The general consensus in the mid-range category of Graphics cards is that as AMD offers a bit more straight up rasterization performance which results in a tad higher FPS than the NVIDIA cards in most cases, it's generally understood that AMD offers much better value for money in this price segment. But this point of view is largely incomplete as it doesn't take into account for both Ray Tracing and Upscaling capabilities which offer substantial reasons as to why NVIDIA cards (some of them, at least) can be a better buy over AMD even in this segment.
Cause honestly, if you're willing to buy a mid-range GPU in 2024, there's absolutely no reason why you would want to skip on Ray Tracing which is present in far more titles than it's ever been and is well on it's way to become a new visual standard in the industry.
And as far as Ray Tracing goes, it's a well known fact that AMD is still far behind NVIDIA at this moment. So going for an AMD card in this segment can mean closing yourself off to most forms of RT there is, which is something I don't think one would prefer given the surge of RT based tech in gaming today.
And then there's also DLSS which enables a significant performance increase in ALL visual quality settings, helping any NVIDIA Graphics card (that features it) to stay relevant for a really long time and thus offering possibly the most bang for your buck that you can get. However, AMD has FSR 3 too which is their own version of upscaling but it's been touted to be lesser than DLSS in more ways than one, especially in terms of image quality.
But still even in the mid-range category of GPU's, if you turn on RT + DLSS,
then the performance figures can change in favor of NVIDIA by quite a bit. This is what I think enables the NVIDIA Graphics cards to have a definite ace up their sleeves over AMD at the more value oriented, mid-range price segment.
Another thing that's needed to be taken into consideration is that if you play at 60 Hz (which is still the Gold standard and perfectly adequate for Videogames) or even at 75 Hz, then the extra framerates provided by the AMD cards can become largely irrelevant in the majority of titles cause most of the cards from both brands at this price range can stay comfortably above the 60 FPS mark almost all the time.
However, VRAM is possibly the only area where I think AMD has a genuine edge over NVIDIA as they're far more generous in terms of delivering more of it in their batch of cards. Now as far as VRAM is considered, the more there is the merrier, so you should definitely aim for the highest VRAM that you can get at this price point cause the amount of VRAM goes a long way in terms of future proofing your GPU.
And there's another important factor that you should definitely check out before making your buying decision which is the heat generation and the overall power consumption of the cards which is always as crucial as everything else.
So it really comes down to individual preferences and whether you prefer RT on your games on not, but even with or without it, there's really no clear objective winner between both brands at this price range, at least not by any significant margin. This might seem contrary to what you've been led to believe as I've seen many Youtubers state that AMD is outright better than NVIDIA when it comes to the mid-range category but it's not really as cut-and-dried and can be subjective to parameters such as RT performance and upscaling.
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