And with the extra genuine performance of the upscaled frames and the interpolated smoothness of the AI-generated frames, the performance improvement is spectacular where DLSS 3 is available. Which should be more and more often, with Nvidia's Streamline SDK offering devs a one-stop option for enabling it and other vendors' upscaling tech too. We're not talking the cheapest of chips here, either. The Radeon RX 6700 XT is still a high-ish-end card by most counts. But its price tag is slipping into the more affordable end of the market by the week, and that's high up on a list of things we absolutely love to see.

What AMD wants you to know, however, is that this is a 1440p graphics card, designed to top 60 fps in the latest titles at the top settings. And, honestly, it goes well beyond that outside of, again, that brutal Cyberpunk 2077 outlier. AMD's FSR 2.0 would prove beneficial here, if AMD can get widespread adoption, but it still trails DLSS. Right now, only one of the games in our DXR suite ( Cyberpunk 2077) has FSR2 support, while three more from our rasterization suite support FSR2. By comparison, all of the DXR games we're testing support DLSS2, plus another five from our rasterization suite — and three of the games even support DLSS3. Even at 1080p medium, a relatively tame setting for DXR (DirectX Raytracing), the RTX 4090 roars past all contenders and leads the previous generation RTX 3090 Ti by 41%. At 1080p ultra, the lead grows to 53%, and it's nearly 64% at 1440p. Nvidia made claims before the RTX 4090 launch that it was "2x to 4x faster than the RTX 3090 Ti" — factoring in DLSS 3's Frame Generation technology — but even without DLSS 3, the 4090 is 72% faster than the 3090 Ti at 4K. I get it. It's been tough. You've been waiting for two years to upgrade your old graphics card. You've waited out the GPU supply chain drought, the mining apocalypse, and all the ensuing, brutal price hikes. You've even waited out the temptation to spend on a last-gen GPU even though prices have dropped ahead of this new suite of Nvidia and AMD cards.Oh, how I wish I could tell you it was an unreserved 'yes!' But, while this is absolutely the card you should buy if you were previously considering an RTX 3060 Ti or RX 6700 XT, all because of its gaming performance lead, I don't feel great about making that recommendation. For our latest benchmarks, we've tested nearly every GPU released in the past seven years, plus a few extras, at 1080p medium and 1080p ultra, and sorted the table by the 1080p ultra results. Where it makes sense, we also test at 1440p ultra and 4K ultra. All of the scores are scaled relative to the top-ranking 1080p ultra card, which in our new suite is the RTX 4090 — especially at 4K and 1440p.

Every new GPU generation offers new features and possibilities. But rasterized rendering is still the most important metric for general gaming performance across the PC gaming world. Sure, Nvidia GPUs might well be better at the ray tracing benchmarks they more or less instigated, but when it comes to standard gaming performance AMD's latest line up can certainly keep pace. In gaming terms, the 4K performance of the RTX 4070 Ti is impressive even without upscaling, and is rather astounding with it. DLSS 2 upscaling with quality mode is supported in most ray tracing games and can boost performance an additional 30~50 percent (depending on the game, resolution, and settings used). FSR 2 and XeSS support can provide a similar uplift, but FSR 2 is only in about a third as many games right now, and XeSS support is even less common. The increase in memory capacity from 16GB to 24GB with the RX 7900 XTX is a bonus, and the ray tracing performance on RDNA 3 is much more convincing to make me part with my money. One of our criticisms of the RTX 4060 Ti is its weak 8GB and 128-bit memory configuration. The RX 7700 XT's 12GB of VRAM and 192-bit bus is something that’s more appropriate for a 2023 mid-range graphics card. It will hold the card in good stead for longer into the future.That's certainly one of the benefits I was alluding to earlier in the RTX 4070 vs. RTX 3080 debate, but the key one is the fact the Ada card has access to DLSS 3.0 and Frame Generation. And when that comes into play it's a game changer, especially for titles that otherwise would struggle at ray-traced 4K settings. But the memory spec on the Arc A750, for a card of its price, is immense. Mostly that's because Intel's Arc A750 is more graphics card than it should be for the money. Intel invested on some beefy specs for its first-generation GPUs, including a massive memory spec, and ultimately the drivers couldn't get to where Intel wanted them to be. That means some games don't play nicely on the Arc A750, but it's not all bad. It also means that the Arc A750 has a lot of untapped potential. I was surprised how small the Radeon RX 7600 reference card is. In fact, it's pretty much tiny compared to some of the triple slot behemoths we've seen. That alone will impress some buyers with compact cases looking to make use of its impressive display capabilities and media engine.

Where it looks far more positive is up against the new AMD RDNA 3 cards, the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT. It is generally slower than the top Radeon GPU, but against the still more expensive RX 7900 XT the RTX 4070 Ti regularly posts higher 4K performance. The unlaunching and subsequent rebadging and repricing of the RTX 4080 12GB was the best thing to happen to this third-tier Ada GPU. Now and forever to be known as the RTX 4070 Ti, this is the card that now makes it impossible to recommend AMD's RX 7900 XT. Still, the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX has a lot going for it. We're used to seeing GPU generations that arrive on smaller process nodes, redesigned architectures, larger caches, reworked shaders, more memory—the list goes on. But all of that, all at once? That's what RDNA 3 delivers: the whole lot in one fell swoop. The RTX 4060 is a very power efficient GPU, too. It's well suited to gamers with smaller cases or cases with poor airflow as it doesn't dump a lot of heat. Turning to the previous generation GPUs, the RTX 20-series and GTX 16-series chips end up scattered throughout the results, along with the RX 5000-series. The general rule of thumb is that you get one or two "model upgrades" with the newer architectures, so for example the RTX 2080 Super comes in just below the RTX 3060 Ti, while the RX 5700 XT lands a few percent behind the RX 6600 XT.Surely, the Ada-based successor to the RTX 3060 Ti is going to be thegraphics card of this generation for the GPU-thirsty masses. Surely, surely, now it's time to pull the trigger on a new RTX 40-series card. We've used two different PCs for our testing. The latest 2022/2023 configuration uses an Alder Lake CPU and platform (with Raptor Lake results coming soon), while our previous testbed uses Coffee Lake and Z390. Here are the details of the two PCs.