The vexed question of which graphics card is the best is a debate that will not die in PC gaming circles. Is it power at all costs that makes a graphics card the best, even though it may cost thousands of pounds to buy and will increase your power bill by the same amount?
Or should you choose something at the other end of the market? After all, the Steam Deck seems to do very nicely with what is, essentially, an integrated AMD graphics chip broadly similar in pixel-pushing power to an Nvidia GTX 1050 graphics card from 2016. Can it play The Witcher 3? Of course it can.
Or should you go for the middle ground, looking for the ideal balance of price and performance? This is fertile territory, with all graphics card manufacturers releasing multiple cards to try to capture the cash from those looking for an upgrade or building their first gaming PC.
So what even is a graphics card? Essentially, a computer processor’s central processing unit and graphics processing unit are separate, and you’ll need a GPU, or graphics card, to display an image on a monitor. If you want to play 3D games, or even run multiple monitors at high resolutions, you’ll need a more powerful GPU. Many, but not all, CPUs from both Intel and AMD come with little graphics chips attached, but an add-in board is often necessary for serious gaming or 3D rendering work, and it can even help with video editing, especially transcoding. GPUs have cores just like CPUs, but they tend to be smaller, more numerous, and more specialised.
Their performance is limited by the resolution you want to play games at, with 4K using the most power; the kind of effects you want to see, with ray-tracing adding a big performance hit when enabled; and their temperature, which is why most of a large card’s bulk is made up of fans.
Three companies make PC GPUs: Nvidia, AMD, and Intel - with the last a relative newcomer to the market despite dominating the world of CPUs for decades. These chips are then integrated into add-in boards by the manufacturers and other companies, who sell them to the public. This means you can often find multiple graphics cards from various manufacturers at different price-points, even though they may have the same processing chip on-board.
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PNY Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 24GB XLR8 VERTO
The flagship card from Nvidia’s latest graphics architecture, the RTX 4090 is so powerful it’s possible to argue nobody really needs it. There are always those, however, for whom only the very best is ever good enough, and if you’re prepared to drop £2,000 on a graphics card, then this is the one to get.
If you can find one. At the time of writing, the RTX 4090 Founders Edition - a card sold by Nvidia itself instead of one of the thirdparty manufacturers that tends to be more reasonably priced - is completely out of stock, while many other boards remain available only for pre-order. The PNY card we’ve selected here is in stock as we write, and at ‘just’ £1,799.99 hasn’t undergone the drastic price inflation seen elsewhere, with some cards breaking the £2,000 barrier.
RTX cards offer ray-tracing for more realistic lighting effects in games, and the RTX 4090 has more of the specialised RT cores that enable this than any other Nvidia card, as well as more of the processing cores that allow it to render realistic computer graphics extremely quickly. The 40-series graphics cards also introduce DLSS 3 (that’s Deep Learning Super Sampling) which uses an AI system to increase resolutions and framerates.
The RTX 4090 is a big, heavy, expensive card that’s thirsty for power - it requires a special feed from your PC’s power supply through a particular connector - but you won’t get anything better right now.
Buy now £1799.99, Scan
Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XT 20GB
We literally got the email announcing the availability of these cards while writing this article, which means stock is starting to trickle out, but many cards remain on pre-order status.
The RX 7900 XT and its slightly more expensive sibling the XTX (which is more powerful but not available yet) see AMD launch a new architecture generation - celled RDNA 3 - with ray-tracing and its own AI cores to increase game resolutions (known as FidelityFX Super Resolution) to supply the features demanded by the latest games.
At around half the price of the RTX 4090, you might expect it to be about half as good, and when gaming at 4K that’s pretty much what you get, but as you’re also getting perfectly playable framerates, surely that’s good enough.
That still puts it ahead of every other board from the previous generation, and so it becomes a case of actually getting hold of a card, which is a game in itself.
Buy now £919.98, Ebuyer
Palit GeForce RTX 3080 GAMING PRO 10GB V1
And speaking of that previous generation, this was the first graphics card launched as part of Nvidia’s 30-series in 2020, and still holds its own very well today. There are cards on top of it in the series, with a 12GB version of this card as well as the 3080Ti, 3090, and 3090Ti, but this one is still good for 4K at 60FPS in many games, and we’ve yet to see the 10GB of RAM on-board become a problem.
That may change - and more is always better - but as you can pick one up right now, such as the Palit card we’ve linked to here, for under £800, you still get a lot of performance for your money. And they’re actually in stock too.
The 30-series cards use older versions of the ray-tracing and AI hardware seen on the 40-series, but DLSS 2 and its ray-tracing capabilities are still capable of providing all the resolution and speed you need.
