Okay, right now the RTX 3080 is rare as pigeon eyelashes, but there is no doubt Nvidia's new RTX 3080 is the best graphics card today. Senior Editor, The most powerful graphics card for gaming right now is the Nvidia RTX 3090, but is it really the best graphics card for you? It surely has to go further than, man likes to cook. Most of us will have to be a little pragmatic about our precious PC upgrades, so it’s vital to weigh up the price/performance ratio of a new GPU. However, there is a section of the gaming populace who indeed wants some incredible power to play the latest titles with quality framerates and graphics options. If you’re leery, consider buying the $580 Radeon RX 6800 instead. AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT. If you have a 120Hz+ 1440p monitor, the $500 GeForce RTX 3070 is also worth considering, but it’s only 9 percent to 15 percent faster than the RTX 3060 Ti at 1440p depending on the game for 25 percent more cash. The Nvidia Ampere generation offers a huge leap in performance over its previous architecture, with the Nvidia RTX 3080 and Nvidia RTX 3070 cards going down as some of the best graphics cards ever made. MSI RX 5500 XT Mech 8G OC. You pay a bit more for a bit faster performance, but more importantly, AMD loaded the Radeon RX 6800 with an ample 16GB of GDDR6 memory. So we’ll help you find the best graphics card for your needs, whether that be for 1440p at 60Hz or all the way up to 1440P 144Hz. It’s complicated. It’s where the bulk of your build or upgrade budget should be spent, so it’s surely the component a PC gamer will give the most thought to. Future US, Inc. 11 West 42nd Street, 15th Floor, The thing which really stands out from our testing is the difference it makes to ray tracing performance. There's no price premium either. But there's a reason it's not number one in our graphics card guide today, and that's simply due to the fact it's not that much better than an RTX 3080, and sometimes not at all. The GeForce RTX 30-series and Radeon RX 6800-series sold out instantly and remain scarce in the face of overwhelming demand, with scalpers and bots snatching them up just as greedily as enthusiasts. Dave James, AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT. All of these options are also fast enough to play ray traced games at a smooth clip at 1440p—something you couldn’t say with older RTX 20-series cards. Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition. Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. And for some graphics-intensive applications, it may be more important than the central processing unit (CPU), which is often referred to as the brain (or heart) of a computer. Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition. AMD's Radeon RX 6800 outperforms the RTX 3070 and offers twice as much memory, easily justifying its higher price. In addition to requiring much more energy from the wall, that also means these cards tend to run a bit louder and hotter, and the card designs tend to be larger to shove in more cooling capacity. You will receive a verification email shortly. PNY - NVIDIA GeForce GT 710 VERTO 2GB DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 Graphics Card - Black Except this time the performance gap is relatively large, and the price difference not great enough to negate the issue. MSI RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio. For that reason, it's simply the better buy for any PC gamer without any ulterior motives of the pro creator variety. We can’t recommend people buy graphics cards at those markups, but if you’re lucky enough to find stock at MSRP, this guide should help. But not every custom RX 5600 XT will receive an upgraded VBIOS, and some of the ones that do won’t get the crucial memory speed increase. The graphics processing unit (GPU) is also called the graphics card or video card. It’s all but impossible to find graphics cards right now, especially at sane prices. If you want the best marriage of price, performance, and features for 4K and 1440p gaming, Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition is matched only by its own step-up RTX 3070 sibling. The whisper-quiet card received a new VBIOS that bumped up both clock and memory speeds, and Sapphire says most of its North American stock will come with the faster speeds out of the box, all for a mere $10 premium over MSRP. PC Gamer is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. It's a strange situation because historically we've always been keen to recommend the second string of any Radeon release. on Amazon. The upgraded VBIOS achieves over 10 percent higher performance, thanks largely in part to the memory bump from 12Gbps to 14Gbps. ... its single PCIe x16 slot pushed top-shelf graphics cards to speeds that matched or … Sure, the technological leaps behind each new GPU can be interesting on their own, but most everyone just wants to crank up the detail settings on Cyberpunk 2077 and get right to playing. The best graphics card for PC gaming right now. You can’t stop the flow of new hardware though. Even so, we know from past launches that this initial stock is tight and snapped up in a flash. Watch Dogs Legion, for example, uses more than 8GB of VRAM at 1440p if you crank up the graphics settings and turn on real-time ray tracing. That makes the RTX 3060 Ti a better