Best Graphics Card Under 300

In this guide, we will once again try to tell you what you really should pay attention to when choosing a video card, and what common beliefs are actually useless and even harmful myths.

What to choose - Nvidia or AMD

Nvidia and AMD are not graphics cards. These, suddenly, are the names of companies.

If you choose a video card, then you need to choose a specific product for a specific price. You should focus on its real characteristics: cost, the number of FPS in games, overclocking capabilities and the performance gain received from it.

The Radeon RX 5500 XT with 4GB of onboard memory costs the same as the GeForce GTX 1650 Super. Their power consumption is the same, performance is the same.

Obviously, in this case, you can choose one or the other card. And whatever you choose, you have absolutely nothing to lose.

At the same price, the card from AMD is already a little slower. Yes, the difference can hardly be called significant, and certainly it will not allow you to play with higher settings or higher resolutions.

But what's the point of giving the same money for a product that, albeit very conditionally, is weaker? Now, if the difference in price is $50, which can be "invested" in other components, then it's another matter.

Operating with mythical parameters like “brand reputation”, “software stability” or “especially bright, juicy picture” will eventually lead you to buy a video card that will either not cope with your tasks or will prove to be worse than the solution from competitors.

Is it worth changing the motherboard if it has PCI-e 3.0, and the card has PCI-e 4.0

Different versions of the PCI-e interface are compatible with each other: a video card developed in the times of PCI-e 2.0 can be installed in a board with 3.0 and 4.0 interfaces without any problems. Also, nothing forbids a video card with a version 4.0 interface to work in a board with an "old" version of the interface.

As an illustrative example, we can provide detailed materials with an analysis of the work in various modes of the Radeon RX 5700 XT and GeForce RTX 2080 Ti video cards.

However, the word "directly" in the paragraph above is not without reason, and indirect influence still takes place. A high-speed interface is important when the consumption of video memory exceeds the capacity of the card's own buffer, and it is forced to use part of the RAM as a reserve.

And it is precisely to smooth out, and not to correct or compensate for losses. Since at first the PCI-e 4.0 benchmark seems to allow you to get a higher FPS, but by the middle of the test scene, the results on PCI-e 3.0 and PCI-e 4.0 are evened out. Now, let's try to figure out what is the Best Graphics Card Under 300 in 2022?

Best Graphics Card Under 300

The Radeon RX 6500XT is the only gaming-class video card so far (albeit an entry-level one) that uses only 4 PCI-e signal lines. In such a configuration, studies have shown that the difference in throughput between PCI-e 4.0 and PCI-e 3.0 already has a real meaning.

True, the difference in real scenarios is far from 50, and not even 20 percent. In some cases, it even equals 2-3 frames per second.

Thus, if you suddenly hear advice that when buying a video card, the processor with the motherboard must also be changed, otherwise nothing will work or the old interface will “cut off” up to 15% (20, 25, 30, and so on) of the performance of the video card , know that the task of this “advisor” is to convince you to make another expensive purchase.

Ray tracing: important or not?

The latest trend is the introduction of real-time lighting processing into games, which makes it possible to abandon the preliminary placement of many “artificial” light sources across the game level in favor of global illumination. And besides - introducing more realistic effects of reflection and refraction of light from various types of surfaces.

There is nothing wrong with the technology itself. Moreover, it is difficult to expect a revolution in graphics due to a simple increase in the number of pixels on the screen and megabytes in textures: it is the qualitative changes that are needed, and ray tracing fits this definition quite well.

The problem is somewhat different.

Ray tracing is only good if the graphics card you choose is REALLY capable of delivering comfortable FPS in games with ray tracing enabled.

If we are talking about models of video cards from the Radeon RX 6000 and GeForce RTX 3000 family, then, of course, there is no place for reservations: you will get above 60 FPS with beams turned on in any current game at FullHD and QuadHD resolutions. In 4K - not always, but even there it will be possible to choose compromise graphics settings.

Enabling ray tracing at “full” screen resolution drops performance below 60 frames on all video cards - only the RTX 2080 is approaching the coveted mark (or rather, it produces 59 frames in terms of average FPS - What is Graphics Card for details).

The use of DLSS upscaling technology corrects the situation, but the image in this case is generated at a lower resolution and then stretched to FullHD, so the final image quality may be worse than “full frame”. Plus, Control is an example of the most complete implementation of DLSS compared to other games that support ray tracing.