AMD vs Nvidia 2020: which makes the best graphics cards?
By Bill Thomas October 20, 2020
The graphics card war never changes
Image Credit: TechRadar
If there's one thing that's true in the world of the best graphics cards, it's that the Nvidia vs AMD GPU war never ends. And, now that Nvidia has just launched its Ampere graphics cards and AMD is on the cusp of launching the Big Navi Radeon RX 6000 series, the graphics war has never been hotter.
But while this is definitely something that's fun to argue about on Twitter, it can be extremely confusing to decide which manufacturer to give your money to. After all, nobody actually needs the graphics card discourse, but people do need a reliable graphics card for their needs.
Right now, the graphics card market is a bit imbalanced at the top end, especially with the recent launch of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, a card that's marketed by Nvidia as an 8K gaming card – even if the performance isn't quite at that level. The closest thing AMD has right now is the Radeon RX 5700 XT, which couldn't top the RTX 2070 Super, let alone the newly-released RTX 3080.
However, that may not last for long, as AMD gets ready to launch its next-generation Big Navi-powered Radeon RX 6000 series of graphics cards. Only time will tell if these new AMD graphics cards will be enough to dethrone Nvidia at the high end like it did Intel with its Ryzen chips after a couple generations.
PriceTraditionally, AMD has always been known as the more affordable brand of graphics cards, and that's true to this day... to a point. Right now, especially in the mid-range, AMD has graphics cards like the Radeon RX 5500 XT, which provide excellent performance at the $199 (about £150, AU$280) price point. If your budget is around this level, AMD's generous helping of VRAM here means that you're getting much better performance in higher-spec games than Nvidia's equivalent GTX 1650 can offer.
Once you start going up the price stack, things change, however. If you look at the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super, for instance, you're getting basically equivalent performance at the same price either way, but you're getting a more robust feature set with the Nvidia card – including ray tracing and DLSS.
These two graphics cards end up trading blows in a lot of games at 1440p, which is usually a sign of a healthy market. However, without DLSS, Nvidia gets a huge performance bump in titles that support the technology, making it hard to recommend the Radeon RX 5700 XT, unless it performs better in the specific games you're into. |
