Graphics cards are the best choice when it comes to playing games at higher resolutions. They're better suited to rendering games over the CPU, but some are better than others and it's possible to spend more than $1,500 on a GPU alone. If you don't have a fancy 4K monitor and don't require the best GPU available, there are plenty of more affordable options out there. I've tested countless graphics cards and have rounded up my favorites to help you build the gaming PC of your dreams.

Our picks for the top graphics cards in 2024

nvidia geforce rtx 4070 fe
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070
Best overall

The GPU we'd recommend you buy

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070 is a midrange card in the RTX 40 series based on the Ada Lovelace architecture.

Pros
  • Impressive gaming performance
  • Expensive, but better value
  • DLSS 3
Cons
  • Still relatively expensive
  • Not great at 4K

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 is the best graphics card in our opinion. It's not the fastest, nor does it offer the best savings, but it strikes a great balance between performance and price, allowing you to spend more elsewhere (or save!). How does this thing compare against our other competing recommendations? It's plenty good, coming in behind AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XT, but offering a considerable MRSP discount of around $300. Being an RTX 40 series GPU, this card uses the same Ada Lovelace architecture as the mightily impressive Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, the best gaming card available. While not as potent, the RTX 4070 does come with 12GB of GDDR6X VRAM for storing all your game data.

Image of MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ventus 3X

This makes it a fine weapon for 4K gaming (when DLSS is enabled) and the rest of the specifications support this. 5,888 shader units are more than enough to tackle some high-fidelity gaming, and so too is the 2.48GHz boost clock speed rating. Then there's the exceptional ray tracing support with all RTX 40 GPUs from Nvidia, this one included. Couple that with DLSS which works like dark magic and you've got one impressive graphics card that's more in line with what most people are willing to spend on a GPU.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX
AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX
Best AMD

AMD's flagship is a difficult GPU to beat for value

The RX 7900 XTX is Radeon's latest flagship graphics card, offering considerable gains across multiple resolutions over the older RX 6000 generation of GPUs.

Pros
  • Solid gaming performance
  • Performance likely to improve with age
  • Can handle 4K
Cons
  • High power draw
  • Pricey

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX is the current flagship AMD graphics card. It's our pick for the best graphics card from AMD right now due to the performance gains the company was able to implement with RDNA 3. This architecture is incredibly efficient, built on a 5nm and 6nm manufacturing process for the GPU cores and memory modules, respectively. The base clock speed for the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX is 2.3GHz and it can boost all the way up to 2.5GHz. To make the most out of the GPU, AMD recommends using it with a Ryzen CPU to unlock additional benefits relating to memory. Speaking of which, you've got a whopping 24GB of GDDR6 to play with, all on a 384-bit bus. The RX 7900 XTX is capable of offering 3,500GB/s of memory bandwidth.

amd-radeon-rx-7900-xtx-reference-gpu-hero-2-1

For cores, we're looking at 6,144, which does fall short compared to what NVIDIA offers with its RTX 40 series GPUs, but it's able to make up ground elsewhere with faster clock speeds and higher memory bandwidth. You've got all the usual high-end GPU features here, including ray tracing support and AMD's excellent Radeon Super Resolution, the latter of which is essentially NVIDIA DLSS for AMD GPUs. You will be sacrificing around 3 PCI slots inside your PC case and AMD states it has a length of 287mm, so make sure your chassis can take such a card. You will require a beefy power supply as AMD recommends at least an 800W PSU and the Radeon RX 7900 XTX is capable of pulling 355W of power.

Overall, it's the most powerful GPU from AMD, as we confirmed in testing for our in-depth review. We found it to be comparable to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 GPU, though coming in considerably cheaper. You'll have absolutely no problem, playing all your favorite games at 4K with this GPU. At an MSRP of $999, it's not affordable but is a more reasonable price tag for a flagship graphics card. And we've found in the past AMD is usually better at improving the overall performance of its graphics cards through driver updates.

