Our top graphics card picks for 1080p, 1440p, and 4K
What powers will the RTX 50 manifest? UpgradedDLSS? Improvedframe generation? The ability to force AMD into making properly compelling alternatives again? We’ll have to wait and see, though I should at least have an Arc B580 review for you very soon.
In the meantime, you can still peruse the best GPUs to switch to right now; these have all been tested across a variety of demanding PC games, including with ray tracing various upscalers, so you can be sure that these cards will do the work at your preferred monitor resolution. While it’s important to have a capable CPU and a sufficiently spaciousSSD, no single component is more integral to overall games performance than your graphics card, so it’s always worth the research legwork to make sure you’reinstallingthe right one.
The best graphics cards for gaming
The best cheap 1080p graphics card
The only real catch, then, is that getting the best performance out of the Arc A750 requires manually enablingResizeable BAR(or Smart Access Memory on AMD motherboards). With any luck, your mobo might include this as a quick toggle in the BIOS' EZ mode. Just make sure it’s switched on before you start playing.
Read more in ourIntel Arc A750 review
The best 1080p graphics card
TheNvidia GeForce RTX 4060kicked a nasty habit that the RTX 40 series had during its initial launch: while the premium models suffered self-inflicted price gouging compared to their RTX 30 series equivalents, the RTX 4060 is no more costly than theRTX 3060was. Even so, it upgrades core performance, improves ray tracing, and adds the option of DLSS 3 frame generation in supporting games, cementing itself as a worthy successor for good times at 1080p.
Upscaling isn’t as ideal for this rez as it is at 1440p or 4K: the even lower rendering resolution is harder to disguise with upscaling, and in games likeIndiana Jones and the Great Circle, the performance improvement is smaller too. However, DLSS 3 usually lets you enable frame generationwithoutthe Super Resolution upscaling component, producing a framerate boost with no sharpness loss. This flexibility simply isn’t matched by AMD’s 1080p candidate, theRX 7600, giving the RTX 4060 an advantage despite these two GPUs otherwise scoring quite evenly in game benchmarks.
The non-ray-traced ones, anyway. The RTX 4060 is plainly better when those enhanced effects kick in, and if you’re likely to upgrade to a 1440p monitor, the Nvidia GPU is generally faster at that resolution too.
Read more in ourNvidia GeForce RTX 4060 review
The best 1440p graphics card
For a Quad HD-tuned PC, there’s a tough call to make between the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT and this, the 8GB version of theNvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti. The Radeon is faster in non-ray-traced, native rez games, and offers more VRAM, packing 12GB.
I’d still go for the RTX 4060 Ti, though, because it overturns its performance disadvantage once you start making use of all its toys. DLSS upscaling looks nicer than FSR’s, but there’s also the RTX 4060 Ti’s drastically superior ray tracing performance, and the possibility of enabling DLSS 3 to send framerates soaring.
Even standard DLSS upscaling can be enough to spin things in the RTX 4060 Ti’s favour. InCyberpunk 2077, it could average 46fps at 1440p with maxed settings, Psycho ray tracing, and DLSS on Quality; the RX 7700 XT could only manage 38fps using Quality FSR.
Read more in ourNvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti review
The best graphics card for ultrawide gaming monitors
TheNvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Superis a surprisingly potent upgrade on the originalRTX 4070, gaining a marked performance uplift (especially at higher resolutions) without raising the price. You could even use it for some decent 4K, but it’s excellent for ultrawide resolutions as well. With ray tracing or upscaling, it’s either level with or slightly faster than the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT on speed, and beats it outright whenever RT effects or DLSS upscaling are in play.
That alone is enough to take the 7800 XT’s spot in this list, but the RTX 4070 Super also supports DLSS 3, which enjoys compatibility with a much wider selection of games than AMD’s FSR 3. And even if it didn’t, FSR 3 works on Nvidia cards anyway, so the RTX 4070 Super loses out on nothing.
Read more in ourNvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super review
The best graphics card for 4K
Maybe a slightly contentious pick here – myNvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Superreview wasn’t especially glowing. But that was mainly down to its lack of a clear performance upgrade over theRTX 4080, in contrast to the RTX 4070 Super’s improved FPS-slinging.
It’s true that I wish the RTX 4080 Super took a bigger leap forward, but itdoesbeat the RTX 4080 on price, despite being the newer, quicker version. That’s a big deal, as the biggest issue with the previous GPU was its unreasonable outlay. 4K performance was never a problem in itself, and the RTX 4080 Super maintains that ability to run max-quality, optionally ray-traced games at a fast clip. Factor in the lower cost, and its status as the best graphics card for 4K is the result of a simple numbers game.
(There’s also theRTX 4090, of course, but I don’t recommend that unless you’re a shipping magnate or are no more than fifth in line to a throne.)
Read more in ourNvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super review
The good news is that graphics cards are no longer as useful to large-scale cryptocurrency mining operations as they once were, so without the demand of miners looking to make a quick, environmentally devasting buck, prices and stock availability have (mostly) lowered and risen respectively.
Ray tracing can be a huge upgrade to how your games handle lighting, shadows and reflections, but you need compatible GPU to take advantage of it. Right now, that includes all of Nvidia’s RTX 20 series, 30 series, and 40 series GPUs, and AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 and RX 7000 cards. On the Nvidia side, that includes everything from the RTX 2060 up to the goliath RTX 4090, while AMD’s ray tracing GPU range starts at the RX 6400 and ends at the RX 7900 XTX.
Intel have also released their first Arc graphics cards, bringing with them ray tracing support and Intel XeSS: an upscaling system similar to DLSS and FSR.
An age old question, the answer to which seems to change with every generation of new GPUs. Right now, Nvidia have a wider range of compelling options across all resolutions, especially now they’ve started releasing more affordable RTX 40-series models. These GPUs don’t always best their closest AMD equivalents on game performance, but they do have a clear advantage whenever ray tracing is involved, and can further improve their frame-per-second counts in a limited range of games using DLSS 3.
AMD graphics cards, however, are sometimes much easier on the wallet than their more cutting-edge competitors. And you may not care about ray tracing, in which case, a Radeon GPU may indeed be better for performance - we’ve seen this be the case with the Radeon RX 7800 XT versus the RTX 4070.
AMD and Nvidia are also narrowing on features. DLSS produces consistently better-quality upscaling than FSR, but newer versions likeAMD FSR 2.0(also known simply as FSR 2) have made the difference harder to notice. FSR 3 also grants frame interpolation capability to Radeon models, though the range of supporting games is even narrower than DLSS 3’s.
That said, FSR itself isn’t a reason to buy a Radeon card specifically, as it’s designed to work on all modern GPUs - Nvidia’s included. DLSS specifically needs an RTX card, so if you want the best upscaling, there’s a much stronger reason to choose Nvidia.
