Graphics processors have come a long way since the advent of 3D gaming, and are now able to rapidly solve complex physics calculations, process large amounts of polygons, and render high-resolution textures.<\/p>\n
The industry has been dominated by two GPU manufacturers, Nvidia and AMD (previously ATI).<\/p>\n
The companies are competing at the cutting-edge of graphics technology and are constantly refining and improving their products.<\/p>\n
After the launch of graphics cards based on the new Polaris and Pascal architectures, GPUs from both brands experienced a leap in performance relative to previous architecture improvements.<\/p>\n
This is largely due to die shrinkage and usage of the 14nm and 16nm FinFet manufacturing processes.<\/p>\n
To see how far the cards have come, we\u00a0compared benchmark scores for single graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia over the last four generations to see how their GPUs have improved.<\/p>\n
Benchmark scores from Anandtech’s benchmark repository<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>were used to provide an average benchmark score across a number of games for a single graphics card.<\/p>\n The benchmark tests used to find the average score for each graphics card were:<\/p>\n We compared a single graphics card from each architecture, focusing on GPUs of the same performance class.<\/p>\n The benchmark scores for Nvidia and AMD graphics cards\u00a0are detailed below.<\/p>\n\n