The best graphics card for gaming depends on many things, including what resolution you’re looking to play at, how demanding games are, and whether you want to do any content creation. Buying the right GPU used to be an easy act of lining up benchmarks on a chart and seeing which had the biggest number next to it, but now there are lots of factors in play, from rasterization performance to advanced features like ray tracing, DLSS upscaling, and frame generation.
For the most bang for your buck, we recommend the AMD RX 6700 XT. It’s an excellent card that combines solid 1080p performance with the ability to dabble at 1440p and beyond. Its closest competitor from Nvidia is the RTX 4060 Ti, which costs about 30% more and is a bit faster overall, but it doesn’t have the same value-add in terms of supporting Intel’s XeSS upscaling feature.
Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Super is a compelling choice at this price point as well. It offers good raw rasterization performance and can even handle a few 4K games, though you’ll need to make some compromises in demanding titles. It also supports DLSS 3 and Frame Generation, which should make up for some of the slowness that you might encounter with older games.
Nvidia’s top RTX 2080 model is the most expensive card on our list, but it’s a great pick for anyone who wants to game at 4K or higher resolutions. It’s about 40% faster than the previous generation card at 4K and can even push a few more frames at 1440p. The RTX 2080 also offers advanced ray tracing capabilities and support for DLSS upscaling, a great value at this price. best graphics card