The best graphics cards 2023: GPUs for every budget

When it comes to PC gaming, 1440p gaming is widely considered the sweet spot, delivering eye-popping visuals that are much crisper than 1080p gaming, but without the need to splurge on ultra-high-end hardware like you do with 4K gaming. And when it comes to 1440p gaming, AMD’s $500 Radeon RX 7800 XT is the only true 1440p option worth considering.

The Radeon RX 7800 XT delivers smashing 1440p performance, absolutely trouncing its GeForce RTX 4070 rival — despite Nvidia’s card retailing for $100 more. Better yet, it comes with an ample 16GB of memory and a wide memory bus perfect for 1440p, while Nvidia’s rival RTX 4060 Ti GPUs pack nerfed memory configurations (and slower performance) that make them unappealing for long-term gaming at this resolution. And if you have an AMD Ryzen processor, the company’s superb Smart Access Memory feature pushes performance even further.

AMD’s GPU delivers decent ray tracing chops. There’s no doubt that the RTX 4070 bests it in ray tracing, power efficiency, and with juicy extras like DLSS 3 and Nvidia Broadcast. But considering the Radeon RX 7800 XT is so much faster at raw gaming performance and costs significantly less, it’s easily the best graphics card for 1440p — and the best graphics card you can buy overall.

AMD’s Radeon RX 6600 is the best graphics card to grab if you’re staying on a strict budget, especially since Nvidia has stopped being competitive in this price range. It goes for around $200 to $220 on the streets these days. With 8GB of fast GDDR6 memory, solid power efficiency, and AMD’s Radeon Super Resolution in tow, the Radeon RX 6600 is a great graphics card for people looking to game at 1080p resolution at 60fps without compromising too much on visual fidelity.

It lags in ray tracing performance, however. If you’re more into playing triple-A games that use ray tracing or the modern DirectX 12 API, give Intel’s Arc A750 a consideration as well. It costs about the same to start. This GPU easily bests the Radeon card on both those fronts, but delivers less consistent results in games that run the more common DX9 and DX11 APIs. Intel’s engineers are improving Arc drivers by leaps and bounds there, but we still give the Radeon RX 6600 the nod for its better overall consistency. You’ll also need a modern computer with PCIe resizable bar support to fully utilize the Intel card, whereas AMD’s should slip just fine into any system.

If you’re on a sub-$200 budget, we’d recommend trying to save a few bucks to try to get a Radeon RX 6600. But if you can’t, consider the $170ish Radeon RX 6500 XT instead — but read our review so you’re keenly aware of its limitations.

If you’re looking for the best 1080p gaming experience, AMD is once again the way to go. The Radeon RX 7600 delivers an average of 35 percent higher performance than its Radeon RX 6600 predecessor, meaning you’ll be able to crank up visuals to High or Ultra even on the most demanding modern games. (Its 8GB memory buffer, common for this price range, comes up a bit short in some of the most memory-intensive games, and required a drop to High.) After years of terrible 1080p graphics cards, the Radeon RX 7600 is a breath of fresh air. While it retails for $270, you can often find it for under $260 on the streets.

It’s atrocious at ray tracing though. If ray tracing and DLSS 3 frame generation are a priority for you, Nvidia’s $300+ GeForce RTX 4060 is an alternative option, with performance well ahead in ray traced games, and just a hair behind in non-RT games. At 1080p, upscaling technologies like DLSS 2 and FSR 2 looks terrible, so they’re not worth factoring in at this resolution.

If you’re able to find a last-gen Radeon RX 6700 XT for $300 or less, we’d actually recommend picking that up, as it delivers comparable gaming performance (except for in ray tracing) to these GPUs, but comes with a much more future proof 12GB of VRAM. It typically sells for $330 or more though, so you’re paying up to get that extra memory versus these more modern GPUs.

Paying $800 or more for a 1440p graphics card is ludicrous. Our review called Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4070 Ti “painfully overpriced.” But if you want exceptional performance at 1440p gaming—and only 1440p gaming, as Nvidia hobbled this $800 GPU to run slower at 4K—price be damned, the 12GB RTX 4070 Ti is a great option. It’s ultra-fast, ultra-efficient, excellent at ray tracing, and supports Nvidia’s killer new DLSS 3.0 Frame Gen technology. Most people would be better off with a much-cheaper Radeon RX 7800 XT though, or saving up your pennies for the next option on this list.

If you’ve got a 4K monitor and want to put all those pixels to work, AMD’s flagship Radeon RX 7900 XTX is the graphics card for you. This $999 beast can keep a 4K/60 monitor maxed out without breaking a sweat, and often flirts with maxing out 4K monitors with higher refresh rates. Yes, that’s with all the graphics options enabled—except ray tracing. Long a losing battle for AMD, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX remains firmly behind the ray tracing prowess of Nvidia’s newer GeForce RTX 40-series GPUs, but still slings rays slightly better than Nvidia’s last-gen flagship, the monstrous RTX 3090 Ti. That’s pretty damned good.

If you do video editing or run Minecraft with tons of mods enabled, you’ll also appreciate the Radeon RX 7900 XTX’s ample 24GB memory capacity. The $800 GeForce RTX 4070 TI, $900 Radeon RX 7900 XT, and $1,200 (gasp) GeForce RTX 4080 are all in a similar price class to the 7900 XTX, but offer atrocious value for the performance delivered. Get this, get a last-gen card…or splurge on our next option.

Graphics cards that cost $1,000 didn’t used to exist, but now they’re commonplace. All of them offer a compelling 4K gaming experience. But if you want peak performance no matter the price, you’ll be spectacularly pleased with the GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition. This is the first graphics card capable of maxing out a 120Hz 4K monitor in many modern games—a monumental achievement. Its rivals can kept a 60Hz 4K monitor fed, but not a high refresh rate display. The GeForce RTX 4090 embarrasses all previous GPU contenders in all games, full stop—it’s so fast that games can become CPU bottlenecked even at 4K/Ultra when using this GPU. You’ll want a new Radeon 9 7950X or Intel Core i9-13900K to truly take advantage of it.

Beyond the raw speed, the RTX 4090 also offers an ample 24GB of GDDR6 memory for content creators, best-in-class ray tracing chops, and new DLSS 3 technology that uses AI to improve frame rates substantially—think twofold or even more, though responsiveness can take a hit in some games. The RTX 4090 is an absolutely sublime GPU for peak-performance gaming.