TechFuel HQThis tool compares any two graphics cards head-to-head and shows which is faster, by how much, at the resolution you actually play. Pick two cards and a resolution. The result is a relative performance margin, plus a breakdown at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K so you can see where the gap widens or narrows.
One honest caveat up front: these are rasterized gaming scores, not absolute frame rates, and they exclude ray tracing and DLSS/FSR upscaling. They are the fairest like-for-like baseline, but a card’s standing can shift in ray-traced titles or with frame generation. The most useful thing the tool surfaces is where the winner changes with resolution — a card that is a hair ahead at 1080p can fall behind at 4K once its VRAM runs short, and that is exactly the kind of buying mistake worth catching early.
Scores come from the Tom’s Hardware GPU benchmarks hierarchy (rasterized gaming, native resolution), current through June 2026. To check whether your processor can keep up with a given card, pair this with the PC Bottleneck Calculator.
Worked examples
These are this calculator’s own outputs, computed with the same formula the tool runs in your browser — so you can see a real answer without touching a single input.
Budget cross-shop where VRAM genuinely flips the verdict – GeForce RTX 5060 8GB (A) vs Intel Arc B580 12GB (B). This is the case the whole “Where VRAM flips the winner” section is about
- Inputs: A = GeForce RTX 5060 -> [43.4, 35.8, 19.6, 8GB]. B = Intel Arc B580 -> [35.1, 30.3, 24.9, 12GB]. Resolution stepped through all three; headline shown at the 1440p default.
- Result: At 1440p the headline reads “GeForce RTX 5060 is 18% faster at 1440p”. Stats: Winner @ res = A; VRAM = 8 vs 12 GB; Margin = 18%. Table: 1080p 43.4 / 35.1 RTX 5060 +24%; 1440p 35.8 / 30.3 RTX 5060 +18%; 4K 19.6 / 24.9 Arc B580 +27%. Flip note: “Note: the winner changes with resolution - the 8GB GeForce RTX 5060 fades at higher resolution as VRAM fills up.” Recommendation: “GeForce RTX 5060 leads by 18% at 1440p. In raster terms it is the faster card here. The slower Intel Arc B580 carries more VRAM (12GB vs 8GB), which can matter for texture-heavy games and longevity. If the price gap is larger than the performance gap, the slower card can still be the better value.”
The “is the halo card worth it” comparison the prose links out to – GeForce RTX 4090 (A) vs GeForce RTX 4080 (B), a clean one-sided result with no flip, shown at 4K where the gap is widest
- Inputs: A = GeForce RTX 4090 -> [90.1, 85.7, 80.4, 24GB]. B = GeForce RTX 4080 -> [77.2, 70.3, 60.9, 16GB]. curRes = ‘4K’ (RES_KEYS index 3).
- Result: Headline: “GeForce RTX 4090 is 32% faster at 4K”. Stats: Winner @ res = A; VRAM = 24 vs 16 GB; Margin = 32%. Table: 1080p 90.1 / 77.2 RTX 4090 +17%; 1440p 85.7 / 70.3 RTX 4090 +22%; 4K 80.4 / 60.9 RTX 4090 +32%. No flip note. Recommendation: “GeForce RTX 4090 leads by 32% at 4K. In raster terms it is the faster card here. It also has more VRAM (24GB vs 16GB), so it ages better too. If the price gap is larger than the performance gap, the slower card can still be the better value.” The widening 17 -> 22 -> 32 spread is a real, computed illustration of the page’s claim that the gap changes with resolution.
How to read the result
The number this tool gives you is a relative margin, not a frame rate. If it says one card is 18 percent faster at 1440p, that card’s aggregate raster score is 18 percent higher across the benchmark set. In a GPU-bound game that lands close to 18 percent more frames, but it is not a promise for any single title, and it says nothing about the absolute FPS either card hits in the game you actually play. Treat it as the size of the gap. If you have a specific frame-rate target in mind, look up benchmarks for that exact game and settings to turn the gap into real numbers.
The scores are rasterized, native-resolution results with no upscaling and no ray tracing. That is the fairest like-for-like baseline, but it is a baseline, not the whole story. Turn on heavy ray tracing and NVIDIA cards usually gain ground. Turn on DLSS or FSR with frame generation and either card can jump well past its native result. If those features are central to how you play, add a mental adjustment on top of what you see here.
Where VRAM flips the winner
The most useful thing this comparison surfaces is the resolution breakdown, because the winner can change between 1080p and 4K. Two cards that trade blows at 1080p can separate hard at 4K, and the usual culprit is video memory. Higher resolutions load bigger textures and frame buffers into VRAM; an 8GB card that was fine at 1080p can run short at 4K and stutter, while a 12GB or 16GB card keeps scaling. Memory bandwidth and cache size matter too, but capacity is the one that produces the obvious, ugly stutters.
That is why the tool shows the margin at all three resolutions and flags when the faster card actually changes. If you play at 4K, or plan to within the life of the card, weight the 4K column and the VRAM figure more heavily than a 1080p average that will not reflect your reality.
Price per frame beats raw speed
Raw performance is the wrong number to shop on by itself. The one that matters is price per frame: what you pay for each unit of performance. A card that is 10 percent slower but 25 percent cheaper is usually the better buy, because that 10 percent gap is rarely visible in normal play while the money saved is very real. Run the performance margin here against the actual price gap before you decide.
There are three cases where paying up for the faster card is worth it: you are chasing a specific frame-rate target the cheaper card cannot reach, the faster card also carries more VRAM that will extend its useful life, or its efficiency and feature set genuinely matter to you. Absent one of those, the cheaper card with the better price per frame is the smarter pick.
Matchups worth running
If you are cross-shopping this generation, the comparisons people run most are the ones where the value line is close. A few worth putting head to head, with full written reviews if you want the detail:
- RTX 5070 Ti vs RX 9070 XT - the 1440p value fight of the generation.
- RTX 5060 Ti vs RX 9060 XT - where the 8GB-versus-16GB question bites hardest.
- RTX 4080 vs RTX 4090 - the classic “is the halo card worth it” call.
Once you have picked a card, check your processor can keep up with the PC Bottleneck Calculator, or price a full system around it with the PC Builder.
Assumptions and sources
- Every score in the menus is drawn from the Tom’s Hardware GPU benchmarks hierarchy (rasterized gaming at native resolution, normalized to the fastest card per resolution), current through June 2026; cards without consistent published figures were left out rather than estimated.
- VRAM capacities shown beside each card are the vendors’ board specifications as recorded in the tool’s dataset.
- Ray tracing and upscaling are excluded by design: the numbers are a raster baseline, and this tool applies no adjustment factors of its own on top of the source data - the resolution breakdown is the source’s own per-resolution scores.