HOW WE TEST GRAPHICS CARDS

Testing a graphics card is an extremely lengthy process. We sometimes see reviews where a graphics card has been tested using out of date equipment, out of date games and even out of date drivers. While the latter can be excused due to the sheer amount of driver updates making a thorough review impossible we will however notify the reader when we have used a different driver to the normal for example a pre-release driver. For the most part however we will always use the same hardware and latest drivers so this does certainly need to be taken into consideration when viewing our testing results. Each game and benchmark is tested times with the lowest and highest scores omitted out of the 5 results and the average then taken from the three remaining to give us our final result for each resolution and setting used.

HARDWARE

In Q1 2025 we decided to upgrade our test system to the very latest AMD X870E platform with the renowned AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D – currently regarded as one of the best gaming CPUs to date. AMD’s platform is one of the most popular choices for gamers and by using such a configuration, we can hopefully showcase to our readership what they can expect.

This new platform provides us with the very latest technology and standards to be able to accurately report back on performance of modern graphics cards.

Graphics Cards on test:
MSI VENTUS 2X OC RTX 4060 TI
ASUS PRIME RTX 4070 SUPER
INNO3D RTX 4080 SUPER X3
PNY RTX 4090 XLR8 VERTO EPIC-X
GIGABYTE RTX 5070 TI EAGLE OC ICE
GIGABYTE RTX 5080 GAMING OC
GIGABYTE RTX 5080 AERO OC SFF
AORUS RTX 5090 MASTER

GIGABYTE RX 7700 XT GAMING OC
POWERCOLOR RED DEVIL RX 7800 XT
POWERCOLOR HELLHOUND RX 7900 GRE
XFX MERC 310 RX 7900 XTX
POWERCOLOR HELLHOUND RX 9070

Special thanks go to MSI and Corsair for providing the hardware configuration for our graphics card reviews:

BENCHMARKS

If you are a regular reader of our reviews you will know we like to test the latest hardware with the latest games and benchmarks on the market. Here are the games we’ve chosen:



To capture framerates we use CapFrameX.

Other benchmark tools have been included to give a broad overview of performance and these include:

PugetBench for Davinci Resolve
ProCyon AI Image Generation
ProCyon Video Editing
3DMark SpeedWay
3DMark Nomad

Let's see how today's graphics card performed...