Intel Arc A770
Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition
Best Intel

Intel entered the game with a muffled bang

RTX 3060-esque performance, ray tracing, XeSS, DisplayPort 2.0 and HDMI 2.1 in a neat little package for $349. Oh and it has 16GB of VRAM.

Pros
  • Good value
  • Solid 1080p performance
  • Drivers continue to mature
Cons
  • Weaker 1440p performance
  • Requires Resizable BAR

Intel is now in the game of making graphics cards. The best GPU from Intel right now is the Arc A770 Limited Edition, which isn't actually limited in availability but is what Intel refers to as "Founders Edition" cards. Intel didn't launch its new GPUs to take on the best graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD and we saw this in our testing of the Intel Arc A770. It's still quite the capable machine for 1440p gaming, however. Inside the GPU, you'll find 32 Xe cores, 8 render slices, 32 ray tracing units, and 512 XMX engines. This basically means it's good for 1080p and 1440p gaming. With ray tracing enabled in games, the Intel Arc A770 can actually perform well enough to take on some of Nvidia's older RTX GPUs.

Intel Arc A770 graphics card.

For creative work, the A770 is well-equipped. It has support for HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.0 external displays and was one of the first desktop graphics cards to have a hardware AV1 encoder. Uses of AV1 are still limited for the time being, but the new codec will be widely adopted in the future and Intel is providing an affordable way to get in on that. Even though it's a reference design, the A770 Limited Edition runs quietly, even with a fairly high power draw of 225W. Out of the box it'll be set to 190W, and increasing the power limit alongside some simple performance tweaks can unlock a little extra performance. There are some drawbacks, such as no hardware support for DirectX 9, and performance in Direct X11 games can be inconsistent.

Intel didn't overpromise, however, and the Arc A770 does perform about as well as an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060. All while being affordable. It's well-priced, especially compared to the latest AMD and Nvidia graphics cards.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
Nvidia RTX 4090 Founders Edition
Best Nvidia

The best gaming experience you'll ever have

The undisputed heavyweight champion of consumer graphics cards, nothing else comes close to the RTX 4090 in performance or price.

Pros
  • Excellent 4K performance
  • Impressive ray tracing support
  • Great for productivity
Cons
  • Unbelievably expensive
  • Massive power draw

It's time for the monster. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 is the undisputed best graphics card for gaming right now. It's also the most expensive, coming in at more than $2,000. For a GPU. That's more money than you'd typically pay for prebuilt gaming PCs. But the results are nothing short of astounding, especially on a decent 4K monitor with ray tracing and all other visual settings turned to the max. AMD and Intel simply cannot come close to what we found possible with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 in our testing. It's truly exciting to enjoy high-frame-rate gaming at 4K with almost everything turned up, knowing the GPU can be pushed that much harder before becoming a bottleneck. It simply doesn't make sense right now for most PC gamers.

NVIDIA RTX 4090 with cables

It comes alive for those with the best 4K panels and content creators. As well as games, the GPU can be used in specific applications like media rendering. The RTX 4090 is the first Nvidia GPU to come with support for hardware AV1 encoding, though the NVENC encoder is no slouch either. For example, using the RTX 4090 with DaVinci Resolve, we managed to encode a 4:30 long 4K60 video at a bit rate of 40,000 using NVENC in just 96 seconds. Like all other RTX 40 graphics cards, the RTX 4090 is built on the latest Ada Lovelace architecture. How it's able to perform all this magic is due to the specifications. We're talking about 16,382 CUDA cores, 24GB of GDDR6X VRAM, a base clock of 2.23 GHz, and Nvidia's 3rd-gen ray tracing cores. It's the first Nvidia GPU to support DLSS 3.0 and has HDMI 2.1 outputs on the back.

