There are a few major factors to consider that will help guide you towards your perfect new graphics card. It’s important that even though the two big players are Nvidia and AMD, you generally don’t buy products directly from them.
Instead, manufacturing partners buy GPUs from the two chip makers, mount them onto PCBs, and attach custom coolers. That means you’ll see cards from brands like Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI with similar coolers and setups for both Nvidia GeForce and AMD Radeon GPUs.
There generally aren’t huge gaps in actual performance between different manufacturers; instead, the differentiators are largely under-the-hood improvements. These can include custom cooling solutions, PCB layout and strength modifications, and quality of the components used to complement the GPU.
You’ll also often see OC (overclocked) models listed alongside their standard counterparts. These graphics cards have the same GPU at their core, but with firmware and BIOS changes that set them to a higher clock rate to eke out additional performance. How much that overclocking matters will depend on the brand.