What is the best budget graphics card?

So in this sort of $150 to $200 range,

in my opinion, is often where a lot of the value is.

Sure, the awesome RTX and Radeon VII graphics cards

of the world are cool, but not everyone wants to spend

$700 to $1,000 on a brand new GPU,

which begs the question,

if you are trying to get something that is reasonable,

that is aimed at 1080p gaming,

which of these cards makes the most sense?

Starting out with, we have the GeForce GTX 1650 at $150.

This guy is a baby brother to those bigger RTX cards

in pretty much every aspect.

Sure, the performance is lower,

but it is based on that same Turing architecture

just minus the RTX stuff.

With a 75-watt TDP, it does mean that you can easily

sort of plug this into pretty much any kind

of prebuilt or whatever because it does not need

any kind of external power.

Next up we have the AMD option,

which is the RX 570.

Now it's hard to believe that even though this is

the cheapest card here at $130,

it is also really, really old at this point.

The RX 570 originally came out two years ago,

and the underlying Polaris GPU is almost three years old.

And yet don't let that fool you.

With the price cuts that this has recently seen,

especially over the last year or so,

it actually should be fairly competitive still.

Spend a little bit more and you can pick up

the Radeon RX 580.

Now again, it is an older GPU,

although this Strix card does have a lot of advantages

including not only does it have a full eight gigs of RAM,

more than any of these other cards,

it has a much, much beefier heat sink.

Last but certainly not least we have the GTX 1660.

Now at $220, NVIDIA has positioned this

as the ultimate 1080p card.

And with six gigs of RAM, it does, at least on paper,

seem to be more powerful than anything here.

But my real question is with the budget between $140

and $220, what is the best bang for your buck?

So to test, we have a fairly high end system.

So this is the streaming PC that we built

a little over a year ago, and inside it does have

a stock speed but still very powerful Ryzen 7 2700X

paired with 16 gigs of memory, fast SSD,

all that kind of stuff.

But the really important thing here is the graphics card,

and we're gonna start out with the 1650.

So I wanna do a fairly decent job

of kind of showing a wide range of gameplay.

So right now, I'm gonna start with Apex

and I'm gonna start here with everything maxed out at 1080p.

So this is the way I assume most people will play

with a card like the 1650,

well, if you can actually keep up.

Yeah, I got somebody.

♪ Na na na na na ♪

I finally got someone without a gun.

This is like me all the time.

Yeah!

So the 1650 actually gives pretty solid performance.

I mean, we're not locked at 60 here,

but we're in the low 50s to mid 50s.

Wow, I'm dead.

I got to say the 1650 is not a bad to 1080p card so far.

I mean, we're in pretty much the low 60s to high 50s.

Very playable on epic settings.

Now mind you, if we try to push it a little higher,

I don't think it would hold up so well,

but at least for lighter game such as Fortnite,

this seems to be pretty doable.

And something you have to consider

is that this is the lowest powered card of the group.

So one of the nice things is that if you actually

really wanna say, upgrade a prebuilt or something,

or even if you have like the most beefy power supply,

this should in theory fit in pretty much anything

including a very small mini ITX system.

Our next game is a little bit more demanding.

It is Black Ops 4.

Now this is an excellent PC port,

and this is one of the very few times

where we actually start to run into the bottleneck

of having only four gigs of RAM on the 1650 and the 570.

So with texture quality set to very high

and everything else set to ultra or high 1080p,

we're actually going a little bit over four gigs.

Now we could bump down to high,

which puts us just right underneath the cap,

but that's a pretty big issue.

Four gigs of RAM is, generally speaking,

enough for these cards.

But as time goes on, something like six or eight gigs

of RAM like the other more expensive cards have

could very well be a major advantage.

For now though, we're gonna go with very high settings

and see how much that bottlenecks the 1650.

So things do seem to work here,

but the issue is that we do see a little bit

of a frame rate drop sometimes.

So generally speaking, we're in the 40s to 50s,

but every once in a while, it does start to dip

into the high 30s.

And you can see, if you look at the VRAM,

we're in the four-plus gigabyte range,

which means it's definitely pushing this card pretty hard.

Yeah, we're up here in the chopper, look at that, 34, 35?

I mean, sure we could definitely get a smooth 60

if we turn some settings down,

but that's not the point.

I mean, all these cards should, in theory,

be capable of 1080p on pretty much max.

And some of these cards might even be able

to go beyond that.

