AMD’s RX Vega, the gaming version of AMD’s long-awaited high-end GPU architecture, finally saw its release this month. While RX Vega 56, the smaller brother of the full Vega GPU, offered great price-to-performance compared to NVIDIA’s price-equivalent GTX 1070, the story is different with RX Vega 64 when comparing it to its price-equivalent, the GTX 1080.
AMD first mentioned the Vega GPU architecture over a year ago, even before the launch of its Polaris graphics cards. It was slated for an early 2017 release, but due to mysterious circumstances was pushed back and back, theoretically coming to market in late June with a Titan X-style Frontier Edition — a prosumer Vega GPU-based graphics card starting at $999.
Now, it’s mid-August, and AMD has finally released the gaming-oriented RX Vega 64, with its smaller brother Vega 56 coming on the 28th of August. But how do they compare to the current competition, the GTX 1070 and 1080? Let’s find out.
Just two weeks following its official announcement, the GTX 1080 Ti has launched at $700, replacing the Titan X Pascal on the highest end of our graphics card recommendations. Simply put: It is the new king of graphics cards, inching out ahead of the $1,200 Titan X in overall gaming performance. On average, the new 1080 Ti is 2-3% faster than the Titan X, while priced $500 lower.
We have added the 1080 Ti to our GPU recommendations in the Exceptional, Enthusiast, Extremist, and Monstrous tiers on our homepage.
Samsung’s CFG70 monitor with Quantum Dot technology
For a new PC builder or a person out of the hardware loop for a few years, choosing a new monitor may prove to be fairly difficult. These days, dynamic refresh rate technology, which syncs your monitor’s refresh rate to your graphics card’s output, plays a big role in choosing a monitor.
The two big contenders in dynamic refresh rate technology are AMD’s FreeSync and NVIDIA’s G-Sync. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, which we’ll try to address in detail in this article.
For those looking for a mid-range graphics card, this generation’s two leading choices are NVIDIA’s GTX 1060 and AMD’s RX 480. Both cards come with two models of varying video RAM capacities and price points:
Clearly, these cards are direct competitors in performance and price. Let’s take a look at each head-to-head matchup to figure out which is the better purchase.
The MSI Gaming RX 470 ARMOR OC
You’re in the market for a new GPU and want to spend less than $200. In that case, the main choices would be the GTX 1050 Ti (~$140) from NVIDIA and the RX 470 (~$170) from AMD. Given the differences in price and performance, which of these mid-range graphics cards is the better deal?
The GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti have both launched.
This is not an “exciting” launch where a new $150 card beats last year’s $500 card, but it is a good launch nonetheless. NVIDIA has new $110 and $150 cards, and they both perform well for their respective price points.
NVIDIA’s latest release is the $1,200 NVIDIA Titan X (no “GeForce,” no “GTX,” just “Titan X”).
Yes, that’s one thousand and two hundred American $$$ USD $$$ money-dollars! With a price tag like that, performance expectations should be very high, and the Titan X does not disappoint. I hear you asking, and the answer is: Yes, this card CAN play Witcher 3 at 4K resolution at 60 frames per second! This new card is about 30-40% more powerful than the GTX 1080.
Updated January 2017, with new Intel CPUs, new SSDs, and better choices for RAM and HDDs.
At factory clock speeds, the GTX 1060 claims to be equal to last generation’s GTX 980 in performance, while only sipping 120W of power. All of this at a price of $249!
