Best graphics card benchmarks: Best Graphics Cards — January 2023

2 марта, 2023

GPU and Graphics Cards Reviews

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What is the best graphics card / GPU for sim racing?

Last updated: January 2nd, 2023

What is the best graphics card for sim racing? And, importantly – have you checked the one you already own is actually good enough to run your sim racing software on higher settings already? It might just be getting too hot and stuttering.

Thanks to a significant drop in the value of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, a small window of opportunity has opened for gamers to get their hands on a next-generation GPU.

For the last few years, new graphics cards have been in short supply. Not that the manufacturers would acknowledge this, as NVIDIA reported an increase in GPU production in 2021! Scalpers have been very successful at adding as much as 100% markup over MSRP (manufacturer’s suggested retail price) for some cards.

However – that markup is steadily dropping on eBay. A £1300 (MSRP) 3090 RTX FE was, at peak demand, priced close to ~£2600 on eBay. But miners are seeing higher risk in the current climate meaning you can pick up a new 3090 FE on eBay for £1000, or a used one for £800.

Weird flex: I’ve tested and run most GPUs for sim racing – there’s some nice stuff in this pile!

A new GPU (and sim racing PC for that matter!) is a big investment. And for sim racing, do you actually need the latest flagship NVIDIA GPU? The answer, in my humble opinion, is a firm no – especially not for iRacing and especially not if you understand the key element for all GPU performance: cooling.

I own most flavours of 30 series NVIDIA GPUs, so you’d think then that I still run a 3090 FE in my sim racing PC? Well having just installed a Zotac 4090 to update this article, clearly, the answer is no. Spoiler: a 4090 is huge overkill for iRacing, for now.

What’s the best GPU for sim racing?

Let’s go to the results first, and if you want to read the methodology, carry on reading! Otherwise, I recommend looking at some of the GPU deals on Overclockers or Amazon.com at the moment!

GPU by best FPS in iRacing

GPU power, efficiency, and temperature.

This article was somewhat inspired by my good friend Geoff who reported stuttering in iRacing during a race session with me. He has an EVGA 3080 RTX 3080 FTW3 Ultra. Even running triples, this card should be able to handle extremely high framerates in iRacing, with all the settings pretty high if not on max, without stuttering.

We investigated using GPU-Z and found that the GPU core temperature was hitting 77c in the replay! This would put the VRAM temperature very much in the 100c realm, possibly higher. The card wasn’t short on power, it was thermal throttling. I’ve seen 3080s begin to throttle at GPU temps of 66c – so 77c is going to drastically reduce the life of that GPU. Sorry, Geoff!

Therein lies the problem. If you’ve got an NVIDIA 30 series GPU for sim racing, you’ve probably got enough power unless you’re running a really out-there setup.

But even then, check this video from Will Ford:

Will Ford’s 65″ 4k sim racing setup looks outrageously good

That setup was running a 2080 RTX ti! I think it was water-cooled, and if I’ve understood correctly he was overclocking the CPU (a 9900k overclocked to 5.5ghz).

Hardware-wise though, this is a perfect example of extracting the maximum performance from what you own, not what you want.

If you’ve got a 2080 RTX ti, that’s still an amazing bit of kit for sim racing.

Power, efficiency and temperature

GPUs need more power to perform as their temperature increases. This makes them less efficient. Less efficiency means more heat, and so a dangerous cycle begins. This issue is particularly terrible when the thermal pads used to conduct heat away from the silicon and into the cooler are very cheap.

Nasty thermal pad material found in 3080/3090 Founder’s Edition GPUs (source)

Overheating VRAM temperatures is an issue that particularly affects the Founder’s Edition GPUs from NVIDIA, but it is endemic across all 30 series reference board manufacturers in one form or another. Replacing the thermal pads on a £1000 GPU is not a difficult job for someone who can follow instructions and observe the relevant precautions when stripping down the card’s ancillary components. But it isn’t for everyone – nor should it be.

Replacing the thermal pads on an RTX 3080 FE (yes, I cleaned up the thermal paste! – image source)

As a gamer, the best thing to do is make sure your PC case is very well-ventilated. You can upgrade the case fans or even just set them to max in the motherboard’s bios. Those things will get you a long way, but ultimately the solution is to a) check your GPU and VRAM temperatures using GPU-Z and b) carry out a thermal re-pad if (when!) necessary!

