A titanic work by the PC Games Hardware website, which looks back over fifteen years of graphics cards.
Well-known for its in-depth and comprehensive reports, the German site PC Games Hardware has slightly undermined its reputation with its latest article. Indeed, while it's always about PC components - in this case, graphics cards - the tests seem to have been a little brief, with the use of a single 3DMark scene (in this case, Fire Strike) and the presentation of performance measurements on just three video games, including BioShock Infinite, Tomb Raider (2013 version) and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Why just three games, and why such "old" games?
Performance of 180 graphics cards (2009-2025) © PC Games Hardware
The explanation is actually quite simple, and fully justifies these choices: PC Games Hardware simply decided to take a deep dive into the history of graphics cards, looking back over more than fifteen years of evolution in the field. No fewer than 180 graphics cards have been brought together to provide as complete a picture as possible of the different architectures brought to market between 2009 and 2025 by AMD, Intel and NVIDIA, not forgetting ATI, which had not yet been completely phagocytosed by AMD. Of course, taking performance measurements on 180 cards implies making a selection, and de facto excludes the most recent games.
Power evolution of AMD and NVIDIA cards between 2009 and 2025 © PC Games Hardware
This almost archeological survey of the PC world allows us to measure the rise in GPU power, since PC Games Hardware starts with models as old as the ATI Radeon HD 5450 or NVIDIA GeForce GT 430, and reaches the pinnacle of today's graphics cards with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 launched last January. In addition to the raw performance, our German colleague invites us to discover the more specific power rise of the AMD and NVIDIA ranges (graphics above). Of course, we can't recommend you enough to read the entire PC Games Hardware dossier... even if it is in German.