As well as the price, the RTX 4090 is a very power-hungry GPU. It's rated at 450W and requires a new 12VHPWR connector. This will be much better once more ATX 3.0 PSUs hit the market and we can supply power through a single cable, but for now, you will need to carefully attach multiple PCIe cables and hope your PSU won't be overloaded. To be safe, we recommend a PSU with a capacity of at least 900W. Finally, you'll need to bear in mind the size of this GPU. The sheer amount of gaming performance available requires a beefy cooler to keep it from overheating and as such you may find it a struggle to cram it inside a smaller PC case. You probably don't need an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, but it would be amazing if you can afford one.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition
Best value Nvidia

The best value GPU for 1080p and 1440p gaming

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti was launched to replace the popular RTX 3060 Ti. This is a GPU that's designed for 1080p gaming with decent results, but we'd recommend looking elsewhere if possible and only buying this GPU as a last resort.

Pros
  • Excellent 1440p performance
  • Great value
  • Matured drivers
Cons
  • Not good at 4K
  • Older hardware

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti is a brilliant little graphics card. It offered amazing value at launch, allowing for high-fidelity 1440p gaming at $400. The RTX 4060 Ti features 4,352 CUDA cores. It's a significant departure from RTX 3060 Ti with fewer but more powerful CUDA cores. The clock speed of 2.31GHz is also impressive, and so too is the boost of 2.55GHz. And if you manage to buy an aftermarket card from AIB partners, you can enjoy an overclocked RTX 4060 Ti experience with even more performance headroom. For memory, the RTX 4060 Ti can be found with either 8GB or 16GB of GDDR6, which isn't enough for 4K gaming and cements this as a 1440p powerhouse.

Front of the Asus ProArt GeForce RTX 4060 Ti with packaging

Memory bandwidth clocks in at 288GB/s, which comes close to what you can find in mid-range cards. 34 ray tracing cores are present inside the GPU, allowing you to crank up visual settings and even mess around with ray tracing in select games. Supporting tech like Nvidia's DLSS would be a requirement to offset the performance hit from more intense lighting processing. With a TDP of just 160W, you can get away with installing it inside a mid-range PC without needing to upgrade the power supply. It may be part of the previous generation of GPUs, but you'll be pleasantly surprised by just how capable the RTX 4060 Ti is in even the more recent PC games.

Gigabyte Radeon RX 7600 Gaming OC WINDFORCE
AMD Radeon RX 7600
Best value AMD

Another great way to save money

The AMD Radeon RX 7600 is a value-focused GPU, offering excellent performance at a reasonable price. Costing less than $300, this graphics card is capable of handling 1080p and some 1440p gaming, making it a good choice for most gamers.

Pros
  • Solid 1080p performance
  • Good 1440p gaming too
  • Great value
Cons
  • Weaker ray tracing
  • Limited VRAM

The AMD Radeon RX 7600 was launched to bring RDNA 3 gaming experiences to the masses with an affordable price tag. More and more GPUs are costing in excess of $1,000 so it's easy to forget just how affordable GPUs used to be (and still are). The AMD Radeon RX 7600 has an MSRP of just $300, but is more than capable of handling 1080p and 1440p gaming. Performance at Full HD is amazing, rivaling that of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. QHD (1440p) is also excellent, so long as you don't turn up all visual settings to maximum and fully saturate the 8GB of VRAM.

One area where Nvidia still reigns champion is with its DLSS and ray tracing technologies. AMD has improved things with its own FidelityFX Super Resolution (FFSR), but it falls short of what's possible with the RTX 3060 Ti and newer Nvidia cards. AMD has been known to improve existing cards immensely through driver iterations, so one can expect to see a solid performance boost through the lifetime of the RX 7600. If you don't fancy spending a ridiculous amount of money on a GPU, this is the card for you.

AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT
AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT
Best 1440p

An amazing GPU for butter-smooth QHD gaming

The king of AMD's RX 70 series graphics cards for 1440p gaming, this is the GPU you should buy if you're after butter-smooth 2K performance. The AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT is also fairly good at 4K gaming, especially when paired with FSR.