Note the oily patches on the back of this EVGA RTX 2080 ti – signs the thermal pads are losing oil and will need replacing

So before you start thinking you need a new GPU I’d check what you’ve already got isn’t suffering from runaway temperature issues.

A lot of gamers think that miners abuse their cards – I can tell you with absolute certainty being a miner myself, miners always run by the thermal performance of the card. When a new Founders Edition turns up, I’ll re-pad it before I even power it. Gamers don’t think like this – well, not all of them! Check your temperatures under load and act accordingly. This is what good looks like:

GPU temperature, Hot Spot and Memory Temperature are all very healthy on this Zotac 3090

OK, I get it – but what’s the best GPU for sim racing?

As I mentioned before I removed the 3090 FE from my sim racing PC as I was learning how to use Nicehash miner. Keeping it cool enough was very challenging – it was hitting extreme VRAM temps of over 100c unless I ran it at 60% power.

While I was re-padding my 3090 I swapped it for an EVGA 3070 FTW3 Gaming Ultra, the “LHR”, “limited hash rate” version. I was really impressed.

After swapping the card, I ran iRacing on maximum settings with an unlimited frame rate to see what sort of frame rate the 3070 could settle down to. Obviously, the FPS from the 3090 FE was much better than the 3070 (the 3090 would top out at around 270/280 fps depending on temperature).

Once set up, that little 3070 would sit happily at rates as high as 160fps in iRacing with little to no trouble. The only compromise I made on the settings was to disable grandstands and crowds. Everything else set to max, no problem.

160 fps from a 3070 is absolutely fine for iRacing, and that 3070 was a fair bit less expensive too. Not to mention the power consumption. A 3070 can be optimised to run at around 140w vs the 3090 which will chew up every last drop of 350 watts if you let it. More power, more heat, and more potential for thermal throttling unless you’ve fixed your thermal pads.

Testing for the best GPU in iRacing

I was going to stop there, with the conclusion being that I think that when you weigh up the price compared to performance; a 3070 RTX Ti is the perfect GPU for iRacing. If of course, you can afford better then go for it but beware that some GPUs overheat and actually perform worse over a longer period of time.

Still considered the daddy of all GPUs for sim racing: the EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 FTW3 Ultra Gaming, 24GB GDDR6X, iCX3 Technology

But I slept on that point and decided to collect some data because despite having run a fair few cards in the past it was a very subjective opinion. So I set up a test using 6 GPUs, ranging from a 3070 to a 3090 Founders Edition.

The process

For each of the GPUs, I re-ran the iRacing graphics config after checking the latest driver was installed and the GPU was working in device manager. After the settings config ran, I applied “maximum” settings:

Settings used in iRacing for test using a Ferrari GT3 at Monza in a public practice session

These are my typical settings except, I normally run with crowds and grandstands set to off. This keeps the 3070 very stable at around 160fps.

For each card, I took note of the highest FPS seen in the session, the typical FPS and logged the GPU temp and VRAM temp in GPU-Z. Note that the 3070 doesn’t have this information so I’ve replaced that data point with the hot spot temp.

Some important caveats:

  • I ran a session of about 10 laps for each GPU.
  • Both Founder’s Edition cards have had their thermal pads replaced – they’d be by far the hottest and potentially suffer issues during a long session
  • The FPS (av) is where the GPU’s framerate seemed to settle
  • Rendering the grandstands as you drive down the pit straight appears to be, by far, the most GPU-intensive operation and drops the FPS on the least powerful cards more significantly than the most powerful.
  • iRacing isn’t as GPU intensive as Assetto Corsa – I have not included Assetto in my tests as I’m very much an iRacing person!
  • I have several Zotac 3090 ArcticStorm water-cooled cards mining – I didn’t fancy draining a watercooled mining rig and building a water-cooled sim rig for this test. If I had, it would win hands down!
  • Update: The 4090 absolutely destroyed all the other cards in this test, but it is overkill for iRacing

Which GPU / graphics card is best for iRacing?

