ti
state of the GPUnion address
28 MAXIMU MPC JUN 2022
* GPU could not run all of the test due to insufficient VRAM