Best Graphics Card for FPS Gaming | Pro Gamer Picks (2023)

Masakari and I have been playing video games for over 35 years, focusing on first-person shooters. But, of course, we have been playing graphics-intensive games for just as long. And every few years, we ask ourselves, just like you:

What is the best graphics card right now?

Which hardware can I trust?

In this post, however, we’re not looking at our experience or any out-of-the-box reviews, but we are analyzing which graphics cards most professional gamers use.

If you want to play on the same level as pro gamers, it’s best to compete with the same equipment. This leads to the question, what graphics card is actually the best for FPS Gaming?

Generally speaking, the best graphics card is used by a majority of professional gamers. Depending on the game and the associated game mechanics and graphics, the preference of pro gamers changes when choosing the appropriate graphics card.

You probably know this too. You are looking for a new accessory for your favorite gaming hobby, or you have very old hardware that is slowly dying. This allows you to finally get on a technical level with the pros of your favorite game.

So it’s time for a new graphics card. Slaughter the piggy bank!

You try to find help on the internet and are bombarded with reviews and top-5 lists of super graphics cards. Oddly enough, each website touts different graphics cards. In the end, you’ve invested a lot of time, you’re confused, and you’re not one step further.

We change that now. We don’t make up any evaluation criteria or come up with a nice shiny ranking of the supposed best graphics cards for you, but hard facts from practice count here.

And who could evaluate the practice better than hundreds of professional gamers who earn their living with the use of a specific graphics card?

The motto is: If you want to know what is currently the best equipment to achieve the most professional results, buy the same equipment as the pros because they have to deliver the maximum performance every day. After all, you do the same in other areas of your life.

Let’s start simple and gradually approach all known FPS games. Before that, I’ll briefly explain our methodology so that you can understand everything transparently.

Note: This article was written in English. Translations into other languages may not provide the same linguistic quality. We apologize for grammatical and semantic errors.

Methodology

On prosettings.net, you can see the equipment used by professional gamers for many FPS games and other games. We took the trouble to analyze thousands of data sets (as of 2021). In the end, we did a blunt count and evaluated the data in different directions.

As a result, we show you the best graphics card and the most used graphics card manufacturer per game. More on that in the results of the individual games, which we also show as an infographic in each case.

If you want to jump directly to a specific game, use the table of contents (see above). In the next chapter, we will analyze what graphics cards over 1700 pro gamers are using.

And here we go.

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What is the Best Graphics Card for FPS Esports?

Currently, 99.24 percent of the FPS per gamer play with an NVIDIA graphics card. The most popular model is the NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti with 20%. High-end models like the RTX 3080 or 3090 are represented with 9.78%. Only 0.76% of pro gamers use a graphics card from AMD.

Let’s dive deeper into the results. As I said, we only objectively present the results of the evaluated 1320 pro gamers. In total, we have evaluated data from over 1700 pro gamers, but an indication of the graphics card was only given by 77.64%.

Currently, most of the examined pro gamers (20% percent) use the NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti model and thus a powerful one with as much as possible 11GB VRAM.

Compared to the 10-series, the 20-series set new standards as can be seen in this benchmark:

Source: nvidia.com

But almost every tenth pro gamer already uses a graphics card from the 30 series. Compared to the technology of the 20-series, this is, of course, another boost, but it also costs a lot of money.

Source: nvidia.com

Here is the complete result of our evaluations as a table and visually prepared as an infographic:

Best Gaming Graphics Card for FPS Gaming (2021)

Graphics Card ModellUsed by N Pro GamersPercentage
NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti26422.7%
NVIDIA RTX 208023312.4%
NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti21711.3%
Others Combined60653.6%
N=1320, Data Source: prosettings.net

If you are interested in high-end graphics cards and have too much money or just want to dream about maximum FPS, you can check the details and offers for the RTX 3080 here and the RTX 3090 here.

Best Graphics Cards for FPS Gaming 2021
Infographic: “Best Gaming Graphics Card for FPS Gaming (2021)” – RaiseYourSkillz.com
Graphics Card ManufacturerUsed by N Pro GamersPercentage
NVIDIA131099,24%
AMD100,76%
N=1320, Data Source: prosettings.net

Infographic: “Popular Gaming Graphics Card Manufacturers for FPS Gaming (2021)” – RaiseYourSkillz.com

What is the Best Graphics Card for Playing Valorant?

22.7% of all Valorant Pro gamers play with the gaming graphics card model NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti with 11GB VRAM. 100% of all Valorant Pro gamers play with a gaming graphics card from the manufacturer NVIDIA.  

Valorant is the newcomer or challenger in Esports when it comes to the FPS genre. The best elements of CSGO, combined with Fortnite graphics, Overwatch action, and last but not least, the main focus on competitive gaming – that’s Valorant. A huge competitive scene has already formed, and many pros have found their way to Valorant from the other games.

More and more money flows into the Esports ecosystem, making it more interesting for players, esports organizations, and media to start with Valorant.

Most of the pros play Valorant with the NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti graphics card model. However, Masakari has also purchased this variant with 11GB VRAM and is very positive about it.

Here is the complete result of our evaluations as a table and visually prepared as an infographic:

Best Gaming Graphics Card for Valorant (2021)

Graphics Card ModellUsed by N Pro GamersPercentage
NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti4422.7%
NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti2412.4%
NVIDIA RTX 20802211.3%
Others Combined10453.6%

N=194, Data Source: prosettings.net

Infographic Best Graphic Cards for Valorant

Infographic: “Best Gaming Graphics Card for Valorant (2021)” – RaiseYourSkillz.com

Graphics Card ManufacturerUsed by N Pro GamersPercentage
NVIDIA194100%

N=194, Data Source: prosettings.net

Infographic: “Popular Gaming Graphics Card Manufacturers Valorant (2021)” – RaiseYourSkillz.com

The best Graphics Card for playing Valorant is:

Final Thoughts on Graphic Cards for FPS Gaming

We are aware that sponsorships always play a role in games with a competitive scene in Esports. For example, if AMD is the main sponsor of the CSGO League, then more pros play with AMD graphics cards because, on the one hand, the team sponsor wants that. But, on the other hand, the hardware provided at offline events such as the league finals also comes from AMD.

Regardless of this, you can assume that esports organizations and teams are always anxious to compete with the best equipment to not be at a disadvantage compared to the competition. There are also teams in CSGO that don’t use AMD graphics cards or teams with totally mixed graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA. So there is no question of a sponsor constraint.

As a competitive gamer, we can only advise you to orient yourself entirely on the pros. Nobody deals with graphics cards, mice, monitors, etc., as intensively as the esport organizations and their players.

As a casual gamer, the results will give you a good indication of which gaming graphics card or manufacturer is not junk. Most of the time, there are slimmed down and thus also cheaper versions of the graphics cards mentioned here. Graphics Cards from the same manufacturer with the same or similar serial numbers most likely come from the same factory and have the same quality.

In general, pro-gamers are more concerned with the small details of hardware and software, and it’s easier to get tips and tricks for graphics settings within the competitive scene. Also, if you have the same equipment as the pros, you can copy their settings and profit from them.

No graphics card will have five stars on Amazon, but that is normal. Transport damages, production errors, and irrelevant ratings (for example, the delivery time instead of the quality of the product) worsen the validity of the rating.

Therefore, our approach is and always has been: buy the same as the pros.

We have not regretted it in 35 years of gaming, 20 of them in esports.

If you have a question about the post or pro gaming in general, write us: contact@raiseyourskillz.com.

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GL & HF! Flashback out.