The graphics card is the heart of any PC that’s being used for gaming or any other 3D rendering tasks, and they have applications for AI as well.
Trouble is, they can be dreadfully expensive, but there are some models that trade computing power for a more reasonable price, and even the budget models aren’t going to give you such a bad experience in games as long as you’re not trying to run them in 4K at 120fps and with ray-tracing.
That last one has seen a bit of a revolution in graphics cards since the launch of Nvidia’s RTX cards in 2018. Ray-traced lighting absolutely does improve the look of your games, if they support it, but it has a hugely detrimental effect on performance, so you’ll need the latest and greatest card to play modern games with it all switched on. Back off a bit, and you’ll be able to enjoy games that look amazing without weeping over the empty state of your bank account.
Nvidia has a huge share of the graphics card market, but AMD and Intel are in on the action too. Intel, Nvidia and AMD chips are used by a range of manufacturers in their cards, with the GPU chip itself and the PCIe edge connector being the only standard features. Other things - like style, cooling, clock speeds and the number of video outputs - can vary. Some even come with RGB lighting.
Graphics cards are hugely complex beasts, and carry so much technology, described with so much jargon, that it can be baffling to decide which one is the best for your needs.
What should you look for in a graphics card?
Just about any separate graphics card released in the last five years will be better than the built-in GPU that comes with your CPU - known as integrated graphics - and the one you buy completely depends on how much you want to spend. Pricier models will be more powerful and can potentially last longer before being replaced, but they can also be larger, hotter, and demand more electrical power from the PC’s PSU.
PC gaming isn’t a low-cost hobby, alas, but by picking one of the best value graphics cards, and making value-oriented decisions about the other components in your rig, it’s possible to get results that will leave any current games console in the shade.
Best value graphics card at a glance:
- Best for power vs value: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super - £610, Amazon
- Best for 1080p value: AMD Radeon RX 7600 - £316, Amazon
- Best for taking on the RTX 4070: AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE - £630, Amazon
- Best for a leftfield challenger: Intel Arc A750 - £275, Amazon
- Best for a balanced approach: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060Ti - £400, Ebuyer
- Best for a cheaper choice: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 - £289, Amazon
- Best for the bottom of the budget: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 - £140, Amazon
- Best for an integrated solution: AMD Ryzen 7 8700G - £300, Amazon
Find out more below
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super
Best for: power vs value
Yes, £600 is a lot of money, but a card like this will keep your PC producing excellent gaming results for a while yet. The XX70 series cards may look like they’re halfway up the Nvidia hierarchy, but they’re closer to the XX80s than the XX60s, and that’s especially true of the newly refreshed Super cards.
The important thing about the RTX 4000 series isn’t the improved clock speeds or larger amounts of RAM over its predecessors, it’s DLSS 3.0, an ingenious bit of engineering that allows the card to both increase the resolution of a frame - turning one rendered at 1080p into 1440p or even 4K in a way you’ll barely notice - but to weave extra frames in between those it’s rendering, using interpolation to improve your framerate.
The only downsides are that price, and the fact it draws around 220W, through the new 16-pin power connector, so if upgrading an older PC you’ll need to make sure your PSU can handle it.
Buy now £610.00, Amazon
AMD Radeon RX 7600
Best for: 1080p value
This budget card from AMD offers excellent value for money. It’s in the same broad performance bracket as Nvidia’s RTX 4060, but often comes in slightly cheaper. It also has the advantage of coming in a small form factor.
Longer, triple-fan cards can take up a lot of room in PC cases, both horizontally and vertically, potentially blocking important parts of the motherboard and preventing you from using PCIe slots that are close to the one the GPU is in (usually the top one), so if space and airflow are important to your build, this is worth a look. Its graphics performance is definitely lower down the scale, but for playing at 1080p resolution, it’s got plenty of oomph.
Buy now £316.00, Amazon
AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE
Best for: taking on the RTX 4070
This chip from AMD is really a cut-down version of its RX 7900 XTX, and the GRE stands for Golden Rabbit Edition, named to tie in with the Chinese New Year. The loss of a few memory controllers and shaders is your gain, however, as the GRE remains a potent card you can find in standard and overclocked (slightly more expensive) guises.
