Nvidia which card to get

HPE 1. NZXT 1. GPU Chip Make. AMD Other 1. GeForce RTX 8. GeForce RTX GeForce RTX 2. GeForce RTX 1. GeForce GTX 2. Other Quadro GPU 2. Other Radeon GPU 9. Other 3. Radeon RX XT 1. Core Clock Speed. Less than MHz 1. Memory Clock Speed. Less than MHz 9. Ray Tracing VR Ready SLI Ready 3.

BestBuyCanada OneDealOutlet Canada Best Buy Business Tecnix Deal Targets 8. Hoengager 8. Best Computers 6. Aero Malls Inc. MS Tech 5. Newseed 5. VLCanada 3. AVShop 2. HM Tech 2. ITFactory 2. As in, practically non-existent. Frankly, even previous generation hardware is currently overpriced and out of stock.

Hopefully, issues with availability as well as bots buying cards to sell them at higher prices will ease in the coming months, as we get further from launch and more silicon comes of the fabrication lines. There are hundreds of graphics cards from dozens of manufacturers, but only two companies actually make the GPUs that power these components: Nvidia and AMD —although Intel's Xe Graphics could arrive this year.

That said, the realistically lit elephant in the room that we've been ignoring thus-far is real-time ray tracing. AMD "Team Red" stepped into this game in a big way in with its RX cards, but it's still on its first go-round with real-time ray tracing, and so lags behind Nvidia on this front. Still, the rollout of games that make use of and specifically good use of ray tracing has been slow.

There's no doubt that more games are adding RT support—and many more will in the future as ray tracing is also supported by the recent Sony PlayStation 5 and Microsoft Series X consoles. But as of this writing, only roughly 20 AAA games have ray tracing support depending on what you classify as a AAA title and substantive ray tracing , with perhaps ten more slated to launch this year. Of those, we really only think two Control and Cyberpunk really do the tech justice.

So weigh the importance of ray tracing performance with how interested you are in these games, how important the best possible visuals are to your enjoyment, and how much future-proofing you want baked into your GPU. It can deliver improved performance with less of a hit on frame rates than is typical from maxing out your monitor's resolution the traditional way. But again, support for this feature is limited to a subset of games admittedly a growing one.

But it isn't ready for a 1. And that's before you account for the currently inflated prices. As is often the case, top-end cards aren't worth the money unelss for some reason you absolutely have to have the best performance possible.

Droping a teir or two down will give you most of the performance for far less money. And honestly, until ongoing stock issues subside, the whole issue of price is up in the air. Because unless you're lucky or fast and usually both , you'll likely either be paying above MSRP or waiting for prices to come down as availability improves. Here's a breakdown of the major current GPUs and where they stand, grouped roughly by price and performance.

For example, note that the GTX is with the 'mid-range' now, since it's about as fast as a Super. Remember that not all cards with a given GPU will perform exactly the same. For more detail, check out the GPU Benchmarks page. And the card requirements of course increase with newer, higher-resolution headsets. Game support is still spotty, and only a few games truly benefit from ray tracing, to the extent where we miss it if it's not enabled.

Even after you decide what GPU you're after say, for example, an RTX Ti , you'll usually be faced with plenty of options in terms of cooler design and brand or manufacturer.

Nvidia makes and sells its own cards under the Founders Edition moniker for higher-end models, while AMD licenses its reference design to other manufacturers.

Both companies' GPUs appear in third-party cards from several different vendors. More expensive third-party cards will have elaborate coolers, extra fans, and often higher clock speeds, but they can also be more expensive than the reference card. Which I guess is also why it's so tricky to get hold of. As a red team alternative to Nvidia's high-end graphics cards, there have been few finer than the RX XT.

A highly competitive card that comes so close to its rival, with a nominal performance differential to the RTX , is truly an enthusiast card worth consideration for any PC gamer with 4K in their sights. All are available today and with two year's worth of developer support in the bank. Yet we're still big fans of what AMD has managed to accomplish with the RX XT, a return to form for the Radeon Technology Group that injects some much-needed competition into the GPU market and offers a worthy red team alternative for any high-end gaming PC build.

That's why we love it so; it's a great GPU for the full stack of resolutions and has decent ray tracing capability to boot, courtesy of second-generation RT Cores.

Perhaps most impressive of this graphics card is how it stacks up to the series generation: It topples the RTX Super in nearly every test. Perhaps the only high-end Ampere that's anything close to reasonably affordable, the RTX is also impressive for its ability to match the top-string Turing graphics card, the RTX Ti, for less than half of its price tag.

In return, you're gifted a 4K-capable graphics card that doesn't require too much fiddling to reach playable, if not high, framerates. And it'll absolutely smash it at p, no question about that. Its gaming performance credentials are undoubtedly impressive, but what makes the RTX our pick for the sensible PC gaming connoisseur is the entire Nvidia ecosystem underlying the RTX stack today.

DLSS is a neat trick for improving performance, with only a nominal loss in clarity, and other features such as Broadcast and Reflex go a long way to sweetening the deal. And it gets kind of close, too, with 4K performance a little off the pace of the RTX —and all for one-third off the asking price. For that reason, it's simply the better buy for any PC gamer without any ulterior motives of the pro-creator variety.

But there's a reason it's not number one in our graphics card guide today, and that's simply due to the fact it's not that much better than an RTX , and sometimes not at all.

Yet, inevitably its ray-tracing acceleration lags behind the competition. With that in mind, for raw gaming alone, the RX XT is a cheaper alternative to the RTX is still a victim to its own extreme price tag. This colossal graphics card is supremely powerful but far more fitting of Titan credentials than GeForce ones. It's not built with your average gamer in mind.

Instead, it's targeting creative professionals and compute-intensive application acceleration, and that's why it doesn't come with your average price tag, either. As immense in price tag as it is in stature, the question on everyone's lips is: Is it worth it? For gamers, no. It's just not much quicker than the RTX But for pro-creators, for whom time is money and where lower render time has a direct correlation with how much they can earn, that's where the RTX comes into its own.

It's for that reason that we've placed this card near the bottom of our list, but since we know PC gamers will undoubtedly spend ungodly quantities of cash to save face and ensure bragging rights, it's still worth a mention. After all, it is the most powerful gaming graphics card on the planet right now, whether it's a great deal or not. As the only one of the AMD RX series cards to launch without undercutting a direct Nvidia Ampere rival, the straight RX feels as though it's almost been cut adrift.

It's a strange situation because historically, we've always been keen to recommend the second string of any Radeon release. AMD tends to launch main series cards in pairs, one with the full might of the new GPU and a secondary card with a slightly stripped back chip. Best gaming PC : the top pre-built machines from the pros Best gaming laptop : perfect notebooks for mobile gaming.

Normally they perform at a similar level for a lot less cash.