If you're piecing together or giving a facelift to your gaming PC, the first shiny bit most people think about is the graphics card. It's no mystery why. Out of all the parts stuffed in a rig, the GPU usually has the loudest say in how smooth your frame rates look. In plain terms, the stronger your graphics card, the better your games will run - though there is a ceiling where more muscle doesn't always mean more speed.
TL;DR: These Are the Best Graphics Cards
GPUs have slid firmly into the luxury lane these days. Case in point: Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 will set you back a pretty penny, which is a hefty price tag for bragging rights. Compared to the good old days when the GTX 970 knocked my socks off in 2014, today's cards are eye-wateringly expensive - even once you factor in inflation. That said, you don't need to sell a kidney to get decent frames. Stick to 1440p or 1080p and you can nab a card that delivers plenty of fun without emptying your wallet.
This guide contains contributions by Jacqueline Thomas
What to Look for in a Graphics Card
It'd be easy to say "just grab the beefiest GPU you can afford" and call it a day, but that'd be lazy advice. Picking the right graphics card actually takes a bit of thought. Not all PCI-E bricks are cut from the same silicon, and what works for one gamer might be overkill or undercooked for another.
Step one: pick your resolution. A card that screams at 4K might trip over itself at 1080p thanks to CPU bottlenecks. Take the RTX 5090 - it's a rocket ship in 4K, but not always the best bang for buck in full HD. At that level, something like Intel's Arc B580 makes way more sense, leaving you cash left over for, you know, actual games.
Next, budget. Prices have climbed sky-high, but you can still snag a capable 1080p card for a reasonable amount of monies. If you've got deeper pockets, the AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT will let you crank up the bells and whistles. Go north of $1,000 and you unlock monsters like the RX 7900 XTX or RTX 5080, which will happily chew through 4K. Between the two, it's really about how much you care for ray tracing. For raw grunt, AMD's RX 9070 XT is the sleeper pick, and with FSR 4 in the mix, it's finally giving Nvidia's DLSS a proper run.
The good news? 4K gaming is becoming more reachable. I had no trouble breaking 60fps in Black Myth Wukong with the RTX 5070 Ti, but pricier beasts like the 5080 or 5090 give you extra headroom for the next wave of demanding titles. Just remember: big cards need big power. A lightweight like the Arc B580 is fine with a 450W PSU, but beefier units such as the RX 7800 XT demand more muscle. You don't need to splurge on a PSU that's double the recommended wattage - just make sure your rig has the juice to keep your GPU fed.
1. AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT
The Best Graphics Card for Most People
In our testing, the RX 9070 XT often outpaced the RTX 5070 Ti, sometimes by double-digit margins. Even in heavy hitters like Cyberpunk 2077, it cruised along at 71 fps in 4K with Ray Tracing Ultra, landing just 4 fps shy of the 5070 Ti. That tiny gap shows AMD still lags a touch behind Nvidia in ray tracing, but compared to the early RX 6000 days, Team Red has closed the gap in a big way.
This generation also brings something I've been hounding AMD for - proper AI upscaling with FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 4. While it's not a performance leap over FSR 3, the bump in image quality is clear, especially in busy scenes where lesser upscalers turn fine detail into mush. The catch? AMD doesn't sell its own version of the 9070 XT, so you'll be stuck with third-party cards and the price swings that come with them. Land one near MSRP, though, and you've got what might just be the best all-rounder GPU for most gamers.
2. Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti
The Best Mainstream Graphics Card If You Want to Spend a Bit More
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is a masterclass in how pricing makes or breaks a GPU. At its launch price, it's easily one of the best value cards of this generation. The catch, of course, is whether you can actually snag one for that figure. Fresh off release, stock is thin on the ground, and if retailers start slapping on markups, the 5070 Ti quickly shifts from an easy recommendation to a much tougher sell.
If you manage to nab the RTX 5070 Ti at even a little cheaper than RRP, you've scored yourself one of the best 4K cards going for the average gamer. In my testing it kept surprisingly close to the RTX 5080, only trailing by about 13 to 15 percent while costing roughly a third less. Hard to argue with that sort of maths, which makes it the best bang-for-buck high-end GPU of the current lot.
The catch is that Blackwell as a whole is a pretty lukewarm upgrade over the 4000 series. The 5070 Ti happens to be the pick of the bunch in terms of gen-on-gen uplift, but even then it's just 11 percent quicker than the 4070 Super and about 21 percent ahead of the plain 4070. Not exactly mind-blowing, though it still looks better on paper than the 5080, which only edges out the 4080 by 15 percent under the same tests.
3. Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090
The Best Nvidia Graphics Card
No two ways about it, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 is the current heavyweight champ of graphics cards. End of story. Sure, it doesn't leap forward the way the RTX 4090 or even the 3090 once did, but when it comes to raw gaming grunt, nothing else comes close - especially once you throw DLSS multi-frame generation into the mix.
On paper it's a beast: 21,760 CUDA cores, 32GB of shiny new GDDR7, and a much fatter power budget. In my time with it, I watched this silicon monster guzzle up to 578W, a hefty jump over the 4090's already eye-watering 448W. With that much juice flowing, Nvidia had to rethink cooling, and the solution was a surprise. Instead of going bigger with more fans, the Founders Edition actually trims back to a dual-slot cooler. I haven't seen that on a flagship Nvidia card since the RTX 2080 Ti, and honestly, it feels like a neat little throwback.
