GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy 2022: Graphics Cards Ranked

Our GPU benchmarks hierarchy ranks all the current and previous generation graphics cards by performance, including all of the best graphics cards. Whether it’s playing games or doing high-end creative work like 4K video editing, your graphics card typically plays the biggest role in determining performance, and even the best CPUs for Gaming take a secondary role.

We’ve revamped our GPU testbed and updated all of our benchmarks for 2022, and are now finished retesting nearly every graphics card from the past several generations. Our full hierarchy using traditional rendering 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 6000-series and Nvidia’s RTX cards are present. Our latest addition to the tables is AMD’s Radeon RX 6400, a “true budget” graphics card.

Below our main tables, 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. We also have the legacy GPU hierarchy (without benchmarks) at the bottom of the article 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. We’ve now added the latest AMD RX 6950 XT, RX 6750 XT, and RX 6650 XT to the charts, along with the RTX 3090 Ti. All of those use custom third-party AIC models with factory overclocks, so they’re not quite on the same playing field as the rest of the reference cards.

We’re still waiting for the Intel Arc Alchemist desktop release, but otherwise we’re now looking forward to the latter part of the year when the Nvidia Ada and AMD RDNA 3 architectures should arrive. Actually, the latest rumors suggest Ada might land as early as August (but probably not), so we might not have that long to wait.

We’ve switched to a new Alder Lake Core i9-12900K testbed, changed up our test suite, and retested all of the past several generations of GPUs. Now let’s hit the benchmarks and tables.

Graphics Card Deals

The component shortages and skyrocketing demand that have been killing graphics card availability and GPU prices seem to be coming to an end. You can find many of the latest GPUs at prices approaching or even beating MSRP.

One alternative to buying a new graphics card is to purchase a prebuilt desktop that has your GPU of choice within. You can either pull the card and resell the PC or, choose a gaming desktop you really like and make it a complete upgrade. Here are some quick links to help you find a graphics card deal on a system if you go this route, along with a direct link so you can see what the latest prices are on the open market. 

GPU Benchmarks Ranking 2022

For our latest benchmarks, we test all GPUs at 1080p medium and 1080p ultra, and sort 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 Radeon RX 6950 XT (at least at 1080p 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. There are a few missing options (e.g., the GTX 1650 GDDR6, GT 1030, and several Titan cards), but otherwise it’s nearly complete now.

The eight games we’re using for our standard GPU benchmarks hierarchy are Borderlands 3 (DX12), Far Cry 6 (DX12), Flight Simulator (DX12), 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.

*: GPU couldn’t run all tests, so the overall score is slightly skewed at 1080p ultra.

Our updated test suite and testbed favor AMD’s GPUs slightly, particularly at 1080p and even 1440p — which is perhaps one more reason the RTX 3090 Ti exists, as it mostly retakes the throne at all resolutions, though the new 6950 XT reclaims top honors. Keep in mind that we’re not including any ray tracing or DLSS results in the above table, as we intend to use the same test suite with the same settings on all current and previous generation graphics cards.

AMD’s RX 6950 XT doesn’t massively boost performance, but it’s enough to make up the gap with the 3090 Ti, and it does so while costing over 40% less. AMD also wins, quite easily, in the performance per watt metric. Stepping down the list, the 3090 and 3080 12GB — an overclocked MSI model, since there are no reference 3080 12GB cards — place just ahead of the 6800 XT, followed by the 3080 Ti. The RX 6800 also beats the RTX 3070 Ti, while the RTX 3070 and RX 6700 XT are effectively tied.

The rankings favor AMD less at the lower portion of the chart, with the RTX 3060 and RX 6600 also tied, and the RTX 3050 easily eclipses the RX 6500 XT — not that it’s difficult to do so, as both the 4GB and 8GB RX 5500 XT also beat AMD’s latest budget offering.

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 architecture, 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.

Go back far enough, and you can see how modern games at ultra settings severely punish cards that don’t have more than 4GB VRAM. We’ve been saying for a few years now that 4GB is just scraping by, and 6GB or more is desirable. The GTX 1060 3GB, GTX 1050, and GTX 780 actually failed to run some of our tests, which skews their results a bit, even though they do better at 1080p medium.

Now let’s switch over to the ray tracing hierarchy.

Ray Tracing GPU Benchmarks Ranking 2022

Enabling ray tracing, particularly with demanding games like those we’re using in our DXR test suite, can cause framerates to drop off a cliff. We’re testing with “medium” and “ultra” ray tracing settings. Medium means using medium graphics settings but turning on ray tracing effects (set to “medium” if that’s an option), while ultra turns on all of the RT options at more or less maximum quality.

Because ray tracing is so much more demanding, we’re sorting these results by the 1080p medium scores. That’s also because the RX 6500 XT basically can’t handle ray tracing even at these settings, and testing at anything more than 1080p medium would be fruitless. We’ve finished testing all the current ray tracing capable GPUs, though there will be more in the future. We’re definitely curious to see if Intel’s Arc GPUs can do any better than the RX 6500 XT, and suspect the answer might be “nope” on the lower tier A300 series.