Pros
  • Excellent 1440p performance
  • Decent 4K performance
Cons
  • Weaker ray tracing support

If you want the best value GPU for 1440p and some 4K gaming, look no further than the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT. This is one of the best value GPUs from AMD for 2K gaming. With 3,840 shader cores, 60 ray tracing cores, and 120 AI/accelerator cores, you can enjoy some high-fidelity gaming on a budget. Other specifications include a boost clock speed of 2.4GHz, 16GB of GDDR6 RAM, and a memory bandwidth of 2,708GB/s. This is excellent for 1440p gaming and you'll be able to do some more 4K gaming than what would be possible with our RTX 4060 Ti recommendation in this collection.

Front shot of the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT

With other technologies like AMD FSR, graphics cards like the RX 7800 XT can punch above their weight. The current pricing of graphics cards may see you pay slightly more than typical for an RX 7800 XT, but if you manage to find one for MSRP or below, we'd recommend taking the plunge.

51RISC GTX 1660 SUPER
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super
Best budget

For when your budget is a little tight

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super is arguably the best GTX 16-series graphics card you can buy on the market right now.

Pros
  • Good 1080p performance
  • Somewhat affordable
Cons
  • No ray tracing

You may not be searching for the absolute best graphics card you can buy, which is where something like the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super comes into play. It's nowhere near the fastest GPU on the market, but it's also one of the more affordable cards and won't suck as much power from the PSU. It's built on the older Turing platform, using a 12nm manufacturing process, but even though it's a little older than other GPUs in our collection here, it's worth considering for 1080p and some 1440p gaming. What you do get here is an incredible value. Forget paying $2,000 for a graphics card.

The GTX 1660 Super has a base clock of 1,5GHz and a boost clock of 1,8GHz. There's 6GB GDDR6 VRAM with a bandwidth of 336GB/s. It's recommended this be used with a 500W PSU or above since it has 125W TDP. And if you're into streaming, you'll be pleased to learn the GTX 1660 Super has enhanced Turing NVENC. The GTX 1660 Super offers more value now, especially when you're not looking to get a generational leap in performance. The best part about this GPU is that it doesn't demand a sophisticated cooling solution. Any build with decent airflow should be enough to push this GPU to its limits at stock settings.

As a GTX-series card, the 1660 Super doesn't support ray tracing. It doesn't have the RT cores to deliver ray-traced graphics. But other than that and the lack of DLSS you get a decent graphics card for a very attractive price.

Choosing the best GPU for gaming

It's important to consider spending a fair chunk of change on the graphics card. It's an important part of the gaming PC puzzle and will be responsible for running your favorite game(s). The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 is the most powerful GPU available but it's also the most expensive and requires considerable amounts of power. It's overkill for most PC builds and we'd not recommend it for everyone.

If you're looking for the best overall graphics card, we recommend the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070, which is our favorite GPU from Team Green thanks to its impressive 1440p performance at a reasonable price. Then there's the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which isn't the fastest GPU, but it's also not the most expensive. You will be able to play all your favorite games at 4K without an issue.

We'd recommend bearing the following in mind when shopping around for a GPU:

  • Buy a graphics card that suits your needs, not because it's new or the fastest.
  • Check for the manufacturer's 'Recommended Power Requirement' before buying the PSU, not the 'Total Graphics Power' (TGP) of the GPU.
  • There's more to a GPU than just its clock speed and total memory. Check the specifications table for details like memory bandwidth, TGP, and more.
  • Check if your PC case is big enough to fit the graphics card you'd like to buy. The GPU length clearance is usually mentioned by the case manufacturer.
  • Know your gaming needs before picking a GPU to save money. For instance, an RTX 3080 for 1080p gaming would just be overkill.
  • Getting the best possible gaming GPU isn't enough for gaming. Make sure your other core components are also good enough to avoid any bottlenecks.
  • All GPUs mentioned in this list are based on the reference model a.k.a 'Founders Edition' or the base model with stock speeds.
  • RT, DLSS, and other acronyms: Not all GPUs support ray-tracing (RT), Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), etc. Check a particular GPU's product page to find out.
nvidia geforce rtx 4070 fe
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070
Best overall

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070 is a midrange card in the RTX 40 series based on the Ada Lovelace architecture.