GPU Tier List: Graphics Cards Ranked by What They Run

Nothing in the graphics market has moved much for a year. The current generation launched, the promised mid-cycle refresh did not arrive, and the cards on shelves today are broadly the cards that were on shelves last autumn. That is unusual, and it makes a tier list more useful than it normally is: the answer you get here will still be the answer in three months.

How we sort these, and what we refuse to do

Every hierarchy worth reading is built on measured results, and every one of them is closed. The two best-known are all-rights-reserved with no export. The one company that will sell you a licensed dataset forbids using it to rebuild the kind of table you are looking at. The largest public benchmark corpus is owned outright by the company that collects it, under a licence that says so in as many words.

So we had a choice: buy a dataset we could not legally display, scrape somebody else and pretend the numbers were ours, or publish something different. We publish something different.

The tier is a statement about purpose, not a score. A card lands in a band because of the resolution it was built to drive at high settings — a judgement we make from published specifications, and one you can check, because every row links to the manufacturer table it came from. Our graphics card buying guide covers the specifications behind that judgement in more depth.

Memory is the specification that ages worst

If you read one column, read the memory one. Shader performance degrades gracefully — a card that is slightly too slow gives you a lower frame rate, and you turn a setting down. Insufficient video memory does not degrade gracefully. It stutters, hitches, and drops frames in a pattern that an average frame rate hides completely, and no setting short of texture quality fixes it.

This matters more than it used to because the entry bands are where manufacturers economise. The same model name is now sold with two different memory capacities in more than one range, at a price gap far smaller than the difference in service life.

Which band should you be shopping in

You own a 4K display and will not compromise. The top band, and only the top band. Everything below it is making a trade you said you would not make.

You own a high-refresh 1440p monitor. The second band is the target, and the third band with a setting or two lowered is a perfectly respectable place to land. This is where most of the money in the market sensibly goes, and our 1440p GPU roundup narrows this band down to specific cards.

You own a 1080p monitor and keep hardware for years. Shop the third band rather than the fourth. You are buying headroom, and the memory capacity is what you are buying it with.

You play competitive shooters. The bottom band at high frame rates is a better purchase than a mid-band card at ultra settings. Those games are built to run on modest hardware and reward refresh rate over fidelity.

The thing this table cannot tell you

It cannot tell you what any of these cost today. Street prices have sat well above list for the whole of this generation, the gap moves weekly, and the memory market has made the situation worse rather than better. A card two bands down at a real price frequently beats the one you wanted at the price it is actually selling for. Check before you commit, and check the card fits your case and your power supply while you are at it. Our processor tier list applies the same approach to the other component that decides your frame rate.

Free tool PC Build Compatibility Checker — Will your GPU, PSU, cooler and case actually fit together? →