Graphics cards official website fall into two distinct classes: consumer cards meant for gaming and light content creation work, and dedicated cards meant for professional workstations and geared toward scientific computing, calculations, and artificial intelligence work. This guide, and our reviews, will focus on the former, but we’ll touch on workstation cards a little bit, later on. The key sub-brands you need to know across these two fields are Nvidia’s GeForce and AMD’s Radeon RX (on the consumer side of things), and Nvidia’s Titan and Quadro, as well as AMD’s Radeon Pro and Radeon Instinct (in the pro workstation field). As recently as 2017, Nvidia had the very high end of the consumer graphics-card market more or less to itself, and it still dominates there.
Please note: These graphics card rankings are approximate. Performance will vary from game to game. When possible, we suggest doing your own performance research on the games you want to play. In some games, some graphics cards will perform slightly better than cards above them, or slightly worse than cards below.
Over the last two years, at times buying a video card felt like dishing out for a rare flower bulb, not a PC component, amid some 21st-century tulip frenzy. The cryptomining crazes of 2017 and 2018 drove wild demand for graphics horsepower—the kind of computing muscle best suited to amateur and professional digital currency mining—and thus for certain video cards. Prices for even modest mainstream cards flew sky-high. For a time, the market went downright bonkers. Some cards traded for double or more than their list prices, if you could find them in stock at all.
If your goal is a high-end graphics card (we define that, these days, as cards at $500 or more) for playing games at 4K, and you plan to use the card for three to five years, the upper end of the market is mostly Nvidia’s game at the moment. But that could shift as 2019 progresses, with AMD’s next-generation “Navi” cards expected later this year. Based on a new 7nm manufacturing process, these cards could change AMD’s fortunes in the graphics space. The Radeon VII, its first 7nm-built video card, is a competent offering for 1440p/4K play and content creators, but it doesn’t quite topple the RTX 2080 in most respects. (See our face-off AMD Radeon VII vs. Nvidia RTX 2080: Which High-End Gaming Card to Buy?)
Since most people purchase graphics cards for their gaming capability, we view real gameplay benchmarks (as opposed to synthetic benchmarking programs) as the best way to measure the performance of a graphics card. Graphics card performance can vary from game to game, but this comparison table reflects the general rankings of each card.
There are so many workstation graphics card models out there, that it has become quite impossible to keep up with the different configurations. That is why we decided to compile this comparison guide. It is designed to be an easy reference for those who are interested in comparing the specifications of the various workstation graphics cards in the market, as well as those already obsolescent or obsolete.
Currently covering 207 workstation graphics cards, this comprehensive comparison will allow you to easily compare up to 24 different specifications for each and every workstation graphics card. We hope it will prove to be a useful reference to you. We will keep this guide updated regularly, so please check back for the latest updates.
It’s up to you who wins the fiery contest of Nvidia vs AMD, although we will say this: Nvidia is unmatched in the 4K market right now. If it helps any, the RTX 2080 Ti is probably your best bet if you want your PC to keep up with your Ultra HD display – as long as you can afford it. If you’re on a budget, though, Nvidia and AMD graphics cards will be about the same, at least until lower-end Turing cards make their way to the public.
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