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- The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, RTX 3090, GT 1030 DDR4, and Radeon RX 6500 XT are some unconvincing GPUs that should not be bought in 2024.
- These GPUs either have grave flaws that plague their design or are just a downright abhorrent value for money.
There is a common saying nowadays that there are no bad products, only bad prices. However, I tend to disagree. I have seen my fair share of great and underwhelming graphics cards over the past decade or so, but only a few specific GPUs have earned the distinct honor of being outright “bad”.
The following graphics cards either have grave shortcomings in their hardware design, or peculiar pricing that places them completely out of the bounds of reason.
Don’t Spend Your Money On These GPUs
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti
NVIDIA did not set off any alarm bells initially with the launch of the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, despite its lofty $400 price tag. However, when I inspected the card during our deep dive, the numbers just did not make much sense to me.
Despite being built on the latest Ada Lovelace architecture, the RTX 4060 Ti was trading blows with the older-gen RTX 3060 Ti in many titles, and even lost the tie altogether in rasterized performance!
Moreover, the 16GB variant at an eye-watering $450 did not improve matters much, as both cards were hamstrung by their narrow memory bus width. NVIDIA’s main selling point was the implementation of DLSS 3.0, which was a lazy cop-out and a sorry excuse for the underwhelming rasterization performance of the RTX 4060 Ti compared to its predecessor.
Even at the current pricing of around $385 for the 8GB variant, it just does not make sense unless all of your favorite titles support DLSS 3.0 upscaling.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090
Flagship GPUs are always a big risk thanks to their exorbitant prices, and the RTX 3090 is the latest victim of this trend. As we noted in our RTX 3090 review, it is a fairly powerful graphics card good for 1440p and even 4K gaming, but its value proposition is downright horrible when compared to the newer offerings on the market.
Launched at a sky-high price tag of $1500, the RTX 3090 has seen some price cuts and can be currently found for around $1300 on the market. Still, you can get comparable performance from the RTX 4070 at $525 and even beat the RTX 3090 with the RTX 4070 Super at $580.
Moreover, the RTX 40-series graphics cards offer the superior DLSS 3.0 feature, while being more efficient and generally running cooler as well. I can only think of one case in which the RTX 3090 might make a bit of sense, and that is if your workload requires the 24GB of GDDR6X memory of the RTX 3090.
NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030 DDR4
If there’s anything worse than a product that offers a poor value for money, it’s a product that lies to the consumers. The GeForce GT 1030 is certainly not a powerful graphics card by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it barely qualifies for the entry-level spot in today’s market and is mostly bought for multimedia use.
However, NVIDIA used a very underhanded tactic that made the GT 1030 an even worse purchase than it already was.
Initially, the GT 1030 used GDDR5 memory for its VRAM, which is conventional for the graphics cards of its time. However, later NVIDIA quietly switched the GDDR5 memory for DDR4 memory, which is much slower and causes a profound loss in performance. The memory bandwidth fell from 48 GB/s to a mere 16GB/s, causing a significant drop in gaming results.
This made the card an even worse value for money, and the nasty bait-and-switch tactic is just a slap in the face of the consumers.
AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT
Now I understand that budget graphics cards have a particular space in the market, and not everybody can afford a high-end GPU with all the latest bells and whistles. However, I particularly dislike those graphics cards that carry the moniker of “budget” yet provide abominable value for money.
Case in point, the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT, which in theory should be a decent budget option at $199, but the specs scream corner-cutting. It has just 4GB of memory, only a 64-bit narrow bus, supports just four PCIe 4.0 lanes, and does not even support overclocking. As a result, its performance was downright abhorrent.
The card trailed behind the outdated RX 5500 XT 8GB and was level with the RX 5500 XT 4GB. This is the card to avoid if you have around $150-200 to spend. You’re much better off going for a used option in this range.
Bottom Line
Despite the tremendous progress seen in the gaming hardware space over the past several years, there are still numerous graphics cards that should never have been released in the first place. Sometimes, it’s due to the ill-planning and ignorance of the manufacturer, while other times the card simply provides a much worse value for money than it should. Nevertheless, these GPUs should be avoided in favor of better options.
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Moiz Banoori, with a decade of experience in gaming and tech journalism and a degree in journalism, is a notable figure in the industry. He has contributed to various esteemed platforms, showcasing his expertise in both reporting and opinion writing.
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