Best First Person Shooter Graphics Cards
During their early years, First Person Shooters or FPS games for short were light in terms of their demand to the overall gaming system, however, this has drastically changed over the years. The improvement in overall graphics design has made FPS games more demanding, and this raises questions about the best gaming hardware needed for the newest fps games, particularly the Graphics Processing Unit or the GPU.
Quick Overview
- Low Priced Graphics Cards For FPS Games
- Mid-Tier Graphics Cards
- High-end Graphics Cards
What to expect from Graphics Cards For FPS games?
Because price and performance are a major concern we have split our graphics card recommendations into 3-tiers.
1- Low Priced Graphics Cards
2- Moderately Priced Graphics Cards
3- High-End Graphics Cards
We have included benchmarks for each and every graphics card that has been recommended. Importantly, the games chosen for benchmarking have three distinct categories based on how much juice they require from a Graphics Card.
1- Least Demanding: CSGO
2- Moderately Demanding: Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare
3- Most Demanding: CyberPunk 2077
Without further ado, let’s get down to the recommendations
Low Priced Graphics Cards For FPS Games
1- GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER WINDFORCE OC 4G – Budget Option
This graphics card boasts a 1755 MHz clock speed with 4GB of GDDR6 of Memory at 12GBPS memory clock speed. This card has 1280 Cuda cores with standard connectors for DP 1.4a, HDMI 2.0b, DL-DVI-D. It is best for games such as CS:GO, Overwatch, and many more at 1080p resolution. This $200 USD card packs a punch with great performance and ensures gaming quality at maximum settings in 1080p resolution. The GIGABYTE variant of this card is superb, not only that it is one of the cheapest, but is also great in terms of cooling – thanks to its double fan design.
Benchmarks
CS:GO – 1080p maxed settings: 290 fps average
CALL OF DUTY: Modern Warfare – 1080p medium settings: 96 fps average
Cyberpunk 2077 – 1080p low settings: 60 fps average
2- MSI Gaming GeForce GTX 1660 Super Ventus 192-bit – Budget Option
The next card on our budget list is the MSI Gaming GeForce GTX 1660 Super Ventus 192-bit. This graphics card has 1408 Cuda cores which are moderately higher than the 1650 super. It has a boost clock of 1,785 MHz, and with 6GB GDDR6 Memory clocking at 14GBs.The 1660 Super also has a relatively high Memory Bandwidth at 336, it can support multiple connectivity that proves to be essential in a setup with multiple monitors. This MSI variant is overclocked, so you can expect boost clocks exceeding the 1,785 MHz standard.
Benchmarks
CS:GO – 1440p Maxed Settings: 206 fps average
CALL OF DUTY: Modern Warfare – 1080p maxed settings: 90 fps average
Cyberpunk 2077 – 1080p low settings: 75 fps average
Mid-Tier Graphics Cards
1- Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 2060 – Mid Tier
The first graphics card on our mid-tier list is the ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 2060. This card is an absolute beast for 1080p users. It delivers good performance to visual quality ratio on all games. It is a solid graphics card that can measure up to the performance requirements of upcoming games at 1080p resolution. Not only that! This card also supports ray tracing, which has been touted by NVIDIA, as the future of gaming. We have tested ray tracing on our system, and it was mind-blowing. This card has 1920 Cuda cores making it faster than the previous cards we featured despite having only 1680 MHz boost clock speed. The memory is decent with 6GB GDDR6 at 14GBs, and 2 efficient cooling fans if you choose the Zotac variant.
Benchmarks
CS:GO – 1440p Maxed Settings: 230 fps average
CALL OF DUTY: Modern Warfare – 1080p maxed settings with Ray Tracing: 60 fps average
Cyberpunk 2077 – 1080p medium settings with Ray Tracing: 50 fps average
2- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super 8GB GDDR6 PCI Express 3.0 Graphics Card – Mid Tier
The most recommended graphics card for 1440p users is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super 8GB GDDR6 PCI Express 3.0 Graphics Card. This Founder’s Edition variant has a very simple design, along with great cooling capacity. It boasts 1770 MHz with 8GB of GDDR6 Memory clocking at 14GBs. RTX 2070 has a whopping 2304 Cuda cores along with support for Ray Tracing at higher frame rates in 1440p. This graphics card also supports DLSS 2.0, which makes it an excellent choice for 1440p resolution setups.
Benchmarks
CS:GO – 1440p Maxed Settings: 260 fps average
CALL OF DUTY: Modern Warfare – 1440p maxed settings with Ray Tracing: 75 fps average
Cyberpunk 2077 – 1440p maxed settings with Ray Tracing and DLSS Performance: 40 fps average
High-end Graphics Cards
1- GeForce RTX 3070 The Ultimate Play – High End
If you want to play FPS games in 4K resolution, then RTX3070 is a perfect graphics card for you! This graphics card only costs about $550 USD, and it is not too far in terms of the price from the RTX 2070. The RTX 30 Series is by far the best upgrade by NVIDIA for more than a decade now, and this is the reason why our mid-tier recommendations did not include the classic RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti. This card has a very huge performance gap compared to its Turing counterparts, and at this price range, this card boasts a whopping 5888 Cuda Cores, which is more than twice the Cuda Cores you get in the RTX 2070. The RTX 3070 is based on the Ampere Architecture which is the latest GPU architecture used by NVIDIA.
Benchmarks
CS:GO – 4K Maxed Settings: 250 fps average
CALL OF DUTY: Modern Warfare – 4K maxed settings with Ray Tracing: 60 fps average
Cyberpunk 2077 – 4k maxed settings with Ray Tracing and DLSS Performance: 35 fps average
2- GeForce RTX 3080 The Ultimate Play – High End
The best graphics card on our list is the RTX 3080. This graphics card is twice faster than the previous RTX 2080 Ti flagship graphics card by NVIDIA, but it comes at half of the price! This $650 graphics card redefines the description of high-end, it has enough muscle to run all game titles without any problem. In terms of performance to price ratio, this is the ultimate winner. The 8704 Cuda Cores make playing games with maxed settings at 4K with RTX ON a no sweat for this GPU. This card also has an upgraded memory of 10 GB GDDR6X at a crazy 16 GBs. The performance is truly astonishing, and the quality of the visual graphics is amazing.
NOTE: Our benchmark for RTX 3080 on these games especially CSGO may not be that accurate because there aren’t many CPUs that can fully compliment this beastly graphics card. A slight CPU bottleneck is to be expected.
Benchmark
CS:GO – 4K Maxed Settings: 350 fps average (estimate)
CALL OF DUTY: Modern Warfare – 4K maxed settings with Ray Tracing: 95 fps average (estimate)
Cyberpunk 2077 – 4k maxed settings with Ray Tracing and DLSS Performance: 45 fps average (estimate)
Conclusion
We categorized the games based on how much performance hit they do to the GPU. CS:GO is one of the lightest fps games you can play, COD being the average in terms of the demand, and Cyberpunk 2077 as the highest. Take note that Cyberpunk 2077 was released just recently, and is known to demand more GPU power than the rest of the games you can find in the market nowadays.
Therefore, even if you have chosen one of the budget options from this list, you are guaranteed decent gameplay for every single game that you prefer, and of course, that includes all existing FPS games.
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