What’s coming this year for graphics cards? How much should you spend? Should you buy one now or wait? And, of course, should you go with Nvidia or AMD? On the CES floor, PCWorld’s Adam Patrick Murray joined forces with Tom’s Hardware executive editor Senior Editor Jarred Walton for a chin wag on the state of the GPU market. You can see their full discussion in our YouTube video below.
Jarred says that while the improvements on Nvidia’s new 4000-series Super cards are great, they’re still far more expensive than the equivalent carts we were used to before the RTX switch-over. Ten percent more performance is great, but $800 is still a lot of money on what seems to be becoming the standard for GPUs or just above. And the rise of industrial “artificial intelligence” is raising prices in the industry — with companies like Meta spending billions on the same chips that are going into consumer graphics cards, prices won’t be going down any time soon.
On the good old Nvidia versus AMD split, Adam asks which would you rather have, a GeForce RTX 4080 Super or a Radeon RX 7900 XTX? “You know, it’s apples and oranges a bit, you have to decide what you want. There’s a lot to get in the Nvidia ecosystem that’s proprietary…the proprietary BS that people hate. But DLSS is a thing and it’s good, and you can’t run it on AMD. And FSR2 isn’t the same as DLSS, and FSR3 frame generation is only in four games right now…and if you have an interest in AI, you gotta go Nvidia.”
What about on the other end of the spectrum, with the RX 7600 XT and its 16GB of video RAM at “just” $329? With only an 8GB upgrade over the 7600, and within striking distance of Nvidia’s 4060 Ti, Jarred would prefer the 7600 XT to be $299 instead. But the boost in clock speed and TDP should still make it competitive at that price point.
Jarred recommends the RTX 4090 if you have “all the money,” a toss-up between the RTX 4080 Super and the RX 7900 XTX at $1,000, the 4070 Ti Super at the $700-800 level. For more interviews with the brightest minds in the computer world, subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube!
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer, PCWorld
Michael is a 10-year veteran of technology journalism, covering everything from Apple to ZTE. On PCWorld he's the resident keyboard nut, always using a new one for a review and building a new mechanical board or expanding his desktop "battlestation" in his off hours. Michael's previous bylines include Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he's covered events like CES and Mobile World Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he's always looking forward to his next kayaking trip.