It's been a busy year for the best graphics cards, as well as cards that don't quite make the cut. Not counting third-party cards, we've had fourteen "latest generation" consumer GPUs launched over the past year from the three big players. (There are also rumblings of various new GPUs from China, but all indications are that those won't be competitive with the incumbents any time soon.) As the dust clears, we wanted to take a look back and provide some thoughts on how things have gone down and revisit the recent launches now that we've seen the full breadth of the product stacks.
To say that this generation has been a disappointment sums up how most people are feeling. There are some great cards, like the RTX 4090, but it's priced out of reach of most gamers. Everything below that generally feels overpriced, underperforming, and/or cut specs too far. There are a few exceptions, GPUs that poke above the crowd for one reason or another, but even then there are caveats.
To quickly recap, Nvidia launched the first of its RTX 40-series Ada Lovelace GPUs on October 12, 2022 with the RTX 4090. Then it followed with the RTX 4080 in November, skipped a month and brought out the RTX 4070 Ti (aka the rechristened RTX 4080 12GB) in January, and more recently, the RTX 4070, RTX 4060 Ti, and RTX 4060. Now we've completed the set with the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB — slightly late to the party, but it's done.
For its part, AMD hasn't filled in all of the gaps with the new RDNA 3 RX 7000-series GPUs yet, though it's widely expected that we'll see the RX 7800-class and RX 7700-class GPUs in the next month or so. (AMD has stated more "enthusiast" GPUs are coming in Q3, which ends in September.) So far, we only have the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT at the top, and the RX 7600 at the bottom, with the previous generation RX 6000-series holding down the high-end and budget forts.
Finally, Intel started shipping its Arc Alchemist GPUs in the U.S. about a year ago, with the Arc A380 blazing trail and clearing out some major driver issues. The Arc A770 and Arc A750 came next, followed by the Arc A770 8GB variant, but the A580 has quietly disappeared. That's it for the Alchemist generation, but Intel has focused a lot on improving drivers and performance, and we'll hopefully see the next generation Battlemage sooner rather than later — it has a tentative 2024 launch window, but Intel isn't commenting on any precise dates yet.
Every GPU launch ends up being a snapshot in time, often one done under an extreme time crunch. Typically, we'll get briefed on the new GPU about two weeks in advance of the launch, with hardware arriving about ten days ahead of the embargo date. It's hectic, to say the least. The "top-down" approach to new GPUs also muddies the waters, as we can only compare new products to what is currently available.
The RTX 4060 Ti 16GB launch gives you a good idea of why sampling and embargoes happen. Due to supply (and maybe demand), even though the cards officially launched on July 18, we couldn't acquire a card at retail until over ten days later. A previously scheduled vacation further delayed things, and our full review was finally posted a month "late." With no embargo on testing and no hardware sampling, this would become the norm.
But that delayed approach gives us more time to reflect, and with nearly all of the cards now on the table, trends and expectations become much clearer. The latest generation hardware has been pretty weak from a consumer perspective, with only a few exceptions.
We don't change our scores after reviews go live unless there's some major mistake. So when we gave the RTX 4090 a 4.5-star score, that's what we stand by. I actually feel that's still the right score, but going down through the rest of the product stack, plus looking at GPUs from the competition, my feelings have changed and solidified over time, given the new GPU landscape. So let's go through each GPU and provide our thoughts about where it currently sits. We also have performance results from our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, plus retail pricing data, which colors our opinions.
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