How Much Should You Spend on a GPU?

**The Radeon RX 580: A Solid Choice for Gaming**

For the most part, we're actually well above that [1080p] resolution, 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.

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.

**Performance Comparison**

Performance-wise, this is much better. 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.

**The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660**

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, if you're playing on a 60 hertz display, you probably wouldn't notice a massive difference. But if you're playing at those higher resolutions or especially if you can take advantage of the higher frame rate, I mean, the 1660 is no joke.

It should be no surprise that Fortnite is no problem for the 1660. We're generally in the 80 to 90 frames per second range, which is especially on epic settings, is pretty solid. I mean, this is totally smooth, no issues. This card really does feel like you could probably aim 1440p in a lot of games.

**Benchmark Results**

Yeah, we're pretty solid in the 100-plus fps range right now. So it's actually kind of impressive that we have a $220 graphics card which does deliver like more than 1080p performance, right? I mean, if you're playing on a normal 1080p monitor, which I assume is most people at this point, you really won't get much more beyond going with something like a 1660, which is really nice.

**Conclusion**

So if we get into some benchmarks to really put these four graphics cards side by side, there's a pretty clear list of winners. So the 1650 by far takes the lead, but that 580 and the 570 aren't massively behind. And interestingly, the 1650 is even behind that 570, which does make sense, right? I mean, it was not as powerful in any of the games and the benchmark absolutely holds that out.

Right now, you should not buy the 1650. I mean, yeah, it's a low-power card, it's nice and small. But beyond that, for $150, the performance just doesn't match up. In fact, one of my favorite cards in this entire group is actually the Radeon 570.

Yeah, the cheapest card here, the one that's the oldest is actually still completely playable here in 2019. For $130, you cannot beat this, at least not right now until there's like a 1650 price cut. If you wanna take a step up from the 570, I do think the next logical step is the 1660.

Sure it is more expensive, but you're getting a good jump in performance. But regardless, I think these are really the cards that you should consider. The 580 is okay, and the 1650 is well, don't buy it. I really do feel like the 570 though is probably the sweet spot for gaming right now. This a lot of games at high settings, even with some of the more demanding ones.