I was genuinely surprised by the Aorus GeForce RTX 3080 XTREME Rev 2.0. This is a 2nd hand card I bought on eBay. It just needed a clean and off it went! It’s a 10GB LHR (limited hashrate) card – clearly with excellent cooling. It comes in a really nice case with an OLED screen running animation and lots of nice RGB. If you’re somewhat uninhibited on the budget side, this is probably the best all-rounder you can buy for your sim.

Note how incredibly well the EVGA RTX 2080 Ti does in comparison to the 30 series GPUs! If you own one of these I really wouldn’t bother yourself with looking for a new GPU if you’re planning to only run iRacing. What an incredible card! This one needs a thermal pad replacement – it did get hotter than it should during the test and had it run for a long session I suspect the performance would have tailed off.

EVGA do make great reference board graphics cards. The EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 ULTRA GAMING GPU performed quite well, although in the 3080 group, the Aorus beats it.

If you can afford one, and you’re confident enough to carry out a thermal re-pad when GPU-Z reports crazy VRAM temps, buy a 3090 Founder’s Edition and sleep well at night. The FPS is amazing, and I’ve no doubt that with some time spent using Afterburner, you could squeeze a higher framerate than the results in my test. If you’re a high-budget kind of driver, build a water-cooled rig with a Zotac 3090 ArcticStorm and *know* that you’ve got a real beast of a gaming PC.

Obviously, the 3090 ti addresses the majority of issues the 3090 Founder’s Edition came with, notably, it runs cooler and offers around a 10% improvement in performance.

But, if you’re looking for a less expensive option, I really think a 3070 RTX ti is a great purchase, it’s the least expensive GPU on the list and runs iRacing brilliantly. If you turn grandstands and crowds off in iRacing but leave everything else maxed out, you’ll not notice a difference in FPS vs cards at twice the price.

My new Zotac 4090

The Zotac 4090

For fun, I swapped my 3080 FTW3 for a Zotac GeForce RTX 4090 Trinity OC 24GB GDDR6X. Firstly, it’s massive. Check out the size difference compared to its predecessor:

The 4090 is probably 3″ longer than this EVGA 3080 FTW3

It also needs a lot of care with the cabling, as it’s known that bending the new power adapter can cause some serious problems. So, bending the adapter cable was not an option, rather gently encouraging it to accommodate itself in my Corsair 700D case (see the build here).

Given the power requirements (4xPCIe 8-pin power), this little adapter feels very insufficient

The results; the card runs cooler than the 30 series units and frankly, isn’t troubled by iRacing. I caught a 438FPS peak:

Generally speaking around 200FPS was the norm at 5120 x 1440 on my Samsung G9 set to run at a 240hz refresh rate in HDR. Basically, if I was running Assetto Corsa Competizione on maximum settings with 1440p triple monitors, this card still wouldn’t break much of a sweat (in my humble opinion)

Perhaps when iRacing updates to DX12, a 40 series GPU will be more appropriate. But for now, if money isn’t an issue, buy the best – but there are some brilliant cards out there at a bargain price.

Related articles

The 10 Best Utilities for Tuning and Testing Video Cards

This article was written by a website visitor and has been rewarded.

In recent years, gaming graphics cards have become noticeably more expensive, and their power consumption is only increasing with each new generation. And if 5-10 years ago you could safely trust automation and just play without looking at the temperature, power consumption and frequencies of the video card, today more and more gamers are trying to optimize the performance of the video card and constantly monitor how it works. nine0004

Once you delve a little into the topic of setting up a video card, it becomes clear that it is quite simple to make it work quieter, consume less electricity and heat up less without losing performance. And in recent years, this particular tuning method, undervolt or undervolt combined with overclocking, has become the most popular among experienced users. And the times of mindless overclocking, when all the juice was squeezed out of the video card, receiving a meager performance boost due to a noticeable increase in heating and power consumption, are long gone. nine0004

recommendations

Special utilities for monitoring its parameters and their settings, as well as benchmarks that evaluate performance, will help in setting up a video card. And given the fact that after the mining boom, a huge number of video cards appeared on the secondary market, stress testing utilities have become especially relevant, allowing you to load the video chip, power system and memory to the maximum to quickly identify a malfunction. But we will start with information utilities that collect as much information about the video card as possible. nine0004

GPU-Z

GPU-Z is a small utility that collects information about a video card and has long been recognized by computer enthusiasts. The utility is compact and well suited for quickly assessing the characteristics of a video card, displaying as much information as possible. In addition, GPU-Z has a monitoring tab that allows you to get complete information about the BIOS of the video card and allows you to save it.

