The best video cards costing up to 10,000 hryvnia

After the merger of AMD and Radeon, supporters of the “red” camp had practically no opportunity to assemble a computer from AMD components without making some compromises. However, the situation changed in 2019 when the company rolled out new Zen 2 and RDNA architectures. One of the main hits of the first generation RDNA was the RX 5700 XT video card, which followed the path of the popular hits RX 470/570. Moreover, it went so successfully that at the end of 2023 it is not always possible to find it on sale.

At the time of its release (note: winter 2019), the RX 5700 XT received high marks from specialized media, but its fame was hampered by the GeForce RTX 2000 SUPER line with its hype ray tracing and no less interesting DLSS upscaling system. And it would have gone to the dustbin of history if Radeon hadn’t tweaked the buggy drivers, solved the heating problem (note: at the start the chip heated up to 110°C) and halved the original price. As a result, an interesting situation turned out in 2023, when far from the most powerful heavyweight card “dried out” from 100 to 75 kg and went down to kick kids a couple of weight categories lower.

Initially, the RX 5700 XT was positioned as a solution for Hi-End systems and games in 2K resolution. After 4 years, it is more suitable for Full HD resolution, providing a consistently high average FPS of 60+ frames per second with graphics settings at or near maximum. Online games and blockbusters from two or three years ago with good optimization can be played in 2K, especially if you use the free analogue of DLSS from Radeon called FSR. In general, at the moment this is perhaps the most interesting video card option in the category up to 10,000 hryvnia. At the same time, the version from PowerColor is also well overclocked. The other side of the coin is high power consumption; to power the system you need a unit with a power of at least 700 W.

At the time of its release in the spring of 2019, the GeForce GTX 1660 Super logically took an intermediate position between the regular GTX 1660 and the GTX 1660 Ti, but gradually squeezed its relatives out of the market, becoming an alternative to inexpensive accelerators of the GeForce GTX 1060 and AMD Radeon RX580/590 level. And despite its venerable age, the GTX 1660 Super is still in great demand and is one of the most popular video cards among Steam users.

The version from Gigabyte is equipped with a quiet and compact cooling system based on copper heat pipes with aluminum fins. Two low-profile axial fans with long-life bearings are used to dissipate heat. In terms of performance, the card is an interesting option for building inexpensive gaming and universal household PCs that do not require miracles of performance. She feels more than comfortable in online games a la Alex Legends and Fortnite, and also confidently copes with the gaming hits of 2019 - 2022, but she cannot cope with the recent Alan Wake 2 and next-gen games on the Unreal Engine.

The main disadvantage of the GTX 1660 SUPER GP these days is the limited memory capacity of 6 GB. More recently, we told you that almost all major development studios are primarily focusing on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X with 12 GB of video memory, hardware decompression technologies and streaming from SSD. As tests have shown, many games in 2022 - 2023 suffer significantly when the buffer is reduced from 8 GB to 6 GB: Alan Wake 2 and Forza Horizon 5 noticeably drop FPS even at medium graphics settings, and Resident Evil 4 Remake and Forspoken may not start at all or fly out.

NVIDIA RTX 3050 is a budget card from the NVIDIA Ampere family with support for ray tracing, a smart artificial scaling system DLSS 2.0 and other goodies of the Ampere microarchitecture at a tempting price of around $200. Unlike the NVIDIA Turing series GPU, this unit has a more modern GA106 graphics chip (8 nm, 2560 CUDA cores), which is complemented by fast GDDR6-class video memory (approx: 8 GB).

The version from Gigabyte is equipped with a compact dual-slot WINDFORCE cooling system, which consists of a pair of 100 mm fans with alternating rotation, a compact passive radiator, multiple heat pipes and additional shielding. The length of the accelerator is only 24 cm, and it itself occupies 2 slots in the motherboard, which makes it a rather interesting option for budget gaming builds with a compact form factor. Also among the advantages of the model is the reduced power consumption - the GPU consumes only 130 W, and therefore an inexpensive 450 W power supply is enough to power the entire system.

