Although the performance of new graphics cards is getting stronger and stronger, providing a more extreme gaming experience, the relative price is also rising, making it really not easy for students or people with a small budget to get started. In fact, there are already many old graphics cards that are powerful enough to handle the games or needs you want to play. However, how to choose the one with the highest CP value requires a lot of research.
The good news is that TechSpot, a well-known computer hardware foreign media, recently announced their latest annual guide report for second-hand graphics cards. It not only uses three well-known games for benchmark comparison, but also directly calculates the cost price of each FPS, allowing us to quickly find which graphics card has the highest CP value that fits our budget. Those who plan to upgrade must not miss it.
The article is very long, so here I will summarize a few key points for you. Those who are interested in learning more can click on the link at the end of the article to read it.
The three games tested by TechSpot are “Battlefield V”, “Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint”, and “Formula 1 2019 (F1 2019)”. The platform is INTEL Core i9-9900K (overclocked to 5 GHz) and 16GB DDR4-3400 memory to ensure that the graphics card does not hit any bottlenecks.
The first image shows the average and lowest FPS across all three games for all graphics cards, at 1080p and medium settings. TechSpot said that if the graphics card cannot provide at least an average performance of 40fps, then don’t consider it. For NVDIA, it is not required below GeForce GTX 670, and for AMD, it is below Radeon RX 460:
The resolution is also 1080p, but after adjusting the image quality setting to high level, it can be eliminated some. NVDIA GTX 680 or above can have at least an average of 40fps, and AMD Radeon R9 380X or above. As for which image to choose, it all depends on the image quality settings you want. I would also like to add that these three are all new games launched in the past 1 to 2 years, and the performance requirements are not low. If you want to play older games, then basically mid-range image quality is enough:
Next, TechSpot converted the mid-level image quality results into the cost per fps. Graphics cards with higher performance at the top usually cost more, but not necessarily in the middle and below. Some cost less, but have better performance scores:
If you still don’t know how to choose, it doesn’t matter. TechSpot has also compiled the best choices in three price ranges.
For people who don’t have a very high budget but want to buy a cheap second-hand graphics card with a high CP value, the Radeon R9 270X and R9 380 can barely be considered, but the R9 380 is better, especially the 4GB version, which provides a fairly cheap fps cost.
If you have a little more budget, the Radeon RX 470 is more cost-effective and the performance is even better.
Those with a mid-range budget can consider the RX 480, RX 580 or GTX 1060 6GB first, with the first two AMD cards selling better. The more expensive ones are the GTX 1070 and Vega 56.
As for those who can spend around $300, RTX 2060 and GTX 1080 are both good choices.
In any case, as far as today’s games are concerned, when choosing a graphics card, you must choose at least a 4GB version. 2GB is no longer enough.
Source: KOCPC Chinese