FAQ

What products do you cover?

Anything from the last two generations that meets a certain performance threshold. There are older cards that could compete in certain areas, but they generally aren't availble new, and they may fall down in certain areas of performance.

Where do the product links lead?

They all go to Amazon. It's the biggest, most competitively-priced market with a straightforward return policy.

While it's possible to score score a good deal with, say, an unknown eBay seller, that approach leads to inconsistent results. Linking to those outliers would mean our pricing tables no longer provide apples-to-apples comparisons.

(Note: while third-party sellers do sell graphics cards on Amazon, we currently only link to products sold by Amazon itself.)

What's the difference between Card Type and actual product names?

Modern graphics card designs (sometimes called reference designs) are created by AMD, NVIDIA, or Intel. However, in many cases, they don't produce the actual cards. They license their designs to manufacturers, who then make minor tweaks to the cards and sell them under their own brand names.

Cards that share a reference design (for example, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090) tend to have near-identical performance. Therefore, it's generally safe to buy the lowest-priced version of that design, as long as the manufacturer is reputable.

What does FPS mean, exactly, in these tables?

FPS = Frames per Second, or the number of frames your display generates every second you play a game, watch a video, or use an app. More FPS = smoother, more immersive experience.

This site uses an abstract Frames per Second rating, distilled from credible product testing sites. It represents how many FPS are produced by each card at 1440p resolution, across various games and applications.

It doesn't predict how many FPS you'll get in any particular game or app; it's just a useful way to compare cards' strength.

What is RT FPS?

It's another abstract FPS rating, this time for games that use ray tracing. It represents the frame rates you might see when enabling ray tracing features in a typical game.

Due to all the different ways games can implement ray tracing, this is an even less precise metric than our abstract FPS numbers. But you'll notice that these frame rates are much lower than the general FPS numbers, which gives you a good idea of how much power ray tracing can demand.

What do AI Generation / Images per Second numbers mean?

AI is the fastest-growing computing field. Graphics cards are much more useful than processors for a number of AI tasks, including AI image generation.

The most common AI task is image generation. Depending on the graphic card you're using, you might either be able to generate many images per minute, or it might be such a slow and painful process that you'd never want to continue.

Our Images per Second rating is a very rough measure of how many 512x512 images your card might be able to generate, using text prompts, in a program like Stable Diffusion.