Our GPU benchmarks hierarchy ranks all the current and previous generation graphics cards by performance, and Tom’s Hardware exhaustively benchmarks current and previous generation GPUs, including all of the best graphics cards. Whether it’s playing games, running artificial intelligence workloads like Stable Diffusion, or doing professional video editing, your graphics card typically plays the biggest role in determining performance — even the best CPUs for Gaming take a secondary role.
The past two months has been nuts as far as new GPUs go. We had four new GPUs from Nvidia and AMD: The RTX 4070 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super, RTX 4080 Super, and RX 7600 XT, plus the RX 7900 GRE has arrived in the U.S. There were many sleepless nights, but we’ve finally got all the updated numbers for the hierarchy ready. We’re (still) retesting GPUs on a slightly revamped test suite, using a Core i9-13900K instead of a Core i9-12900K. All our recent reviews use the updated test PC, but our hierarchy continues to use the older PC — but the charts at the bottom of the page are from the new testbed.
Our full GPU hierarchy using traditional rendering (aka, rasterization) comes first, and below that we have our ray tracing GPU benchmarks hierarchy. Those of course require a ray tracing capable GPU so only AMD’s RX 7000/6000-series, Intel’s Arc, and Nvidia’s RTX cards are present. The results are all without enabling DLSS, FSR, or XeSS on the various cards, mind you.
Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace architecture powers its latest generation RTX 40-series, with new features like DLSS 3 Frame Generation — and for all RTX cards, Nvidia DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction (which is only used in a few games so far). AMD’s RDNA 3 architecture powers the RX 7000-series, with six desktop cards filling out the product stack. Meanwhile, Intel’s Arc Alchemist architecture brings a third player into the dedicated GPU party, even if it’s more of a competitor to the previous generation midrange offerings.
On page two, you’ll find our 2020–2021 benchmark suite, which has all of the previous generation GPUs running our older test suite running on a Core i9-9900K testbed. It’s no longer being actively updated. We also have the legacy GPU hierarchy (without benchmarks, sorted by theoretical performance) for reference purposes.
The following tables sort everything solely by our performance-based GPU gaming benchmarks, at 1080p “ultra” for the main suite and at 1080p “medium” for the DXR suite. Factors including price, graphics card power consumption, overall efficiency, and features aren’t factored into the rankings here. The current 2024 results use an Alder LakeCore i9-12900K testbed. Now let’s hit the benchmarks and tables.
For our latest GPU benchmarks, we’ve tested nearly every GPU released in the past seven years, plus some 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.
You can also see the above summary chart showing the relative performance of the cards we’ve tested across the past several generations of hardware at 1080p ultra — swipe through the above gallery if you want to see the 1080p medium, 1440p, and 4K ultra images. There are a few missing options (e.g., the GT 1030, RX 550, and several Titan cards), but otherwise, it’s basically complete. Note that we also have data in the table below for some of the other older GPUs.
The eight games we’re using for our standard GPU benchmarks hierarchy are Borderlands 3 (DX12), Far Cry 6 (DX12), Flight Simulator (DX11 Nvidia, DX12 AMD/Intel), Forza Horizon 5 (DX12), Horizon Zero Dawn (DX12), Red Dead Redemption 2 (Vulkan), Total War Warhammer 3 (DX11), and Watch Dogs Legion (DX12). The fps score is the geometric mean (equal weighting) of the eight games. Note that the specifications column links directly to our original review for the various GPUs.
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