Old flagships vs.new budget graphics cards

Leaving aside hardware ray tracing - the latest big innovation in custom 3D graphics - graphics cards two or even three generations older than the current devices cannot yet be called fundamentally obsolete, and, by and large, they are only distinguished from the current models by performance.
The real historical boundary at this point is between the devices which debuted at the end of 2011 - beginning of 2012 and what came before.
Then AMD released Radeon HD 7000 series gas pedals, based on a fundamentally new architecture - GCN, and NVIDIA has appeared GeForce 600 family, which also incorporated a lot of important changes.
Unlike its predecessors, these graphics cards support both modern graphics APIs - DirectX 12 and Vulkan, modern output interfaces and have the memory capacity to meet today's minimum requirements.
Most importantly, they still receive regular driver updates to address critical bugs and vulnerabilities.
Senior models Radeon HD 7000 and GeForce 600 are guaranteed to work in current builds of Windows 10 and the ability to at least run most new games.Another thing, what performance \"old guys\" can offer in modern titles, and we are talking not only about the simple online games, but also demanding AAA-projects.
The question makes practical sense, because on the secondary market old graphics cards are sold for very modest money - much cheaper than modern low-end devices, which are supposed to be the best alternative to the old flagships, but as the tests will show, everything is not so clear.
Recently we published an article on a related topic, comparing the performance of old and new high-performance GPUs in current games with the results in games five years ago.
Now let's change the terms of the problem.
Let's take only modern games with demanding graphics and flagship models of 2012-2013.
The first generation graphics cards will be presented by GeForce GTX 680 and Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, the next generation - GeForce GTX 780 Ti and Radeon R9 290X.
This time we will not use reinforced versions of the latest devices (GeForce GTX TITAN and Radeon R9 390X) with double the VRAM.
To put the test results in the context of the capabilities of modern gas pedals we will help two budget gamers video cards - GeForce GTX 1630 and Radeon RX 6500 XT - and the \"plug\" GeForce GT 1030.
Finally, as an experiment, we will consider outdated hardware - GeForce GTX 580 and Radeon HD 6970.Test participants at the moment are in various stages of support from the manufacturer.
GeForce GTX 1630 and Radeon RX 6500 XT receive, of course, monthly software updates and optimizations for the latest games.
The drivers of \"red\" video cards from 7000 series to 300 series, and \"green\" cards from GeForce 600 to GeForce 700 also are updated, but less frequently and only to fix critical errors.
Well, the latest drivers for GeForce 500 and Radeon HD 6000 models are dated 2018 and 2016, respectively.At the same time video cards newer than GeForce 500 and Radeon HD 6000 support DirectX 12 and Vulkan, which is the main condition for running modern games.
Compatibility with DirectX 12 (but not Vulkan) applies even to the GeForce 500 series, but the gas pedals of VWLIW architecture (i.e.
Radeon 5000 and 6000) are too different from what the company released later for AMD to care about support for low-level programming interfaces.
However, even during the first games for DirectX 12, it was noticeable that the then NVIDIA hardware did not work very efficiently with the new API, and since then the situation has been aggravated.
Nevertheless, in all situations when the game and hardware would allow it we used DirectX 12 or Vulkan: DirectX 11 is leaving the scene and is simply not supported by many of the new games.⇡#Test stand, test methodologyTest standCPUAMD Ryzen 9 5950X (4.4GHz, all cores fixed clock speed)MotherboardASUS ROG Strix X570-E Gaming (Resizable BAR incl.)RAMG.
Skill Trident Z RGB F4-3200C14D-16GTZR, 4 × 8GB (3600MT/s, CL17)ROMIntel SSD 760p, 2048GBPower supplyCorsair AX1200i, 1200W CPUCorsair iCUE H115i RGB PRO HTClosureOpened standOperating systemWindows 10 Pro x64GPU AMDRadeon HD 6970AMD Catalyst 15.
7.1Radeon HD 7970 GHz EditionAMD Software Adrenalin Edition 22.6.
1 for Legacy ASICsRadeon R9 290XAMD Software Adrenalin Edition 22.6.1 for Legacy ASICsRadeon RX 6500 XTAMD Software Adrenalin Edition 22.8.1 GPU Applications NVIDIAGeForce GTX 580NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready Driver 391.35GeForce GTX 680NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready Driver 473.
81GeForce GTX 780 TiNVIDIA GeForce Game Ready Driver 473.81GeForce GTX 1030NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready Driver 516.94GeForce GTX 1630NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready Driver 516.94GamesAPI Test Method