Gaming Graphics Cards at the End of 2025: A Fresh Performance Ranking Published

The end of each year brings a slew of reviews and comparisons to help gamers choose the right hardware. The specialists at PC Games Hardware have summed up the year with extensive testing involving dozens of modern GPUs. The testing was conducted on a system with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor and DDR5-6400 memory. The focus was on 20 modern games, checked at resolutions from full-HD to 4K. An important note: the evaluation was specifically for rasterization, meaning traditional rendering without ray tracing.

The top spot on the ranking was predictably taken by the GeForce RTX 5090. Its lead over the previous flagship, the RTX 4090, is over 20%, and even compared to the new RTX 5080, the advantage exceeds 40 percent. However, this graphics card also set a price anti-record. The RTX 4090 holds onto second place, outpacing the newer RTX 5080, so its wider memory bus and other architectural features allow the former flagship to maintain high positions.

The top-10 is a mix of new releases and well-known models. For example, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT still show respectable results, sitting in fourth and eighth places respectively. Among new AMD models, the Radeon RX 9070 XT, positioned in sixth place, is noteworthy. Its performance is close to the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, so these two cards essentially share a spot in the ranking.

The position of the RTX 4080 SUPER is interesting: it comes very close to the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, showing just how competitive the premium segment remains. Below the top ten begins the zone most interesting for the majority of buyers, and here we find some unexpected things. For instance, the RTX 4070 outperforms the newer RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, while the AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB delivered results on par with the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB, which looks decent for its price category. The Intel Arc B580 deserves special mention, as it beats many previous-generation models from competitors, showing the company is gradually increasing its presence in the gaming market.

The results clearly show: the newest model isn't always the best choice from a frame-per-dollar value perspective. Cards from the previous generation, especially from the high-end segment, continue to demonstrate strong performance. The year's results confirm that despite constant price hikes in the top segment, healthy competition persists in the mid-range and budget brackets, and gamers still have plenty to choose from.