THE PAST TWO YEARS of pandemic-induced scarcity and supply chain disruption, coupled with cryptocurrency mining mania, have for many dashed hopes of a new graphics card. Nearly 18 months after the launch of AMD’s Radeon RX 6000-series and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs, Steam data shows only 15 percent of gamers use Ampere cards, and under one percent use AMD’s RDNA 2 chips.
But plenty of graphics cards are still fast enough to play today’s demanding games. To help put things in perspective, we rounded up all the major GPUs from the past six years (plus a few from further back) and put them to the test. Which cards still have staying power and which have fallen by the wayside? Our requirement is that each card needs to work with Windows 11, so join us as we delve through GPUs past.
WELCOME TO THE MODERN ERA
Midway through 2022, Windows 11 is coming up to its first anniversary and it looks as though the pandemic may finally be subsiding. It’s also the second anniversary of the current graphics architectures from AMD and Nvidia, RDNA 2 and Ampere, so it’s a good time for a look at the state of the GPU industry. But we’re not just interested in the latest offerings, we want to see how previousgeneration GPUs stack up, so we’ve rounded up a huge collection of graphics cards and tested every one in a system that’s about as modern as it comes.
We’re running a Core i9-12900K CPU, cooled by a Corsair H150i Elite Capellix AIO. Our motherboard is an MSI Z690-A Pro WiFi DDR4, a small concession to sanity since DDR5 prices are high and the change in memory doesn’t necessarily improve performance. We have 2x 16GB of Corsair DDR4-3600 16-18-18 memory, which has worked flawlessly with
