WHEN TO UPGRADE
It’s easy to get carried away looking at the top-performing cards and thinking it’s time for an upgrade. Resist the temptation, at least until the games and applications you’re using warrant the expense. Even then, make sure that your ‘upgrade’ actually represents a true leveling up of performance.
The oft-quoted rule of thumb is that a previous generation GPU represents one step down in performance, but that’s not entirely accurate. For Nvidia, the RTX 2080 lands midway between the 3060 and 3060 Ti, the GTX 1080 performs about on par with the RTX 2060, and the
GTX 980 lines up with the
GTX 1060. That’s two steps down, but if you look at the
–70 cards, it’s maybe one to one and a half steps down, and among the –60 series chips it’s sometimes less than a single step, albeit muddied by the Turing GTX 16-series GPUs. AMD has swapped through various naming paradigms so making comparisons is a bit trickier, but the RX 5700 XT matches up with the RX 6600 XT, Vega 64 takes on the 5600 XT, and Fury X matches up with the RX 580.
If you’re sitting on a GTX 1060, which still rates as the most popular GPU according to Steam’s hardware survey, it’s probably worth thinking about upgrading. Our advice is to try and get a graphics card that’s at least double the performance of your current GPU if you want to feel a big improvement. The RTX 3060 gets you that, as does the RX 6600, but if you can splurge on an RTX 3070 or RX 6700 XT you get triple the performance.
The other thing to consider is when new GPU architectures and hardware will launch. Upgrading right before the new stuff comes out is usually the worst approach while being an early adopter can mean paying higher prices. Then again, anyone who paid scalper prices of $1,100 for an RTX 3080 after that card launched probably felt good about the decision when prices shot up to over $2,000 four months later. Let’s hope that never happens again.