The six ray tracing games we’re using are Bright Memory Infinite, Control Ultimate Edition, Cyberpunk 2077, Fortnite, Metro Exodus Enhanced, and Minecraft — all of these use the DirectX 12 / DX12 Ultimate API. The fps score is the geometric mean (equal weighting) of the six games, and the percentage is scaled relative to the fastest GPU in the list, which in this case is the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti.

Where AMD can claim the top spot in our standard test suite at 1080p and 1440p, once we enable ray tracing, the best AMD can do is sixth place, just ahead of the RTX, RTX 3070 Ti. It’s a precipitous drop, and we’re not even using DLSS, which all six of our DXR games support.

You can see what DLSS Quality mode did for performance on the Asus RTX 3090 Ti in our review, but the short summary is that it boosted performance by 48% at 1080p ultra, 62% at 1440p ultra, and 89% at 4K ultra — with that last taking performance from a borderline unplayable 31 fps average up to a comfortable 60 fps. You can also legitimately use the Balanced and Performance modes without killing image quality, especially at 4K, which will deliver even larger gains.

AMD’s FSR 2.0 would prove beneficial here, if AMD can get widespread adoption — AMD’s fastest GPUs can barely manage 1440p at more than 30 fps. Also note that none of the GPUs can handle native 4K in all of the games, though the RTX 3080 was 45% faster than the RX 6900 XT, and the RTX 3090 Ti was 93% faster. Hopefully the upcoming Nvidia Ada and AMD RDNA 3 GPUs will be able to handle 4K at native resolution while reaching playable framerates, but even then we expect DLSS or FSR 2.0 will be necessary for 60 fps or more.

The midrange GPUs like the RTX 3070 and RX 6700 XT basically manage 1080p ultra and not much more, while the bottom tier of DXR-capable GPUs barely manage 1080p medium — and the RX 6500 XT can’t even do that, with single digit framerates in most of our test suite, and one game that wouldn’t even work at our chosen “medium” settings. (Control requires at least 6GB VRAM to let you enabled ray tracing.)

It’s also interesting to look at the generational performance of Nvidia’s RTX cards. The slowest 20-series GPU, the RTX 2060, still outperforms the new RTX 3050 by a bit, but the fastest RTX 2080 Ti comes in a bit behind the RTX 3070. Where the 2080 Ti basically doubled the performance of the 2060, the 3090 delivers about triple the performance of the 3050.

2020-2021 GPU Benchmarks Ranking

The results below are from our previous version of the GPU benchmarks hierarchy, using a different test suite and combining results from nine games with six resolution and setting combinations. All of the scores are combined (via a geometric mean calculation) into a single overall result, which tends to penalize the fastest and slowest GPUs — CPU bottlenecks come into play at 1080p medium, while VRAM limitations can kill performance at 4K ultra.

These results have not been updated since early 2022, when we added the RTX 3050 and RX 6500 XT to the list. We won’t be adding future GPUs to this table, so there’s no 3090 Ti, 6950 XT, 6750 XT, or 6650 XT, but it does help to provide a look at a slightly less demanding suite of games, where 6GB or more VRAM isn’t generally required at 1080p ultra settings. You can use these older results to help inform your purchase decisions, if you don’t typically run the latest games at maxed out settings.

Choosing a Graphics Card

Which graphics card do you need? To help you decide, we created this GPU benchmarks hierarchy consisting of dozens of GPUs from the past four generations of hardware. Not surprisingly, the fastest cards use either Nvidia’s Ampere architecture or AMD’s Big Navi. AMD’s latest graphics cards perform well without ray tracing, but tend to fall behind once RT gets enabled — even more so if you enable DLSS, which you should. GPU prices are still a massive hindrance to upgrading, unfortunately, and we’re likely at least six months away from hitting somewhat reasonable levels.

Of course it’s not just about playing games. Many applications use the GPU for other work, and we covered some professional GPU benchmarks in our RTX 3090 Ti review. But a good graphics card for gaming will typically do equally well in complex GPU computational workloads. Buy one of the top cards and you can run games at high resolutions and frame rates with the effects turned all the way up, and you’ll be able to do content creation work equally well. Drop down to the middle and lower portions of the list and you’ll need to start dialing down the settings to get acceptable performance in regular game play and GPU benchmarks.

It’s not just about high-end GPUs either, of course. We tested Intel’s Xe Graphics DG1, which basically competes with integrated graphics solutions. The results weren’t pretty, and we didn’t even try running any of those at settings beyond 1080p medium. Still, you can see where those GPUs land at the very bottom of the 2020-2021 GPU benchmarks list. Thankfully, Intel’s Arc Alchemist, aka DG2, appears to be cut from entirely different cloth. We hope, anyway.

