Solar radiation budgets from 20 general circulation models (GCMs) participating in the second phase of the Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIPII) are analyzed. The models largely differ in their global mean radiation budgets, particularly at the surface. Compared to a comprehensive data set of 760 worldwide-distributed surface stations from the Global Energy Balance Archive, the models tend to overestimate the land surface insolation by 9 Wm-2 on average. The biases in the net solar fluxes at the top of atmosphere are generally smaller. This suggests that the excessive surface insolation in the GCMs is rather related to inaccurate partitioning of solar absorption between surface and atmosphere than to excessive absorption by the planet as a whole. This applies also to 13 state-of-the-art GCMs participating in IPCC AR4. Uncertainties in the solar absorption by the atmospheric constituents are thus still significant in current GCMs and contribute to the large discrepancies amongst the GCM radiation budgets and their biases compared to surface observations.