Most powerful graphics card 2024

If you’re looking for the most powerful graphics cards this year, here are some of the best graphics cards to enjoy the latest AAA titles and play at 4K resolutions without lowering the game’s graphics settings. If you’re looking for the best of the best in graphics cards to spice up your PC, we’ve rounded up a list of the 10 most powerful graphics cards for 2023 (ordered from highest to lowest).

It’s time to discover which are the ten most powerful graphics cards of 2023. The introduction of new graphics cards, as well as catalog refreshes by NVIDIA and AMD, forced us to make significant changes to this new list of the most powerful graphics cards in existence today. We’ve taken into account the combined performance in rasterization and ray tracing to make this choice, but put more weight on the latter as it’s a much more demanding technology, so keep that in mind when evaluating it.

1. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090

It’s the most monstrous model we’ve ever seen, with a massive 60mm thickness in every way and an impressive unibody aluminum heatsink that retains the Ampere aesthetic. No less with a 23-phase PCB to power the GDDR6X AD102 chipset with 24GB of VRAM exceeding 450 W, 128 SM and 2.5 GHz clock. Nvidia offers the best-in-class Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics card with less detailed quality, originality and large dimensions. We have a horizontal hinged opening system built on a hard cover that leaves the card in a much more slanted screen type position than the previous generation.

Measuring 336mm long, 140mm wide and 60mm thick, it is the largest Nvidia model along with the RTX 3090 Ti. We continue to have the white LED lighting area in the “GEFORCE RTX” logo and the triangle leading to the top fan. We position ourselves on the underside of the Nvidia RTX 4090 to see a large 115mm diameter axial fan in print mode, which makes better use of the heatsink area just above the PCB and chipset.

The Nvidia RTX 4090’s port panel has remained unchanged compared to the previous generation and comes with 3x DisplayPort 1.4a and 1x HDMI 2.1. Above them is a huge opening that extends to the far left edge where the air is discharged. Once again, the HDMI 2.1 port supports maximum resolutions of 8K @120 FPS and 60 FPS compressed and 4K @144 Hz uncompressed, with more bandwidth than the working version of DisplayPort.

As for the power system, we only have a cutting-edge 16-pin combined PCIe header, which is Nvidia’s way of minimizing the amount of headers on the PCB and cables in the PSU. Nvidia is launching its new Ada Lovelace architecture, based on TSMC’s 4nm manufacturing process. Less lithography means more transistors per unit area, and this Nvidia RTX 4090 has a 608.5mm 2 chipset with 76.3 billion transistors, more than double the 28.3 billion transistors of the RTX 3090 Ti. This allows to improve IPC and energy efficiency.

2. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080

A new member has joined Ada Lovelace’s list of graphics cards: Nvidia RTX 4080 is considered the most anticipated option for gamers due to its more limited price compared to the 4090. Initial tests show a performance increase of 50% to 55% in comparison. This card with 16 GB GDDR6X, 76 SM 4 times less than 3080 Ti, lower consumption with 320W TBP and still much higher performance than 3080 Ti.

The Nvidia RTX 4090’s port panel comes with 3x DisplayPort 1.4a and 1x HDMI 2.1. This card continues to use PCIe 4.0 or Gen4 interface with 16 active lanes, which is more than enough for the capacity of current monitors. The Nvidia RTX 4080 is the second model to implement the impressive Ada Lovelace architecture based on the 4nm TSMC manufacturing process customized by Nvidia. After seeing what it’s capable of on the RTX 4090, it’s the architecture that probably represents the biggest increase in performance compared to the previous generation.

3. AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX

Radeon RX 7900 XTX is the most powerful and at the same time a clear representative of this new generation. It costs a little more, but offers great numbers and is generally a more balanced card. One improvement we’ve seen in this generation, which the brand shares with its latest processors, is that they combine high operating frequencies while maintaining the consumption profiles of the previous generation. This model runs on a 355 W thermal design with two 8-pin PEG connectors with 150 W each as the main power connectors and takes the rest of the PCI Express 4.0 16x interface, which should deliver up to 150 W on compatible motherboards.

The Radeon RX 7900 XTX is built using a seven-chip design whose main design is called GCD, it is the largest with a surface area of 300 mm2 and is manufactured using the TSMC 5N process. This model is accompanied by six additional chips surrounding it, forming the 96 MB Infinity Cache 2. These flakes have a surface area of 37 mm2 and are produced using an older and less expensive process based on TSMC’s 6N technology. Despite having less cache than the previous generation, it delivers up to 2.7x faster access speeds, reaching 5.3 TBps.

4. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti released under the GA102 GPU model based on Ampere architecture. It comes with 28000M transistors at just 628mm2 thanks to Samsung’s 8nm chip. The GeForce RTX 3090 is a devilishly large GPU with TITAN-class performance. NVIDIA’s second-generation RTX architecture powered by Ampere doubles ray tracing and AI performance with enhanced ray tracing (RT) cores and Tensor cores, and newly developed stream multiprocessors. It also packs an astonishing 24GB of G6X memory to deliver the ultimate gaming experience.

5. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090

This NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 is not only one of the best graphics cards (it’s also one of the most expensive), it’s also an all-around beast. It is built on a chip with an area of about 628 mm2, using an 8 nm chip from Samsung to ‘pack’ approximately 28 billion transistors.

The Nvidia RTX 3090 is the new flagship of the green brand, both in the field of 4K and 8K video games and in the field of design. They should be proud of this new conceptual aesthetic, thanks to the double-sided fan cooler that offers great aesthetics and finishes. This graphics card is mainly aimed at content creators and works in 8K, not giving up brutal gaming performance from 4K with RTX + DLSS. Its Ampere architecture and 10496 Shaders are record breaking.

6. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti

The next model to highlight is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, one of the best graphics cards today. In this case it is based on the GA102-225 variant of the Ampere microarchitecture. It also has the same dimensions and number of transistors as its older brother, the 3090. But there are some technical differences:

The Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti is a model designed for gaming with an RTX 3090 based GPU that drops CUDA Cores to 10240 and yes, main memory using GDDR6X and 384 bus bits. It’s a real beast, filling the tiny gap between Nvidia’s top models, with the Radeon RX 6900 XT and 6800 becoming direct competitors.

7. AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT

This serves as the biggest jump between the two architectures, as Nvidia does. More efficiency, higher clock frequencies, more powerful RT cores, the premiere of IA cores or 20GB GDDR6 are some of the biggest innovations of this generation, not to mention the high-range preset price. This AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT comes in a compact, hard cardboard box that is all black in color and has a case-style opening.

The first thing that impresses us about this AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT is its size compared to the massive coolers in the Nvidia RTX 4080 and 4090 reference. This builds AMD’s reputation when it comes to thermal efficiency for a GPU consuming 300W. Its dimensions are 276 mm long and 50 mm thick. In the design part, the aluminum outer cover is all black, elegant but a bit bland in our opinion so it looks like any decoration or color on the heatsink has been removed.

The 3 surface mounted fans are identical with an effective diameter of 80mm whose blades are combined with an outer ring that allows to concentrate the airflow on the heatsink. The panel consists of 4 ports: 2x DisplayPort 2.1, 1x USB Type C, 1x HDMI 2.1. AMD Radiance Display Engine is a new technology that integrates with DisplayPort 2.1 and HDMI 2.1 supporting 12-bit and REC2020 color space in high-performance monitors.

8. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 12GB

Another of the most powerful graphics cards, such as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080, almost touches the heels of its predecessor, although it costs a little more. Based on the Ampere microarchitecture like the previous Graphzilla ones, the GA102-200 model measures 628mm and comes with approximately 28,000 million transistors manufactured with Samsung’s 8nm chip.

Their analysis confirms that the 12GB RTX 3080 is slightly more powerful than the RTX 3080, thanks to the increase in shaders and memory bus. The performance difference can be up to 10% in certain games below 4K resolution, but will decrease when the resolution is lowered due to the lower impact of bandwidth.

DLDSR integrates an artificial intelligence network that requires fewer input pixels to operate optimally. This is a very important improvement, because thanks to this new network, an image created using DLDSR at 2.25X has almost the same quality and superior performance as an image created with DSR at 4X.

9. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080

The first model to be up to 80% more powerful than the RTX 2080 Super and superior to the 2080 Ti. The 8 nm Samsung Ampere architecture offers a massive 8704 CUDA Core, 272 TMU and 10GB of 320-bit GDDR6X memory.

We haven’t seen anything like it since the switch between Nvidia GTX 200 and GTX 400, and Nvidia’s new architecture has improved graphics performance so markedly that it will leave everything known in its infancy, including current GPUs and of course consoles. . There are many sweet moments coming for every gamer using PC as a gaming platform, so get ready to play at 4K@100 FPS.

10. AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT

The AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT brings a thicker triple fan cooler extended up to 100mm with dual BIOS and triple power connectors. Additionally, the steam room on the GPU is used to improve temperatures. AMD also offers the RDNA 2 refresh in the 6950 XT version, raising the GPU and memory clock frequency up to 2250 MHz as well as TBP or total consumption to increase performance.

We continue with the port configuration of the RX 6950 XT Gaming OC, which will surprise no one: 1 x HDMI 2.1, 3 x DisplayPort 1.4a. The HDMI 2.1 port is the most capable port, supporting 8K DSC at 120Hz as well as uncompressed 4K at 144Hz.