Despite its almost two years of age, the GeForce RTX 3050 remains one of the most attractive entry-level video cards, with which the player will not have to resort to some kind of graphics tricks in literally every game. The card confidently handles most big-budget games in 2023 in Full HD with above-average mixed settings. In the well-optimized Baldur's Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty, the test model most of the time stayed in the wake of a comfortable 60 FPS with rare drops to 40 FPS. In Starfield, Alan Wake 2 and the remaster of the third Witcher, we had to immediately tune in to 30+ FPS and actively rely on DLSS/FSR. In this case, there is nothing to say about ray tracing.

The Asus Radeon RX 6600 Dual V2 is an affordable and compact mid-range video accelerator with a dual cooling system. This series uses a compact metal heatsink and a pair of Axial fans with a reduced hub to maintain extremely low operating temperatures with barely noticeable noise levels. It should also be noted that the card has low power consumption: calculations in the online calculator say that a 450 W power supply will be enough for it, while Asus insists on 500 W. Compare this with the requirements of the RX 5000 series video cards, which had to be paired with 700 - 750 W power supplies.

From a technical point of view, the Asus Radeon RX 6600 Dual V2 belongs to the second generation of Big Navi. It is equipped with a Navi 23 XL GPU with 28 compute units and 1792 stream processors. The amount of Infinity Cache memory, which speeds up data exchange between the video card and other PC components, is 32 MB. GDDR6 memory up to 8 GB operates via a 128-bit interface. This is perhaps the main weakness of this model. The core operates at 2491 MHz, and overall the GPU provides computing performance of around 9 TFLOPs.

In games, the Asus Radeon RX 6600 Dual V2 guarantees truly comfortable gaming at 60 FPS in almost all popular AAA titles from 2019 to 2023 at high/maximum graphics settings in Full HD resolution. True, it all depends on the specific game and its requirements for video memory. For example, the recent Alan Wake 2, which many gamers crowned “a real next-gen”, is very demanding on the amount of memory, so here it is better to immediately tune in to the console experience with a stable 30 FPS, while simultaneously leaning on FSR. The same can be said for demanding Unreal Engine 5 games with their nanites and global illumination. Otherwise, this is perhaps the most productive video card in the category up to 10,000 hryvnia - its pure performance is at the level of the GeForce RTX 3060, which costs 25 - 30% more.

Intel's entry into the desktop video card market did not go smoothly at all - the company spent a long time looking for partners to release non-reference GPUs, then repaired drivers, improved compatibility, while simultaneously trying not to fall under the NVIDIA steamroller. A year later, the situation has largely leveled out, thanks to which the current version of the Intel Arc A750 with 8 GB has become a rather interesting option among inexpensive video accelerators costing up to 10,000 hryvnia.

In terms of performance, the Arc A750 is located exactly between the GeForce RTX 3060 and Radeon RX 6600 XT, providing gaming comfort in AAA games of recent years in Full HD with high graphics settings. As an alternative to DLSS/FSR upscalers, Intel uses its own technology called XeSS. Like its competitors, the Arc family is also compatible with DirectX 12 Ultimate and hardware ray tracing, supports mesh shaders and other modern technologies. Arc has an excellent memory subsystem with a large cache and high bandwidth, but they have unobvious problems that owners of other video cards are unlikely to encounter.

The most obvious shortcoming of the Arc series is the strong performance jumps in games with DX 11. Intel promised to fix the problem with the drivers, but the problem still exists. Secondly, the card turned out to be highly dependent on modern technologies and in old systems it may not work at all as expected. For example, if the motherboard does not support Resizable BAR/SAM technologies, which are responsible for the interaction between the processor and video memory, the Intel Arc A750 may become tired of life and turn the game into a slide show. So there is no point in buying Arc A770/750 for older systems at all. But for systems with new processors, next-gen memory and support for PCI-E 4.0/5.0, the Intel Arc A750 can be an interesting alternative to the GeForce RTX 3060 and Radeon RX 6600 XT.