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If you felt the RTX 4090 performance was impressive at 4K in our standard test suite, just take a look at the results with ray tracing. Nvidia put even more ray tracing enhancements into the Ada Lovelace architecture, and those start to show up here. There are still further potential performance improvements for ray tracing with SER, OMM, and DMM — not to mention DLSS3, though that ends up being a bit of a mixed bag, since the generated frames don't include new user input and add latency. Nvidia absolutely dominates in ray tracing performance, with the RTX 4090 nearly doubling AMD's best AMD RX 7900 XTX in sixth place. Intel's Arc A770 lands at number 28.
It's also worth saying that all it will take is either a decent price drop on this 8GB version for the RTX 4060 Ti to become the GPU darling of the mid-range PC gamer. The RTX 4060 is a very power efficient GPU, too. It's well suited to gamers with smaller cases or cases with poor airflow as it doesn't dump a lot of heat.AMD also has FSR3 coming soon, providing for frame generation. Like DLSS3, it will add latency, and AMD requires the integration of Anti-Lag+ support in games that use FSR3. But Anti-Lag+ only works with AMD GPUs, which means non-AMD cards will likely incur a rather large latency penalty. For our latest benchmarks, we've tested nearly every GPU released in the past seven years, plus a few extras, at 1080p medium and 1080p ultra, and sorted the table by the 1080p ultra results. Where it makes sense, we also test at 1440p ultra and 4K ultra. All of the scores are scaled relative to the top-ranking 1080p ultra card, which in our new suite is the RTX 4090 — especially at 4K and 1440p.
Oh, how I wish I could tell you it was an unreserved 'yes!' But, while this is absolutely the card you should buy if you were previously considering an RTX 3060 Ti or RX 6700 XT, all because of its gaming performance lead, I don't feel great about making that recommendation.I was surprised how small the Radeon RX 7600 reference card is. In fact, it's pretty much tiny compared to some of the triple slot behemoths we've seen. That alone will impress some buyers with compact cases looking to make use of its impressive display capabilities and media engine. While the RTX 4090 does technically take first place at 1080p ultra, it's the 1440p and especially 4K numbers that impress. It's only 3% faster than the next closest RX 7900 XTX at 1080p ultra, but that increases to 8% at 1440p and then 23% at 4K. Against the RTX 3090 Ti, it's also a major upgrade: 14% faster at 1080p, 27% faster at 1440p, and 51% faster at 4K. The above tables provide a summary of performance, but for those that want to see the individual game charts, for both the standard and ray tracing test suites, we've got those as well. We're only including more recent GPUs in these charts, as otherwise things get very messy. These are also using our new test PC, which changes the performance slightly from the above table, simply because our newest tests are more relevant (but haven't been run on a lot of the older GPUs shown in the tables). DLSS 2 upscaling with quality mode is supported in most ray tracing games and can boost performance an additional 30~50 percent (depending on the game, resolution, and settings used). FSR 2 and XeSS support can provide a similar uplift, but FSR 2 is only in about a third as many games right now, and XeSS support is even less common. Surely, the Ada-based successor to the RTX 3060 Ti is going to be thegraphics card of this generation for the GPU-thirsty masses. Surely, surely, now it's time to pull the trigger on a new RTX 40-series card.
Which graphics card do you need? To help you decide, we created this GPU benchmarks hierarchy consisting of dozens of GPUs from the past four generations of hardware. Not surprisingly, the fastest cards are from the latest Nvidia Ada Lovelace and AMD RDNA 3 architectures. AMD's graphics cards perform well without ray tracing, but tend to fall behind once RT gets enabled — even more so if you enable DLSS, which you probably should, though FSR2 is a reasonable alternative. GPU prices are finally hitting reasonable levels, however, making it a better time to upgrade.We've used two different PCs for our testing. The latest 2022/2023 configuration uses an Alder Lake CPU and platform (with Raptor Lake results coming soon), while our previous testbed uses Coffee Lake and Z390. Here are the details of the two PCs. And that's more than aesthetics, too. The size of the card hints at the efficiency of the 4nm Ada GPU quietly thrumming away inside of it. If you want a powerful, but low power card, the RTX 4070 fits the bill. Which will no doubt make it the darling of the small form factor PC brigade, and deservedly so. That's certainly one of the benefits I was alluding to earlier in the RTX 4070 vs. RTX 3080 debate, but the key one is the fact the Ada card has access to DLSS 3.0 and Frame Generation. And when that comes into play it's a game changer, especially for titles that otherwise would struggle at ray-traced 4K settings. Still, the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX has a lot going for it. We're used to seeing GPU generations that arrive on smaller process nodes, redesigned architectures, larger caches, reworked shaders, more memory—the list goes on. But all of that, all at once? That's what RDNA 3 delivers: the whole lot in one fell swoop.
After years of massively inflated GPU pricing, is the RX 7600 the card the market has been crying out for? The RX 7600 is easily the cheapest of the current generation of GPUs from either AMD or Nvidia. Though it's important not to overlook Intel's Arc cards either. For now, the RX 7600 is touted as being a solid option if you're after a card on a tight budget. There are a few times when the differences between the XT and XTX are minimal, and the performance delta practically non-existent. The XT is also the much more efficient and cooler running of the two. Generally, though, you get what you pay for with the higher-end XTX card, if not a bit more. The RX 7800 XT has some 4K gaming chops, as you would expect from a card that's offering performance right up there with the high-end of AMD's previous generation of GPUs. At this level you are going to need some upscaling to deal with any ray-traced lighting effects, however, as away from pure rasterised rendering you can see the RX 7800 XT start to chug with this many pixels on screen. The RTX 4060 Ti is a tightly regimented graphics card, rigidly taped out to hit a certain performance level as cheaply as possible, and to provide Nvidia with an avenue for any AD106 GPUs that don't make the grade as higher-spec mobile RTX 4070 chips.
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Intel's Arc A380 ends up just ahead of the RX 6500 XT in ray tracing performance, which is interesting considering it only has 8 RTUs going up against AMD's 16 Ray Accelerators. Intel posted a deep dive into its ray tracing hardware, and Arc sounds reasonably impressive, except for the fact that the number of RTUs in the A380 severely limits performance. The top-end A770 still only has 32 RTUs, which proves sufficient for it to pull ahead (barely) of the RTX 3060 in DXR testing, but it can't go much further than that. Arc A770 also ends up ahead of AMD's RX 6800 in DXR performance, showing just how poor AMD's RDNA 2 hardware is when it comes to ray tracing.
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