GPU Benchmarks Hierarchy 2025 – Graphics Card Rankings

Our GPU benchmarks hierarchy ranks all the current and previous generation graphics cards by performance, and Tom’s Hardware exhaustively benchmarks current and previous generation GPUs, including all of the best graphics cards. Whether it’s playing games, running artificial intelligence workloads like Stable Diffusion, or doing professional video editing, your graphics card typically plays the biggest role in determining performance — even the best CPUs for Gaming take a secondary role.

With 2025, the new GPU releases have been coming fast and furious. Intel kicked things off with the Arc B580 at the end of 2024, followed by Arc B570 in January. Nvidia announced its Blackwell RTX 50-series architecture at CES 2025, then launched the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 in late January, with the RTX 5070 Ti in February. The biggest problem with nearly all of those GPUs? You can’t buy them at MSRP, or sometimes even at all.

The AMD RX 9070 XT at $599 and RX 9070 at $549 arrived on March 6, one day after Nvidia’s RTX 5070 at $549 launched. We’ve tested those cards as well and will be adding them to the GPU hierarchy soon enough. Naturally, they sold out as well. It’s not that we don’t want more affordable graphics cards; it’s that AI is all the rage, commanding billions of dollars in sales. It accounted for nearly 90% of Nvidia’s record-setting $130 billion in annual revenue for last fiscal year. Gaming was just under 9% of the total.

A big part of the problem is also that Nvidia and AMD seemingly made some planning errors with the transitions from the prior generation to the new / upcoming hardware. Demand for the prior generation didn’t dry up, and basically all the RTX 40-series GPUs and RX 7000-series GPUs went out of stock, with the exception of the base model RTX 4060 and RX 7600. That started to happen several months ago, leaving a gaping hole of demand for the new GPUs.

Inventory ran out before the new GPUs were ready, creating a backlog of people wanting to upgrade GPUs. Couple that with an inadequate supply of Nvidia’s RTX 50-series cards that have launched and you basically can’t find a reasonably priced graphics card. And then there are new tariffs coming into effect that could further impact prices and availability. It’s a perfect storm hitting the graphics market yet again.

We’re also working on revamping our GPU test suite. We’ve upgraded the test PC to an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and socket AM5 platform, and we’re now in the process of retesting… well, everything, as much as possible. Our latest reviews are using the new test suite and test PC, but we haven’t gotten through enough of the latest and previous generation GPUs to swap over to the new data for the hierarchy … yet. That will happen probably next month. In the meantime, all of the existing data is still valid; we just don’t have the results from the new generation GPUs.

Our full GPU hierarchy using traditional rendering (aka, rasterization) comes first, and below that we have our ray tracing GPU benchmarks hierarchy. Those of course require a ray tracing capable GPU so only AMD’s RX 7000/6000-series, Intel’s Arc, and Nvidia’s RTX cards are present. The results are all at native resolution, without enabling DLSS, FSR, or XeSS upscaling or frame generation.

Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace architecture powers its previous generation RTX 40-series, with new features like DLSS 3 Frame Generation — with DLSS 4 upgrading the quality of both upscaling and ray reconstruction, plus adding MFG (Multi Frame Generation) on the 50-series GPUs. AMD’s RDNA 3 architecture powers the RX 7000-series, with seven desktop cards filling out the product stack. Intel’s Arc Alchemist architecture brings a third player into the dedicated GPU party, even if it’s more of a competitor to the earlier generation midrange offerings (i.e. RTX 3060 and RX 6650 XT).

On page two, you’ll find our 2020–2021 benchmark suite, which has all the previous generation GPUs running an older test suite on a Core i9-9900K testbed. It’s no longer being actively updated. There’s also the legacy GPU hierarchy (without benchmarks, sorted by theoretical performance) for reference purposes.

The following tables sort everything solely by our performance-based GPU gaming benchmarks, at 1080p “ultra” for the main suite and at 1080p “medium” for the DXR suite. Factors including price, graphics card power consumption, overall efficiency, and features aren’t factored into the rankings here. The current 2024 results use an Alder Lake Core i9-12900K testbed. Now let’s hit the benchmarks and tables.

GPU Benchmarks Ranking 2025

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