Buy now £798.99, Ebuyer
ASUS GeForce RTX 3060Ti 8GB DUAL MINI OC V2
Stepping down into the mid-range, the incredibly popular Nvidia RTX 3060Ti GPU has been just everywhere since its launch in 2020, and as an RTX 4060 has yet to be announced at the time of writing, this utter workhorse is the place to go if you want the benefits of ray-tracing but don’t want to completely destroy your bank account.
Keep your resolutions modest - it’s not a card for 4K gaming - and the RTX 3060Ti can give you a great experience from frenetic firstperson shooters to more considered strategy games. While it will almost certainly be supplanted by a new-generation graphics card sometime in 2023, it remains one of the best upgrades you can buy for an ageing games PC. The only limiting factor may be that 8GB of RAM, as games are starting to push past this.
The ASUS card we’re linked to here is a twin-fan card that’s smaller than triple-fan designs, which means it can fit in smaller spaces, making it ideal for PCs built into compact cases.
Buy now £489.99, Ebuyer
Intel Arc A770 16GB
Intel made its debut in the discrete graphics card market this year, having been making integrated graphics chips in its processors for a very long time. They haven’t troubled the top of the GPU charts, but the A770 is competitive with the RTX 3060 and AMD’s RX 6650 XT, and shares the £400-ish price bracket too. This means its 16GB of RAM is a key selling point against the 8GB cards.
The A770 supports ray-tracing and a DLSS/FidelityFX competitor called XeSS, though it’s not quite as good and, being new, isn’t as widely used in games as Nvidia and AMD’s solutions.
Still, it’s good to see a third player in the market, and really the only way is up for Intel from here, and it’s not a bad start.
Buy now £399.99, Ebuyer
MSI Radeon RX 6650 XT MECH 2X 8GB OC
AMD’s final mid-ranger from its previous RDNA 2 generation of cards, released in autumn 2022, is still a decent value proposition as prices are dropping even though a replacement RDNA 3 card hasn’t been launched yet.
It’s not a 4K card, and if you want ray-tracing you’ll be playing at 1080p in order to get a decent framerate. Having 8GB of RAM on-board is enough for now, and the RX 6650 benefits from using faster memory than the RX 6600 it replaced, which you might still see on sale, but should avoid.
Many cards featuring this GPU, such as the MSI example we’ve linked to, are reasonably cool, quiet, and not too power-hungry, making them good choices for smaller PC builds. The fact they’re quite reasonably priced helps too, but the market is crowded at this level.
Buy now £399.99, Ebuyer
ASUS GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6GB TUF OC EVO GAMING
A recently discontinued GPU, so while stocks may dry up fast, bargains may also be spotted. The ASUS card we’ve linked to is selling for £45 off at the time of writing, but things change fast and similar cards from other manufacturers may become even cheaper.
Nvidia’s 16-series is built on an architecture similar to its 20-series, from 2018, but with the then-new ray-tracing capabilities removed. This allows it to be cheaper, cooler, and smaller. Single-fan cards using the 1660Ti aren’t uncommon.
Performance-wise, you’ll be fine at 1080p, with the card’s 6GB of memory just about right for its purpose but limiting how far you can push it as games become more complex and require larger amounts of data storage.
Buy now £279.99, Ebuyer
ASRock Arc A380 6GB OC Challenger ITX
The market for graphics cards targeted specifically at very small PCs is a thriving one, and given the engineering challenges involved in building a thin, short card and keeping it cool in a tight case interior, it’s amazing there are as many as there are. This ASRock card has a single fan, and stops it entirely when the card’s idling to reduce noise.
This budget GPU from Intel is intriguing, as it’s relatively weak for gaming but shines at applications such as accelerated video encoding, and has 50 per cent more RAM than similarly-specced cards from Nvidia and AMD. This makes it a great choice for someone who needs a powerful PC with multiple monitors (it has four output ports) for professional creative applications.
However, people in that kind of situation often have more money to spend, and adding just a little to the price brings you into range of much better chips. While it’s fine for what it is, the A380 has not been the greatest part of Intel’s entry into the GPU market. It should be much cheaper.
Buy now £164.99, Ebuyer
Verdict
Graphics card prices are still inflated at the end of 2022 following a year of electronics shortages and the impact of crypto mining that saw hundreds of graphics cards bought up and used in mining farms that were then abandoned, rather than finding their way into gamers’ hands.
Both issues are clearing up, and the outlook for 2023 looks much sunnier. New architectures from Nvidia and AMD have launched, and we look forward to seeing how Intel can build on the launch of its Arc cards with a second generation that addresses their shortcomings.
The message you can draw from all this is the same as it’s always been. There are no shortcuts, if you want the best graphics card, you’re going to have to pay for it, and if you want Nvidia’s RTX 4090 you’ll have to pay a lot. We should soon see mid-range cards appear at more reasonable prices, however, and strong competition should see them fall.
The good news is that graphics cards, and PC games themselves, are better than they’ve ever been, and with one of the newer cards in your PC you can look forward to some phenomenal experiences.