Link to download from the official site.

HWiNFO

The HWiNFO utility is a combine that collects almost all the information that the sensors of your PC components give out and the main value of the utility is that it constantly monitors without requiring many resources. And you can always open it and see what the maximum temperatures were on your video card today and, if they rise, take action by improving cooling.

Link to download from the official site.

AIDA64

AIDA64 is one of the most advanced utilities for collecting PC information and testing components. There is not a single parameter and sensor that AIDA64 cannot collect information about. As a utility for testing video cards, it is distinguished by the ability to collect information about the BIOS and drivers, supported video modes, and many other parameters of interest to advanced users. The utility also has the AIDA64 GPGPU Benchmark, which allows you to evaluate the speed of reading information from memory, AES-256 encryption and interaction with data in a random sample format. nine0004

Link to download from the official site.

MSI Afterburner

MSI Afterburner can be called the main utility for configuring video cards. Overclocking, undervolting, setting the fan speed — everything is done through this utility. And if you add the ability to output the necessary information to the OSD right on top of the game, then you can admit that MSI Afterburner is almost indispensable, even despite the fact that video card drivers have acquired similar functions.

Link to download from the official site. nine0004

FPS Monitor

But the FPS Monitor utility specializes only in displaying information about the operation of your video card and the system as a whole in an overlay on top of the game, and it does it very well. Compared to monitoring, MSI Afterburner FPS Monitor provides more detailed information, allowing you to choose fonts, sizes, styles, colors, and options for rendering sensor values.

Link to download from the official site.

FurMark

After you have set up monitoring of video card parameters using the utilities above, you can proceed to testing using stress tests. You need to do this with a fair amount of caution, because such utilities give out such a powerful load that is unattainable in a regular game that they can literally break the video card, especially if it is already «breathing its last». FurMark is the most famous utility of this type and its main feature is the ability to evaluate the potential of the video card cooling system and the operation of the chip under maximum load. nine0004

Link to download from the official site.

MSI Kombustor

MSI Kombustor is a more advanced and modern stress testing utility that allows you to test OpenGL and Vulkan features, including MSI PhysX, FurMark, TessMark, Phong-Donut and PBR-Donut tests.

Link to download from the official site.

Nvidia MATS/MODS

MODS software package (MODular Diagnostic Suite or Modular Diagnostic Software) with MATS program, which allows you to test the video memory of Nvidia video cards — an indispensable utility in all service centers that repair video cards. The utility is launched from a bootable flash drive, from the command line, and if you suspect that your video card has a faulty video memory, then use it to quickly find the problem. It was not possible to find the official website of the utility, but there are many links to it on computer forums. nine0004

3DMark

3DMark is a set of tests for evaluating the performance of a video card. 3DMark traces its lineage back to the late 90s, and each generation of video cards had its own current version of the test. In 2022, Time Spy, Night Raid, Fire Strike, Sky Diver, Cloud Gate, Ice Storm, and Ice Storm Extreme tests are still relevant, with which you can evaluate how fast your graphics card works compared to peers. It is also worth noting a powerful stability test, which will allow you to load your video card much more than regular games. nine0004

Link to download from the official site.

Unigine Superposition

Unigine Superposition is a smaller, simpler and completely free benchmark based on the UNIGINE engine. The test heavily loads the video card due to the proprietary SSRTGI (Screen-Space Ray-Traced Global Illumination) dynamic lighting technology and is suitable for quickly assessing the performance and performance of the video card, as well as temperature under load. nine0004

Link to download from the official site.

Choosing a reliable and high-quality video card without reading dozens of reviews will help you choose a customer rating. To do this, you need to sort video cards, select the most highly rated ones, and then start searching for more detailed information about them. In Citylink, such video cards at the end of 2022 were MSI GeForce RTX 3050 GAMING X 8G, Palit GeForce RTX 3050 Dual OC and MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GAMING X.

Write in the comments, what utilities do you use to test and configure video cards?

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How to conduct a GPU stress test: the best tests of video cards

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