The graphics card is responsible for handling all the rendering tasks that are too intense for the CPU alone — think rendering video or playing games. The best graphics card depends on what you need. Should you have a Full HD monitor and only play some lighter games occasionally, you could get away with buying a cheaper GPU. If you're going all-out with 4K gaming and want the very best, a flagship GPU will likely be a better choice. We've tested a whole host of graphics cards to see which is the best GPU for gaming.
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Our picks for the top graphics cards in 2023
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070
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.
- Graphics RAM Size
- 12GB GDDR6X
- Process
- 4nm
- Shader Units
- 5,888
- Ray Accelerators/Cores
- 46
- Stream Processors
- 46
- Base Clock Speed
- 1,920MHz
- Boost Clock Speed
- 2,480MHz
- Memory Bus
- 192-bit
- Memory Bandwidth
- 504.2 GB/s
- Power Draw
- 200W
- Impressive 4K performance
- Better value
- Still relatively expensive
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti 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.
This makes it a fine weapon for 4K gaming 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's flagship is a difficult value GPU to beat.
The Radeon RX 7900 XTX is the new flagship for 2022, offering considerable gains across multiple resolutions over the older RX 6000 generation of GPUs.
- Cooling Method
- 3x 92mm fans
- GPU Speed
- 2.30 GHz
- Interface
- PCI 4.0
- Memory
- 24 GB GDDR6
- Power
- 355 W
- Boost Speed
- 2.50 GHz
- Impressive 4K performance
- Performance likely to improve with age
- High power draw
- Still relatively expensive
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.
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 Limited Edition
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.
- GPU Speed
- 2.1 GHz
- Interface
- PCIe 4.0
- Memory
- 16GB GDDR6
- Power
- 225 W
- Good value
- Solid 1080p performance
- 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.
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 RTX 4090 Founders Edition
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.
- GPU Speed
- 2.23 GHz
- Interface
- PCIe 4.0
- Memory
- 24 GB GDDR6X
- Power
- 450 W
- Boost Speed
- 2.52 GHz
- Excellent 4K performance
- Impressive ray tracing support
- Extremely 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.
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 3060 Ti
The best value GPU for 1080p and 1440p gaming.
The RTX 3060 Ti can handle both 1080p as well as 1440p gaming very well. It's the best 30-series GPU for most people that want something better than an RTX 3050.
- Ray Accelerators/Cores
- 38
- Stream Processors
- 4,864
- Base Clock Speed
- 1.41 GHz
- Boost Clock Speed
- 1.66 GHz
- Memory Capacity
- 8 GB GDDR6
- Memory Bus
- 256-bit
- Memory Bandwidth
- 448 GB/s
- Power Draw
- 200 W
- Excellent 1440p performance
- Great value
- Not good at 4K
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is a brilliant little graphics card. It offered amazing value at launch, allowing for high-fidelity 1440p gaming at less than $400. The RTX 3060 Ti features the GA104 GPU with a total of 4,864 CUDA cores. Not only is it a significant departure from RTX 2060 Super, but it has more CUDA cores than even the RTX 2080 Super. The clock speed of 1.4GHz is also impressive, and so too is the boost of 1.7GHz. And if you manage to buy an aftermarket card from AIB partners, you can enjoy an overclocked RTX 3060 Ti experience with even more performance headroom. For memory, the RTX 3060 Ti has 8GB of GDDR6, which isn't enough for 4K gaming and cement this as a 1440p powerhouse.
Memory bandwidth clocks in at 448GB/s, which comes close to what you can find in more powerful hardware. 38 ray tracing and 4,864 processing 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 200W, 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 3060 Ti is in even the more recent PC games.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
An amazing GPU for butter-smooth QHD gaming.
The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 may not be the most powerful 30-series GPU out there, but it offers impressive performance for the price.
- Shader Units
- 5,888
- Ray Accelerators/Cores
- 46
- Base Clock Speed
- 1.50 GHz
- Boost Clock Speed
- 1.73 GHz
- Memory Capacity
- 8 GB GDDR6
- Memory Bus
- 256-bit
- Memory Bandwidth
- 448 GB/s
- Power Draw
- 220 W
- Excellent 1440p performance
- Decent 4K performance
- Weaker ray tracing support
If you want the best value GPU for 1440p and some 4K gaming, look no further than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070. It's a significant upgrade over the RTX 2080 Ti and has since been replaced by the RTX 4070 Ti, but it's still worth considering for gaming in 2023. With 5,888 CUDA cores, 46 ray tracing cores, and 184 tensor cores, you can enjoy some high-fidelity gaming on a budget. Other specifications include a boost clock speed of 1.7GHz, 8GB of GDDR6 RAM, and a memory bandwidth of 448GB/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 3060 Ti recommendation in this collection.
With other technologies like Nvidia DLSS, graphics cards like the RTX 3070 can punch above their weight. The current pricing of graphics cards may see you pay slightly more than typical for an RTX 3070, but if you manage to find one for MSRP or below, we'd recommend taking the plunge.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super
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.
- Shader Units
- 1,408
- Base Clock Speed
- 1.53 GHz
- Boost Clock Speed
- 1.79 GHz
- Memory Capacity
- 6 GB GDDR6
- Memory Bus
- 192-bit
- Memory Bandwidth
- 336 GB/s
- Power Draw
- 125 W
- Good 1080p performance
- Somewhat affordable
- 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
If you're looking for the best graphics card, we recommend the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX. It's not 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. Then there's the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, which is our favorite GPU from team green thanks to its impressive 1440p performance at a reasonable price.
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
Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4070 is a midrange card in the RTX 40 series based on the Ada Lovelace architecture.