The best graphics card can mean a lot of different things — fastest card, best value, best card for a specific price, etc. And some people might refuse to buy an AMD card, or an Nvidia card. But prices change all the time, and lately, they’ve been on the rise, particularly as previous-gen hardware starts to get phased out. We wanted to look at the current and previous generation GPUs, ranked by current value, for everything that’s readily available in brand-new form.
That last bit is important because it means older cards (RTX 20-series and RX 5000-series) are disqualified. However, we do have a few of the Turing generation Nvidia cards included as they’re still available at Newegg (at reasonable prices). All of the performance data is taken from our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, and we’ve broken things down into rasterization and ray tracing rankings. We’ll also have the three GPU vendor rankings after that, in case you’re only interested in seeing how the various GPUs from one company stack up.
For the rasterization rankings, we’re sorting by the 1080p column, which penalizes the fastest GPUs. If you’re only interested in 4K or 1440p performance, some of the cards change places, though the overall standings remain relatively consistent.
Best value overall right now, no surprise, goes to the AMD RX 6600. That’s been the case for most of the past several months, with prices ranging from as low as $200 to the current $235 — this is actually about as high as we’ve seen for RX 6600 pricing since September! AMD also claims positions two and three with the RX 6700 XT and RX 6650 XT, and again both now cost more than they did a couple of months back.
Intel makes a run for the fourth spot with the Arc A750, now on sale and marked down to $265. The official MSRP for that GPU is $290, and we’ve seen it selling at $275 for a couple of months, but recently Newegg dropped the price on the ASRock card another $10.
The best Nvidia value right now goes to the GTX 1660 Ti, thanks to a Peladn model selling at just $179. The next closest is another relatively unknown Chinese brand, this time a Mannajue RTX 2060 for $220. If you want something from a traditional graphics card brand (meaning, not Peladn or Mannajue), sold and shipped from the U.S., your best option is the Asus RTX 3060 for $360 (opens in new tab). Note that in rasterization games, the RTX 3060 lands between the RX 6600 and RX 6600 XT, and also just behind the A750 — all of which cost quite a bit less than the Asus card.
What about the newer RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 4080, RTX 4090, and RX 7900 XTX / XT? In terms of value, those latest-generation cards all rank toward the bottom of the list. The RTX 4070 Ti gets the honor of being the “best of the worst” new cards, sitting at number 27 out of 38 GPUs, while the RX 7900 XT sits at slot 31. The RTX 3080 12GB, RTX 3090, and RTX 3090 Ti also sit right near the bottom, as prices have shot up over the past two months, presumably due to them being phased out.
Turning over to our ray tracing benchmarks, again sorted by the 1080p results — though this time the tests are demanding enough that the 1440p and 4K results mostly maintain their relative ranking — the best value ends up being Nvidia’s RTX 2060. Again, that’s a no-name Mannajue model, shipped “direct from the factory” in China; there’s a Paladin card for $20 more, but if we omit those companies, prices on the Nvidia cards jump quite a bit.
Intel’s Arc A750 would arguably take the top spot in 1080p RT performance, and interestingly the RTX 4070 Ti is nipping at its heels — and ranks higher at 1440p. Intel’s A770 also does well, while the best AMD card for ray tracing (in terms of value) is the RX 6700 XT.
The bottom spots end up being claimed by AMD’s RX 6400 and RX 6500 XT, neither of which can remotely handle 1080p gaming with ray tracing enabled. The 3090 Ti and 3090 come next, followed by the 7900 XTX — with the cheapest XTX currently going for $300 over MSRP. Finally, the overpriced 3080 12GB and RX 6800 XT also manage to fall behind even the exorbitantly priced RTX 4090, thanks to inflated pricing.
But the key takeaway is that high-end and extreme GPUs really aren’t great values right now. Normally, we’d expect cards like the 3080 and 3070 series to sell below their launch MSRPs, but that’s mostly not happening (except for the aforementioned Chinese branded cards).
GPUs by Vendor
If you only want to look at AMD, Intel, or Nvidia GPUs without mixing everything together, we’ve included those tables below, without commentary. All of the card names link to the best price we’re currently tracking, which will likely change shortly after this goes live.
| Graphics Card | Price | 1080p FPS/$ | 1440p FPS/$ | 4K FPS/$ | RT 1080p FPS/$ | RT 1440p FPS/$ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intel Arc A750 (opens in new tab) | $265 | 0.3442 | 0.2085 | 0.1199 | 0.1260 | 0.0655 |
| Intel Arc A770 16GB (opens in new tab) | $349 | 0.2859 | 0.1786 | 0.1053 | 0.1176 | 0.0632 |
| Intel Arc A380 (opens in new tab) | $140 | 0.2812 | 0.1390 | 0.0814 |