It’s a good choice for ray-traced effects at 1440p resolution, and if you turn the RT off it can dip into 4K territory, with tech like FSR 3 and Fluid Motion Frames catching up with Nvidia’s DLSS. The 16GB of VRAM it has on-board helps it here too, as rival cards often make do with 12GB.
Buy now £630.00, Amazon
Intel Arc A750
Best for: a leftfield challenger
Intel’s discrete GPUs are still in their first generation and didn’t make much of a splash when they launched, but they’ve matured into good budget options. There are two things you have to know, however: first, your PC must support Resizable BAR (tech that allows your PC to transfer more data at once between the CPU and the VRAM) and have it switched on - it’ll still work without it, but you’re giving up performance.
Second, you’ll need to keep the software up to date. You probably do this already, as new graphics drivers frequently drop to coincide with new game releases, but the software support for Intel’s GPUs improves all the time, and new drivers can make a lot of difference. The A750 has 8GB of RAM and makes for an excellent 1080p card, and if you can get one for a good price will rival cards further up this list.
Buy now £275.00, Amazon
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060Ti
Best for: a balanced approach
Cards featuring this GPU are fully in the mid-range of Nvidia’s offerings. Stepping up to an RTX 4070 will net you a performance increase, but also cost a bit more. There are also cheaper cards in the 4000 series, but you’ll be losing performance. The 4060Ti beats the regular 4060 and, particularly if you shop around for the 8GB variant of the card (16GB versions are also available), can be found for a very reasonable price that nets you DLSS 3.0 frame generation and decent 1440p performance without breaking the bank.
Buy now £400.00, Ebuyer
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060
Best for: a cheaper choice
There is an RTX 4050 card, but this 4060 saves you a chunk of change from the 4060Ti without dropping the performance level too far. It’s low-powered even for a 1080p card if you want to enjoy the best graphics modern games have to offer with a smooth framerate, but it does have Nvidia’s 4000-series tricks and makes for a substantial upgrade over a much older card.
It’s also ideal for anyone who uses their PC for work, particularly creative or video-based jobs, and just wants to run lots of monitors without the mouse pointer getting all jerky when you move between them.
Buy now £289.00, Amazon
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050
Best for: the bottom of the budget
This is the lowest-powered card you should be considering for games, or even accelerating creative applications. It’s commonly found in laptops, but is available as a desktop PCIe card too. It’s from Nvidia’s previous generation of cards, the 3000 series, and even then was the bottom of the bunch.
That’s not to say it’s not useful, however, as it will easily beat any integrated graphics solution, and the price tag that comes attached makes it very attractive to budget PC builders. The 3000 series cards don’t support DLSS 3.0 and its clever frame generation, though, so it might be worth holding back until the 5000 series launches and then picking up an RTX 4050 for cheap.
Buy now £140.00, Amazon
AMD Ryzen 7 8700G
Best for: an integrated solution
This is a CPU with integrated graphics, but AMD’s 8000 models come with the Radeon 780M GPU, which is a bit better than the sort of thing you’d usually find. It sports 12 compute units and 12 ray-tracing cores, which aren’t going to push high framerates at 4K but will manage nicely at 1080p, especially if you’re happy to pare back the graphics complexity a bit or just play older games.
This isn’t a substitute for a separate modern graphics chip, but if you need to build a budget PC then picking a CPU from this range will potentially save you a bit of cash.
Buy now £300.00, Amazon
Verdict
Building or upgrading a gaming PC is never cheap, but there's a graphics card out there for any budget. The cards on this list don’t command the eye-watering prices that GPUs like the RTX 4090 can achieve, and the most expensive card here would only be described as the top of the mid-range. However, a card sporting Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Super chip is going to be able to play games for years to come, and comes with all the latest engineering and coding tricks to help it display graphics that can be sharp, fast and immersive. That’s why it's at the top of the list.