So the fact that we're in the 30s to 40s

doesn't bode so well for the 1650.

So the most demanding here is there's no problem.

I'm getting a solid 80 fps.

But as soon as I walk outside

and see a whole lot more geometry, I mean...

This area is just simple.

Literally walking by these trees tanks my fps.

Look up to the sky, oh there's no problem.

But as soon as I actually see any real geometry,

it drops pretty heavily.

What is that?

I'm not gonna say this is unplayable,

but Black Ops could and probably will

run a lot better on the other cards.

It's funny, put the RX 570 in

and I can immediately tell it's a much more

power hungry card because I'm getting like toasted here.

I couldn't even feel anything with the 1650.

All right, oh no you don't, wow, are you serious?

Bro, no, no man.

No, yeah! (chuckles)

This does seem to perform better.

I'm actually kind of surprised because

this is a cheaper graphics card.

Yeah, it's going to be definitely not as power efficient,

but we're talking about something that is $20 less expensive

and yet I'm pretty close to a locked 60.

Yeah, it drop a little bit from time to time,

but I mean, especially when I'm indoors, I'm like 70.

So let's get out and get some, look at that, 65, 66.

It's not a huge difference,

but I actually might give a slight win here to the RX 570.

I would give a giant loss to myself

because I'm about to die.

Oh, I'm actually in the game?

Oh damn, I'm in game game, okay.

All right, performance seems to be pretty similar

to be honest.

We're still in the low to mid 60s for the most part,

which is very much where the 1650 was.

We might be a few frames ahead,

but I don't know, there doesn't seem to be

any kind of significant difference here.

That being said, since this is a cheaper card,

you would expect it not perform as well.

So yeah, there's a fair bit of stuff going on here

and we're still 63, 64.

Yeah, no, I think the 570 has an advantage.

So last time on the 1650,

we were actually dipping into the mid to low 30s and 40s.

Here, I'm not seeing that at all.

I mean, we're still solid above 60.

I need to definitely get into some action.

So what's interesting with the 570

is that it has the same VRAM limitation

which means that in Black Ops,

we should be seeing some major dips,

but I really haven't seen that yet.

We actually haven't even dipped below 60.

Now I'm sure once I get into some action,

I'll see it start to dip a little bit.

But I mean, on the 1650,

we were in that 35 to 40 frames

per second range pretty quickly.

The fact that this card is $130

is properly impressive.

I mean, pretty much everything we've thrown at it

comes close to hitting 60 fps,

and we're talking $130.

Mind you that is with an expensive Ryzen CPU,

but I don't think we're really severely CPU bottlenecked

in any of these games.

Look at that.

Now we jump up to the RX 580,

we are stepping up the price point.

So previously we were looking at 130 to 150 bucks,

but now we do have $180 graphics card here.

But I'm noticing a performance difference.

So where the other two were in the 60-ish range,

for the most part, we're actually well above that,

at least in the 70s, if not in the 80s here.

The other advantage that the RX 580 has

is it does have a full eight gigs of RAM.

Now I do believe there are still some SKUs

of the 580 with four gigs,

and those are probably fine.

But considering it's not a huge price penalty to go up,

it probably makes sense.

Honestly, even with max settings,

this is slight overkill.

I mean, we're not even like,

the bottom end is still...

I haven't gone below 60 yet.

Fortnite seems to be a decent game for the 580,

so I am seeing our frame rates being a little bit higher,

probably close to that 75 to 80 range.

Not a massive difference between the 570 though.

I mean, yeah, it's a few extra frames

but not enough to make any significant difference.

So one of the more interesting things about this 580

is that even though it's not the most expensive card here,

it does have the most memory with a full eight gigs.

Now most games aren't really taking a huge advantage of it,

but here on Black Ops, this is actually a game

that will pretty much eat up as much VRAM

as you can sort of give it.

So right now, we're at 6.3, 6.4,

but essentially it will continue to max out

until you're literally full,

and then it'll start cycling things through.

So it'll always be able to use more and more RAM

if you actually have it,

which is an advantage for the 580.

And performance wise, this is much better.

(laughs)

The 580 is a pretty big jump though.

I feel pretty confident in saying that we're getting

minimum of like 80, 85.

And a lot of times, we're close to like 90 in here.

Look at this, we're above 100 frames per second

while we're running around here.

Like, 1080p is not even remotely a challenge.

So over to the 1660,

Apex is immediately running really well.

So first glance, 90 to 100 fps or so.

And I guess, to be fair,