option for most people, though the RTX 3070’s performance boost may be worthwhile if you hold onto your graphics cards for an especially long time before upgrading again. You've also got the RTX 3070 being priced $80 lower than this RX 6800 card. After all, it is the most powerful gaming graphics card on the planet right now, whether it's a great deal or not. The graphics processing unit (GPU), which is also called the graphics card or video card, is a very important part of a gaming system. If you're looking for maximum performance, you used to be able to run two cards in SLI or CrossFire. That said, if you’re looking to max out a high refresh-rate 1440p monitor, or drive a 3440x1440 ultrawide monitor, Nvidia’s $700 GeForce RTX 3080 and AMD’s $650 Radeon RX 6800 XT are stellar options that trade blows in raw performance. The RX 5500 XT is a great little graphics card, but if you want to play games at max settings at 1920×1080 and still have room to spare, then the AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT is hands down the best graphics card for the job right now. The card comes with 3584 Stream Processors and 8GB HBM2 memory having 2048-bit interface. That's why we love it so; it's a great GPU for the full stack of resolutions and has decent ray tracing capability to boot, courtesy of second generation RT Cores. With that in mind, for raw gaming alone, the RX 6900 XT is a cheaper alternative to the RTX 3090, if still a victim to its own extreme price tag. Nonetheless, its performance hasn’t moved much beyond its Radeon RX 500-series predecessors, and it’s both slightly slower and slightly more expensive than Nvidia’s graphics card. You’ll need a six-pin power connector to run the card, which is much more potent than its non-Super cousin, the $150 GeForce GTX 1650. That includes all DXR games. So with the competition this tough, it's a wonder anyone can make a practical decision. 01 February 2021. Overall, it’s the best budget 4K graphics card for gaming to buy in 2021. Sign up to get the best content of the week, and great gaming deals, as picked by the editors. But still, you can play games on a higher resolution with a high-end graphics card. Choose min rating. 02. Updated February 18 to include news about Nvidia battling cryptocurrency demand with dedicated mining chips and nerfed mining performance in the RTX 3060. Answering the question can be a bit trickier than it seems. The only reason to consider the non-Super version is if you’re upgrading a big-box office PC into a gaming rig and have no extra power cabling available, since the vanilla GTX 1650 can draw all its more from your motherboard. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080: Best Graphics Card for Most Gamers. Best GPU for 1440p Ultrawide Gaming: RTX 2080 Ti While the No.1 GPU to get for high resolution and ultra wide gaming used to be the GTX 1080 Ti, it has since been utterly superseded by the monstrous RTX 2080 Ti. And it'll absolutely smash it at 1440p, no question about that. Spending extra can get you hefty out-of-the-box overclocks, beefier cooling systems, and more. All available today and with two year's worth of developer support in the bank. Demand is so high that even older-generation graphics cards are selling for more than they cost new, years ago, in most cases. Our knowledge has been distilled into this article—a buying guide with recommendations on which graphics card to buy, no matter what sort of experience you’re looking for. The $300 options have been struggling with availability issues since they’ve launched, however, and if you move up much beyond $300, the Radeon RX 5600 XT is a much better value. The Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti may not offer the best performance-per-dollar, but it is still the best graphics card under $300. The XFX Radeon RX 570 is an excellent fit for your system. Best Graphics Cards February 2021 Choose category. Good luck out there. There was a problem. Unfortunately, the ROG Strix isn’t available at retail at the time of publication. Sapphire’s superb Pulse Radeon RX 5500 XT is a killer custom variant with a mere $10 premium if you go for Team Red. The entire ecosystem for high-fidelity gaming is getting cheaper by the day, and it finally feels like an attainable goal for PC gamers that don't have RTX 3090-money burning a hole in their chinos. With the GeForce RTX 30-series arriving and AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT now here, it’s a great time to buy a graphics card that can feed a high refresh rate 1440p monitor—if you can find a new one. The RX 580/RX 590 and GTX 1650 Super, in my opinion, are the ones you should look for if you want something under $200. 