If your main goal is gaming, you can’t forget about the CPU. Getting the best possible gaming GPU won’t help you much if your CPU is underpowered and/or out of date. So be sure to check out the Best CPUs for gaming page, as well as our CPU Benchmarks Hierarchy to make sure you have the right CPU for the level of gaming you’re looking to achieve.

Test System and How We Test for GPU Benchmarks

We’ve used two different PCs for our testing. The latest 2022 and later configuration uses an Alder Lake CPU and platform, while our previous testbed uses Coffee Lake and Z390. Here are the details of the two PCs.

Tom’s Hardware 2022 GPU Testbed

Intel Core i9-12900K (opens in new tab)
MSI Pro Z690-A WiFi DDR4 (opens in new tab)
Corsair 2x16GB DDR4-3600 CL16 (opens in new tab)
Crucial P5 Plus 2TB (opens in new tab)
Cooler Master MWE 1250 V2 Gold (opens in new tab)
Cooler Master PL360 Flux (opens in new tab)
Cooler Master HAF500
Windows 11 Pro 64-bit

Tom’s Hardware 2020–2021 GPU Testbed

Intel Core i9-9900K (opens in new tab)
Corsair H150i Pro RGB (opens in new tab)
MSI MEG Z390 Ace (opens in new tab)
Corsair 2x16GB DDR4-3200 (opens in new tab)
XPG SX8200 Pro 2TB (opens in new tab)
Windows 10 Pro (opens in new tab) (21H1)

For each graphics card, we follow the same testing procedure. We run one pass of each benchmark to “warm up” the GPU after launching the game, then run at least two passes at each setting/resolution combination. If the two runs are basically identical (within 0.5% or less difference), we use the faster of the two runs. If there’s more than a small difference, we run the test at least twice more to determine what “normal” performance is supposed to be.

We also look at all the data and check for anomalies, so for example RTX 3070 Ti, RTX 3070, and RTX 3060 Ti all generally going to perform within a narrow range — 3070 Ti is about 5% faster than 3070, which is about 5% faster than 3060 Ti. If we see games where there are clear outliers (i.e. performance is more than 10% higher for the cards just mentioned), we’ll go back and retest whatever cards are showing the anomaly and figure out what the “correct” result would be.

Due to the length of time required for testing each GPU, updated drivers and game patches inevitably will come out that can impact performance. We periodically retest a few sample cards to verify our results are still valid, and if not, we go through and retest the affected game(s) and GPU(s). We may also add games to our test suite over the coming year, if one comes out that is popular and conducive to testing — see our what makes a good game benchmark for our selection criteria.

GPU Benchmarks: Individual Game Charts

The above tables provide a summary of performance, but for those that want to see the individual game charts, for both the standard and ray tracing test suites, we’ve got those as well. These charts were up-to-date as of May 19, 2022, with testing conducted using the latest Nvidia and AMD drivers in most cases, though some of the cards were tested with slightly older drivers.

Note that we’re only including the past two generations of hardware in these charts, as otherwise things get too cramped — and you can argue that with 35 cards in the 1080p charts, we’re already well past that point. (Hint: Click the enlarge icon if you’re on PC.)

Also note that we’ve switched from DX12 to DX11 for Microsoft Flight Simulator testing, partly because DX12 started to have issues recently, partly because DX12 is still listed as “beta,” but mostly because we’ve determined DX11 runs faster — somethings by more than 10% — on most GPUs. We’ve retested all of the cards in DX11 mode now.

Power, Clocks, Temperatures, and Fan Speeds

While our GPU benchmarks hierarchy sorts things solely by performance, for those interested in power and other aspects of the GPUs, here are the appropriate charts.

Legacy GPU Hierarchy

Below is our legacy desktop GPU hierarchy dating back to the late 1990s. We have not tested most of these cards in many years, driver support has ended on most of these models, and the relative rankings are pretty coarse. Note that we also don’t factor in memory bandwidth or features like AMD’s Infinity Cache. The list below is mostly intended to show relative performance between architectures from a similar time period.

We sorted the table by the theoretical GFLOPS, though on architectures that don’t support unified shaders, we only have data for “Gops/s” (giga operations per second). That’s GeForce 7 and Radeon X1000 and earlier — basically anything from before 2007. We’ve put an asterisk (*) next to the GPU names for those cards, and they comprise the latter part of the table. Comparing pre-2007 GPUs against each other should be relatively meaningful, but trying to compare those older GPUs against newer GPUs gets a bit convoluted.

* – Denotes performance measured in gigaoperations per second, as opposed to GFLOPS. Older GPU architectures without unified shader support aren’t directly comparable with newer architectures.

Finding Discounts on the Best Graphics Cards

With all the GPU shortages these days, you’re unlikely to see huge sales on a graphics card, but you may find some savings by checking out the latest Newegg promo codes, Best Buy promo codes and Micro Center coupon codes.

For even more information, check out our Graphics Card Buyer’s Guide.

MORE: Best Graphics Cards for Gaming

MORE: Graphics Card Power Consumption Tested

MORE: How to Stress-Test Graphics Cards (Like We Do)

MORE: CPU Benchmarks

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