Nvidia pulled a clever trick with the RTX 5090’s design. By shrinking the PCB and plonking it right in the middle of the card, they made space for chunky pass-through heatsinks on either end. Air gets sucked in from below, blasted straight up through the chassis, and job’s a good one. The engineering is obviously a bit fancier than that, but the end result is telling: even with its massive power draw, the hottest I ever saw this thing hit was 87°C. Warm, sure, but still safe enough to keep hammering out games at full tilt.
When it comes to performance, the RTX 5090 delivers about 26 percent more grunt than the RTX 4090 at 4K across both games and 3DMark runs. Drop the resolution and that advantage shrinks fast, so unless you’re gaming in 4K you’d be wasting your two grand (or more) on this monster. Even at 4K, some titles just don’t scale much further because the CPU becomes the bottleneck, and I was using a Ryzen 7 9800X3D. In short, this GPU is built for one thing: unapologetic, maxed-out 4K gaming without needing DLSS on ‘Performance’ mode. It’s a brute, and it finally makes 4K feel like the baseline instead of the dream.
4. AMD Radeon RX 9070
The Best AMD Graphics Card
The AMD Radeon RX 9070 arrived in a bit of an awkward spot. With its launch pricetag, it only undercuts the far flashier 9070 XT by not much (at the time of writing). Performance-wise, that gap feels about right, but it also begs the question: why not just cough up the extra fifty and grab the XT, one of the strongest GPUs AMD has put out in ages?
That said, the plain RX 9070 does carve out its own niche. If your focus is 1440p gaming, it actually makes a lot of sense. You get solid performance, modern features, and a card that doesn’t blow the budget wide open, all while keeping the XT’s shadow just far enough away.
In head-to-head testing, the RX 9070 gave Nvidia’s RTX 5070 a proper nudge, beating it in nearly every benchmark by around 12 percent on average. Both cards launched within a day of each other and share the same price tag, so that kind of gap is nothing to sneeze at. The margin does shrink in ray tracing-heavy titles like Cyberpunk 2077 or Black Myth Wukong, but even there AMD’s card usually stays in front.
Like the beefier XT version, the RX 9070 also debuts FSR 4, AMD’s first crack at AI-driven upscaling. It isn’t necessarily faster than FSR 3’s temporal approach, but it does sharpen things up nicely, cutting down on ghosting and dodgy artifacts. The result is cleaner visuals overall, which makes the RX 9070 feel like a step forward in more ways than just raw frame rates.
5. AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT
The Best GPU for 1080p
As much as I love running games at 4K, the reality is that most PC players are still rocking good old 1080p screens. You don’t need to splurge on an RTX 5090 to power that setup. The Radeon RX 9060 XT fits the bill perfectly.
Ideally priced, the RX 9060 XT is built to chew through modern games at 1080p, ray tracing included, which is an area where AMD hasn’t always shined. AMD complicated things a bit by releasing two versions: the 16GB model featured in today's tests and a cheaper 8GB version that shaves some decent bucks off. On paper the only change is VRAM, but that difference is big enough that the cut-down model is tough to recommend. If you’re going for this card, stick with the 16GB and don’t look back.
The 16GB Radeon RX 9060 XT has no trouble holding its own against demanding titles, averaging around 80fps in Cyberpunk 2077 and landing shoulder-to-shoulder with the pricier RTX 5060 Ti. A few games like Black Myth: Wukong and Assassin's Creed Shadows do push it harder, but with some adjustments to quality settings, performance smooths out quickly. Tests run at maximum settings highlight the raw limits, leaving plenty of headroom for optimisation.
As part of the same generation as the RX 9070 XT, the 9060 XT also benefits from AMD’s newest upscaling tech, FSR 4. This marks the first time AI-powered upscaling has come to Radeon GPUs, delivering image quality that edges closer to Nvidia’s DLSS. Only a small handful of games support FSR 4 at present, but adoption is expected to climb steadily, giving the card more future-proof appeal.
Best Graphics Cards FAQ
AMD or Nvidia? Or Intel?
Choosing a graphics card brand is mostly about what you value most. Intel’s cards are the cheapest of the lot, but they can’t keep up in raw horsepower. Nvidia sits at the opposite end, making the fastest GPUs money can buy, but the price tags can make your wallet wince. AMD usually lands somewhere in the middle, delivering strong performance at fairer prices. The trade-off is missing out on some exclusive Nvidia tricks like DLSS 4. AMD has its own equivalents for most of them, but they don’t always match up in quality..
What power supply should I get?
Another factor worth thinking about is power. Modern graphics cards are becoming serious energy hogs, with some drawing more than 450W on their own. If you’re planning a new build or a big upgrade, a 1,000W power supply is a smart investment.
GTX vs. RTX
And then there’s the GTX vs RTX question. GTX cards belong to Nvidia’s older, simpler line-up, while RTX models bring extra hardware in the form of Tensor and RT cores alongside CUDA cores. That means AI features like DLSS for sharper upscaling, and ray tracing for lifelike lighting and shadows. GTX cards still work fine for budget systems, but they’re living on borrowed time as RTX becomes the standard.
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