01. Read our full Nvidia RTX 3070 review (Founders Edition). While the RTX 2080 isn’t Nvidia’s strongest GPU, we still consider it to be the best graphics card for gaming at 4k. AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT. Nvidia has managed this by adding a whole load more CUDA cores to the mix in this 8nm GPU, as well as updated Tensor Cores (for extra DLSS goodness), and second-gen RT Cores to make with the ray traced pretties. It’s a good graphics card capable of satisfying 1080p gaming with some settings tweaks, but not quite as good as the competition. Many PC gamers play on basic 1080p, 60Hz monitors, thanks to their compelling blend of resolution, speed, and affordable pricing. DLSS is a neat trick for improving performance, with only a nominal loss in clarity, and other features such as Broadcast and Reflex go a long way to sweetening the deal. The GeForce RTX 3070 (and 3060 Ti) only has 8GB of GDDR6 memory. If you haven't already done the maths: At $399, the RTX 3060 Ti is 20% cheaper than the RTX 3070, and so performance per dollar is on the up with the diminutive graphics card. Not bad for a $399 card. Read our full Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti review (Founders Edition). Perhaps most impressive of all about this graphics card is how it stacks up to the 20-series generation: It topples the RTX 2080 Super in nearly every test. With Big Navi waltzing onto the stage, and the AMD RX 6800 XT—a real contender to the RTX 3080—having dropped ahead of the holidays, the red team is finally giving Nvidia a run for its money. With each passing generation throwing up new and exciting features, everyone wants a piece of the action. So this processor is not a great option with a graphics card like GTX 1050. But it does have to be said, the RX 6800 is still a mighty impressive card outside of the ramifications of its place in the stack. New York, Otherwise, the GeForce GTX 1650 Super is far superior, especially for just $10 more. Graphics Card RTX . Future AMD graphics cards could swipe a trick from the company’s Ryzen CPUs. So, if you’ve got right at $200 to spend, the Gigabyte RX 5500 XT is your best bet. See it. It’s also capable of fine 4K gaming, but the 8GB of memory could hold it back future 4K games. CUDA cores: 5,888 | Base clock: 1,500 MHz | Boost clock: 1,725 MHz | TFLOPs: 20.37 | Memory: 8GB GDDR6 | Memory clock: 14 GT/s | Memory bandwidth: 448 GB/s. If your GPU budget has a hard limit at no higher than $300, then this is the best card for you. PCWorld helps you navigate the PC ecosystem to find the products you want and the advice you need to get the job done. Thank you for signing up to PC Gamer. Perhaps the only high-end Ampere that's anything close to reasonably affordable, the RTX 3070 is also impressive for its ability to match the top-string Turing graphics card, the RTX 2080 Ti, for less than half of its price tag. Unfortunately, this means the good GPU stock manages to fly off the shelves before anyone has a chance to check their bank balance. CUDA cores: 8,704 | Base clock: 1,440 MHz | Boost clock: 1,710 MHz | TFLOPs: 29.76 | Memory: 10GB GDDR6X | Memory clock: 19 GT/s | Memory bandwidth: 760 GB/s. The original GTX 1660 will be sticking around with a price cut closer to $200, while the GTX 1660 Ti will also continue to live on at $280 or more. It comes within 3 to 5 percent of the $280 GTX 1660 Ti, too. AMD went from zero to hero in the high-end, and its latest RX 6000-series graphics cards are more than a match for those pesky eight million or so pixels required every frame at 4K. It's not built with your average gamer in mind, instead it's targeting creative professionals and compute intensive application acceleration, and that's why it doesn't come with your average price tag, either. We have to forget about stock problems for the new cards when we're looking at which GPUs are the best, because right now it's not just the new cards. The Radeon RX 5600 XT is faster than the identically priced GeForce GTX 1660 Ti across the board and can even go blow-for-blow with the pricier RTX 2060—sometimes. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Super is a superb 1080p graphics card that can hit the hallowed 60 frames per second mark at High or Ultra settings in virtually all modern games—a hell of a feat for just $160, or $170 for the feature-loaded ROG Strix model we evaluated. 1. Search. For gamers, no. A highly competitive card that comes so close to its rival, with a nominal performance differential to the RTX 3080, it is truly an enthusiast card worth consideration for any PC gamer with 4K in their sights. It represents a huge generational performance boost over the previous RTX 20-series. PCWorld |, “What graphics card within my budget gives me the best bang for my buck?”. Its gaming performance credentials are undoubtedly impressive, but what makes the RTX 3070 our pick for the sensible PC gaming connoisseur is the entire Nvidia ecosystem underlying the RTX stack today. Normally they perform at a similar level for a lot less cash. If you’re willing to dial graphics settings down a bit, the last-generation Radeon RX 570, built on AMD’s ancient Polaris GPU architecture, is still a compelling option at roughly $130 on sale. And it is arguably the most important component of a gaming system.The GPU speeds through math calculations so that the central processing unit (CPU) can go … Not only is it cheaper than ever to buy a 4K-capable graphics card, but it's also possible to pick up a decent 4K gaming monitor for a lot less these days too. At $499, it's still a significant sum by any means—we're talking next-gen console equivalent pricing here—but it's hardly an exorbitant sum when compared to PC gaming's top graphics silicon today. It’s faster than last generation’s $800 RTX 2080 Super—the second most powerful GPU in the world until a few months ago. Better yet, Nvidia’s GPU is incredibly power efficient, and that means these graphics cards run cool and quiet, too.