Meet the Radeon and GeForce Families - Upgrading a Pre-Built Desktop With a New Graphics Card
Continuing on our path for upgrading your pre-built desktop with a new graphics card let’s take a look at what is currently available on the graphics card market. So let’s meet the 2019 Radeon and GeForce families.
Both Nvidia and AMD offer a complete range of graphics cards, from the very low-end models suited for low-resolution gaming up to enthusiast, elite models for 4K and high refresh rate gaming. Let’s start with Nvidia and see what they have to offer.
Nvidia GeForce Family of 2019
Nvidia’s current family is split between two generations: a last-generation graphics card also known as the 10’th series or Pascal, and newer generation starting with the GTX 1600 all the way to the RTX 2000 series also known as Turing series. Also for the very high end they offer another series called Titan and we will discuss them as well below. Here is the complete list of Nvidia’s GeForce family:
Let’s have a small discussion about the Nvidia graphics card market recently. If you were looking on the market for a while now, you might have seen that the GeForce GTX Pascal cards like the 1080, the 1070 and the 1060 are not present as much as they used to. So why is this you might ask? Well they are not allowed to be sold separately anymore by Nvidia and they will slowly get off the market in favor of the RTX series. That’s a bummer, as those were absolutely great cards, but hey, you might be lucky enough to find one though.
Ok, so back to our list. The GT 1030 and GTX 1050 are low-end graphics cards, priced at just under $100 or just above the $100 mark. These cards can provide decent framerates in eSports games but at low resolutions and minimum graphics details.
The GTX 1650/1050Ti up to the GTX 1660Ti are Nvidia’s mid-range graphic cards and can provide more than decent framerates in 1080p with medium graphics details in eSports games and even AAA games, coming from $150 up to $350. Now don’t expect the 1050Ti to offer the same performance as the 1660 or the 1660Ti, and as you might figured it out already the higher the number the better the performance. Of course performance varies but we will discuss performance of these cards in a future article.
Since the GTX 1070 or the GTX 1080 are not available we have to put in the high end class the RTX 2060 and RTX 2070 (both the originals and the newer released "Super" versions), and can offer what the older 1070 and 1080 used to offer meaning high performance in 1080p or 1444p with high detail graphics. Prices for these cards varies from $350 up to $700.
The final entries from our list are the RTX 2080 (both original and "Super") and the RTX 2080Ti which are the high-end enthusiast graphics cards, or elite graphics cards as some call them. These are absolute beasts and can offer excellent performance even at 4K resolutions. Of course they do come at a price: starting from $900 up to $1500.
We mentioned the Titan cards earlier. The Titan series are basically teared-down workstation level cards that mix pro graphics and high-end 4K gaming cards. All sounds good but they are very very expensive, and if you are not a graphic Pro or do allot GPU-bound calculation work in your day by day activities, these graphics cards are not for you as they are very expensive, from prices starting at $2500 for the Titan RTX up to $2999 for the Titan V.
This completes the GeForce family for 2019. Let’s have a look on what AMD Radeon has to offer.
AMD Radeon Family in 2019
To this date, AMD Radeon has come strong and can compete with Nvidia up to the mainstream cards. Unfortunately AMD does not offer competition in the mid-high end or high end enthusiast class. Here is AMD Radeon family for 2019:
The AMD Radeon RX 550 and 560 come as low end graphics cards (don’t be mislead by the numbering, as they are not in the same class as Nvidia’s x050 or x060), while the AMD Radeon RX 570, RX 580 and RX 590 are the midrange graphics cards and are preffered for 1080p gaming with moderate-high graphics details.
The AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 and Vega 64 cards are superior to the RX 5xx series and used to compete with Nvidia’s GTX 1080 and 1070. They offer great-value for 1080p gaming as well as for 1440p gaming (on moderate graphics details) and they were hit hard by the crypto-mining craze from 2 years ago (actually all AMD Radeon cards were absolute beasts when it came to crypto-mining back in the day).
Moving down the list we see AMD’s obsession on offering great performance for 1440p gaming with mid-high detail graphics. They launched in July the 7nm-based “Navi” midrange graphics cards, based on the RDNA architecture. The cards that are currently available are the AMD Radeon RX 5700, 5700XT and the limited edition 5700XT Anniversary Edition. All these cards can run demanding AAA games at above 60fps in 1440p and this is something that AMD can actually market and focus.
The last card on our list is the Radeon VII and this is AMD’s attempt to enter the high end enthusiast market. It can handle 4K quite well though, and even trades punches with the RTX 2080 in 4K but it has lower performance in lower resolutions. We think that the Radeon VII is not mature enough from a drivers perspective (as this is usually an issue with AMD, drivers sometimes suck) but maybe it was a design flaw and since it is currently reaching its end of life too we think that AMD is already working on a replacement card based on this architecture.
This is it guys, this is what you can find on the market at this point. Depending on your needs, budget and on the system you are trying to upgrade this is what you can find in shops right now.
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