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Best gadgets for Gaming: Tech Awards 2021 Editor's Choice Results (Part 4)

By Team HardwareZone - 12 Apr 2021

Best Graphics Chip

Gaming has always been a huge deal but it gained even greater significance in the past year of the pandemic. Left with nowhere to go, many people turned to their PCs, consoles, and phones, to while away the hours and the days. Regardless of what kind of games you play, what devices you play them on, here's a list of the top devices to help you get the most out of your gaming sessions. These are the award categories that the editors have assessed for this segment to play your favourite games on:-

  • Best Graphics Chip
  • Best Graphics Card
  • Best Gaming CPU
  • Best Wireless Ultralight Gaming Mouse
  • Best Wired Ultralight Gaming Mouse
  • Best Gaming Headset
  • Best Gaming Console
  • Game of the Year
  • Best Premium Smartphone
  • Best TV
  • Best Home Entertainment Projector
  • Best Wi-Fi 6 Mesh Networking System

Other segments include the Best devices for HomeMobility devicesWork and Gaming (this article). Not to forget, our Readers' Choice results for the Best Tech Brands.

Read on and find out who the winners are in each category! For this segment, we begin with what's arguably the most important component in every gaming PC – the graphics chip.

 

    Best Graphics Chip

    Last year was a defining year for PC gamers. Not just because of how the pandemic has confined us to working from home, but also how it made us look toward video gaming as one of the few rare entertainment outlets that allow us to connect and play with our friends and families. That both NVIDIA and AMD also launched their new GPUs, the GeForce RTX 30 series and Radeon RX 6000 series, came at an opportune time too, with games like Cyberpunk 2077 and The Medium demanding more processing power than ever.

    Representing NVIDIA's newest GPU family is the flagship GeForce RTX 3080, which also paved the way for the more budget-friendly RTX 3070 and the incredibly monstrous RTX 3090 that NVIDIA is aptly nicknaming the BFGPU. Over at AMD's side, the company's Radeon RX 6000 series are their strongest push in the discrete GPU race yet with their own flagship, the Radeon RX 6800 XT, even giving the GeForce RTX 3080 a run for its money in some rasterized results.

    But rasterized results do not tell the complete picture - not even half of it to be exact. In choosing the best GPU, we looked at how each company's flagship card fared not just in raw, brute performance. But also the new and/or improved technologies it brought to gamers. 

     

    Nominees:

    • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080
    • AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT

     

    And the winner is...

    NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition graphics card

    The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 (and by extension, all graphics cards based on this GPU) is based on NVIDIA's latest Ampere architecture and comes with new features, such as RTX IO, which will speed up gaming loading and reduce game install sizes. Clearly, it's a graphics card that isn't all about frame rates and all the visual bells and whistles though when it comes to that, the RTX 3080 GPU is armed to the teeth with the newest generation of ray-tracing and DLSS 2.0. These two key defining features are also what set the RTX 3080 GPUs apart from AMD's RX 6800 XTs, which performed poorly in ray tracing benchmarks. Even its equivalent of the competition's DLSS, FidelityFX Super Resolution, was not ready at launch - and is still not ready yet.

    With the RTX 30 series, and in particular the RTX 3080, the new cards represent a generational leap in performance. More so, when you consider that not only is the RTX 3080 Founders Edition more than twice as powerful on paper than the RTX 2080 Founders Edition, but going for the same launch price at US$699.  

     
    Model Performance Features Value Overall Price (as tested)
    NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition 9.5 8.5 9.0 9.5 US$699
    AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (Made By AMD) 8.5 8.0 8.5 8.5 US$649

    For more details on how we selected our winners, check out the full reviews and articles listed in the References section below.

     

    References

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