Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about whether or not you should buy a new graphics card right away. While these discussions always take place at the end of a generation, they are more common than ever right now because it has been so difficult to purchase a graphics card, or do so for a reasonable price, for the past two years. We will thus examine what we consider to be the finest value category today.
Our recommendation has been the same up to this point and for the last few months: try to avoid purchasing a high-end graphics card like the RTX 3080 or greater. These are still pricey in our opinion, and we anticipate further price reductions, especially once the upcoming next-generation GPUs become available. However, if you need a GPU badly and have waited through the cryptocurrency boom, we advise choosing something more mid-range to low-end because these items won’t depreciate as much in price and their successors are still a long way off.
As a result, we have been advising components like the Radeon RX 6600, which is currently available for less than $300. However, it wouldn’t be fair to only suggest the Radeon without a GeForce alternative, so we have the somewhat more costly, $330 GeForce RTX 3050.
Today we’ll compare the two utilising the Ryzen 7 5800X3D and 32GB of dual-rank, dual-channel memory across 51 games at 1080p and 1440p. Radeon Adrenalin Edition 22.6.1 and GeForce GPU Game Ready 516.59 were utilised as display drivers. As per usual, we’ll review the data for around a dozen of the games we evaluated before examining all 51 games together in one graph.
Benchmarks
We can see that both GPUs maintain frame rates above 100 fps at 1080p and even 1440p by starting with Fortnite and choosing the medium quality option. Nevertheless, when examining 1% lows at 1080p, the Radeon 6600 was up to 20% quicker, while at 1440p, it was 21% faster. That was a noteworthy performance benefit that gamers will undoubtedly perceive.
