Nvidia, AMD, and Intel GPUs ranked by bang for the buck — Prime Day deals let you break 60 fps for $280

If you’re looking for a new graphics card, Prime Day tech deals are a great time to upgrade. We’re seeing some of the lowest prices ever across the gamut of GPUs, from Nvidia’s base model RTX 4060 Ada card up through AMD’s RX 7900 XTX and everything in between. These are some of the best graphics cards available, with limited time sales dropping them to levels we’re not likely to match until Black Friday rolls around this fall.

How do the various GPUs stack up in terms of overall value, though? We’ve gathered the lowest prices from our GPU price index and sorted everything by FPS per dollar at 1080p. We selected that resolution as some of the cards simply don’t make sense at 1440p and especially 4K, like the Arc A380. But we do have the FPS values at those higher resolutions in our performance table, if you’re more interested in picking up a more performant card.

It’s also worth considering that 1080p represents the approximate base resolution for both 1440p with Quality mode upscaling and 4K with Performance mode upscaling. Nvidia DLSS, AMD FSR 2/3, and Intel XeSS each have their own ways of doing things, but we’ve found Quality mode at least doesn’t compromise image fidelity much if at all. Here’s how the cards stack up.

Given that it’s Prime Day — though many of the best deals are from Newegg’s competing Fantastech initiative rather than from Amazon — you should expect most of these prices to be relatively short-lived, and we’ve already seen plenty of fluctuations and out of stock cards. If you’re in the market for a new GPU, saving $20 to $50 right now might be enough to get you to fork over your pennies.

While FPS/$ isn’t a perfect measure of value, Intel’s Arc A580 and Arc A750 take the top two spots. Both come with 8GB of GDDR6 memory, enough for running most games at 1080p and maxed out settings, though there are still the occasional driver hiccups on newly released titles. You’ll get around 0.3 FPS per dollar with these cards, or alternatively, you’d need to spend about $200 to average 60 fps at our test settings.

Except, the drop off from the A750 to the next GPU, Nvidia’s RTX 4060, is quite steep, with the 4060 only offering just under 0.236 FPS/$. It does average 60 fps in our 19 game suite at least, but it’s also $100 more than the Arc A750. Nvidia drew a good deal of criticism for equipping the 4060 with just 8GB — the previous generation RTX 3060 offered 12GB — and it’s basically the minimum you’ll need for running many modern games at maxed out settings. Some games will even exceed 8GB of VRAM use, like Horizon Forbidden West, though dropping to high settings should look nearly as good without exceeding your card’s VRAM.

AMD takes fourth place overall with its RX 7700 XT, coming in just behind the 4060 at 0.233 FPS/$. It’s also the first card in our rankings to give you more than 8GB VRAM. We didn’t love the card when it launched, but dropping from $450 down to just $360 drastically changes the picture. It’s an excellent option right now at this price, though also an $80 jump from the 4060’s price. It’s also fully capable of running games at 1440p ultra, the least expensive card to average more than 60 fps at that resolution.

If you want a 16GB card, the least expensive option in our list goes back to Intel with its Arc A770 16GB. Initially launched with a competitive $349 MSRP, over 20 months later it’s now routinely sitting at $270–$280. Unfortunately, while it offers twice as much VRAM as the RTX 4060, in general the Nvidia card still offers higher performance — and that’s without factoring in DLSS support, which is in far more games than XeSS or FSR 2.

You can see how the rest of the GPUs stack up, and it should come as little surprise that the more expensive cards fall to the bottom of the list. Some of that will be due to CPU bottlenecks that become more of a factor on high-end GPUs at 1080p, but the rankings don’t change much if we use the 1440p results. The 4060 drops behind the 7700 XT and A770 in that case, but the A580 and A750 keep their top spots and still deliver nearly twice the FPS/$ as GPUs like the 7900 XTX and 4080 Super.

Sorting by 4K FPS/$ eliminates a few cards from consideration, as we didn’t benchmark them at 4K. Of those that remain, the A750 still sits at the top, but it’s sub-20 FPS result means it’s not playable in many of the games we tested. The 7700 XT and 7800 XT take the next two spots, followed by the 4070 Super, but getting up to 60 fps average on our game suite would require spending at least $965 on an RTX 4080 Super, with AMD’s 7900 XTX coming up just short of that mark.

We do expect to see a couple of new GPUs launch this fall, but those will be extreme parts from the Nvidia Blackwell RTX 50-series lineup, likely just the RTX 5090 and 5080 (or whatever they end up being called). AMD’s RDNA 4 GPUs aren’t expected until next year, while Intel’s Battlemage GPUs could still arrive in late 2024, but we’re less certain about what to expect from either of those if and when they arrive. So if you’re not planning on buying a top-tier card, this is a good time to pick up a budget to mainstream GPU.