The price of graphics cards has dropped sharply in recent months, so for those of you who haven’t bought one yet, you must be thinking about which one to buy. If you still don’t know how to choose, recently the well-known hardware foreign media Techspot The latest list of recommended graphics cards has been announced, ranging from entry-level, mid-range, to the highest-end, and it is based on the prices that have dropped, so it is different from the previous announcement in February. AMD is no longer selected.
entry level
The first is entry-level. Here Techspot sets the graphics card with the least cost, so it also includes second-hand graphics cards. The selected ones are “Radeon RX 6400” and “GeForce GTX 1650 Super (second-hand).”
Techspot said that we tentatively recommended the Radeon RX 6500 XT a few months ago. We didn’t really recommend it at the time, mainly because of the price. With the price of graphics cards falling, the 6500XT currently costs about $175. Considering the performance and functions, the price is no longer so sweet. The GeForce GTX 1650 Super (second-hand) for only $150 is better.
If you want to buy a new card, the RX 6400 will be better. Although it is slower than the 6500XT, it is more power-saving, has a single slot, and does not require an external power supply.
Beginner – Intermediate
If you have a larger budget and are above the entry level, the more ideal and recommended graphics card is the “Radeon RX 6600”, which is currently available for about $280, which is cheaper than the recommended price of $330. The rival RTX 3050 is currently more expensive at $330 and in their testing. The performance of 51 games is nearly 30% higher than Radeon, and the rasterization performance also beats RTX 3050
This graphics card is also better than the RX 6500 XT, such as supporting more than two display outputs, twice the PCie bandwidth, twice the VRAM capacity, hardware encoding and AV1 decoding.
Intermediate level
The selected ones are “GeForce RTX 3060 Ti” and “Radeon RX 6700 XT”.
The performance of Radeon 6700 XT is about 40% higher than that of 6600, and it supports the full PCIe x16 bandwidth, and the VRAM is increased to 12GB. Currently, this card can be purchased for less than $450, which means that compared with 6600, you need to pay 60% more to get 40% higher performance. Whether it is worth it depends on you.
The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti can be bought for about $470. The biggest advantage of the Radeon RX 6700 XT compared to the RTX 3060 Ti is VRAM. The RTX 3060 Ti only has 8GB. On the other hand, the RTX 3060 Ti supports DLSS and better ray tracing performance, so which one is better depends on the game you play.
High-end graphics card
The selected ones are “GeForce RTX 3080 12GB” and “Radeon 6900 XT”.
In the past, Techspot has recommended that gamers avoid buying high-end GPUs, but prices have dropped in the past few months, and now they can indeed be considered. The GeForce RTX 3080 12GB is a good choice. It is also cheaper than the 10GB model, priced at about $800, and can provide the same level of performance as the 6900 XT.
As for the RTX 3090, NVIDIA’s next-generation high-end graphics card will be launched before the end of the year. Therefore, it may not be worth buying the RTX 3090 series for $1,300 now, even if it is already below the recommended selling price.
NVIDIA RTX 30 series price trend (eBay average selling price):
Image source: Techspot
Summarize
Some people may want to wait for the next generation of graphics cards to be launched, but if you are not looking for a high-end graphics card, it will not be available until early next year. Therefore, I highly recommend considering this generation if it has a cheap price. I recently bought an RTX 3080 12GB.
Source: KOCPC Chinese