Best graphics card 2019

These are the best graphics cards to buy today… we know because we’re tested them all. The GPU is the silicon heart of your gaming PC and we’ve reviewed and benchmarked all the latest AMD and Nvidia graphics cards to come to our decision. But should you go for a cheap graphics card or go all in for 4K? We can help.

If you want the absolute pinnacle of graphical prowess you could drop a cool $2,500 on Nvidia’s Titan RTX, but now that the RTX 2080 Ti is finally here, serious 4K performance is actually within reach. I mean yes, it is some $1,200, but that’s less than half the price of a Titan RTX. Bargain, right?

But, if you can’t drop four figures on a GPU, what should you buy right now? Older Nvidia graphics cards are starting to creep up in price in the short-term, now that Nvidia’s Turing architecture, and subsequent RTX 2080, RTX 2080 Ti have been released. But the more mainstream RTX 2070 is finally available on the shelves now, with an RTX 2060 on its way soon, and AMD’s RX 580 and RX 570 cards are a bit of a bargain.

So whether you’re chasing a good, cheap graphics card, a top-end 4K graphics card, or just simply the best overall GPU, we’ve got you covered.

The best graphics cards are:

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Winner: Best graphics card

AMD RX 580 8GB

Approx. – $190 | £200

Pros
 Large video memory capacity
 Great price/performance ratio
 Quality DirectX 12 performance

Cons
 The GTX 1060 6GB is sometimes faster

Until there are affordable next-gen mainstream Turing GPUs in play the price/performance heroes will remain the AMD RX 580 and GTX 1060. And, finally, pricing has returned to a vaguely sensible level where the RX 580 8GB is once more the cheaper option, and the go-to card for non-billionaire PC gamers.

The Polaris-based Radeon cards perform better than the GTX 1060 competition in a handful of DX12 titles and in Doom’s Vulkan build. They have a superior memory setup, too. Not only does the RX 580 have an extra 2GB of VRAM at its disposal, useful for high-res textures and large open-world games, it’s also got that running over a wider, 256-bit, aggregated memory bus.

Read our full AMD Radeon RX 580 review.

Runner-up

AMD RX 590

Approx. – $280 | £240

Pros
 Most powerful sub-$300 GPU
 Tops the GTX 1060 6GB
 Quality DirectX 12 performance

Cons
 The RX 580 is still better value for money

The RX 590 isn’t all that different to our favourite graphics card, the RX 580. AMD has copy and pasted its 36 CU GPU onto either GlobalFoundries 12nm or Samsung’s 11nm process, resulting in significantly higher clock speeds over its predecessor. It’s not a hugely impactful change when it comes to gaming performance, but AMD has tweaked the formula just enough to earn the RX 590 the title of most powerful sub-$300 graphics card.

That said, it’s not the card we’d recommend in the mainstream GPU segment. One of the best things the RX 590 has done for the market is make the RX 580 just that much more tantalising with its sub-MSRP prices right now. Still, if you want the newest silicon, the RX 590, in various third-party garb, is the fastest going without needing to break the bank.

Read our full AMD Radeon RX 590 review.

runner-up

Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB

Approx. – $247 | £202

Pros
 Great gaming performance
 GeForce Experience backend
 Quality legacy DX 11 frame rates

Cons
 Not so great in Vulkan and DX12

We’re still a long way off from having genuinely mainstream Nvidia Turing graphics cards, with even the upcoming RTX 2070 costing at least $499 for the reference chip. So, until the 2060 – whether it gets RTX or GTX designation – appears, the graphics card we recommend for the vast majority of PC gamers is either the GTX 1060 or the RX 580.

AMD’s RX 580 has just pipped the GTX 1060 as the go-to card at the moment, thanks to its improved framebuffer, lower price tag, and better performance in modern APIs. But if you love yourself some Nvidia features – G-Sync, GeForce Experience, Shield’s GameStream, and the like – then the GTX 1060 6GB is still an absolutely brilliant gaming GPU.

Read our full Nvidia GTX 1060 review.

Winner: best 4K graphics card

Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti

Approx. – $1,199 | £1,099

Pros
Serious 60fps 4K gaming
 Faster than a $3K Titan V
 Future ray tracing and AI goodness

Cons
 Old-school Titan-level pricing

The RTX 2080 Ti is the true next-gen graphics card of the new Turing GPU generation. The RTX 2080 only delivers current gaming performance at the same level as the GTX 1080 Ti, but the RTX 2080 Ti goes well beyond it, offering genuine 4K gaming at 60fps in all but the most demanding of PC games.

There’s also the promise of real-time ray tracing… when Microsoft updates its Windows 10 OS with a new version of DirectX 12. Then there’s AI-based super-sampling that will make your games look prettier and run better. As well as all the other goodness AI will bring to gaming in the future via Microsoft’s WinML API, and the new shader techniques Nvidia has created for Turing. Buy it if you want the ultimate in 4K gaming now, and then bask in the knowledge there’s even more to come.

Read our full Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti review.

 

Runner-up

Nvidia RTX 2080

Approx. – $799 | £699

Pros
 Outperforms the GTX 1080 Ti
 Future ray tracing and AI power…

Cons
 … but we’re still waiting for it
 Super-expensive for a 2nd tier GPU

The second-tier 20-series GPU from Nvidia is still a massively expensive card and yet is only delivering a little more performance than the previous generation’s GTX 1080 Ti. But stock of the top Pascal GPU has dwindled to such a point you can’t pick them up for less than the cost of the RTX 2080 Ti… so that idea’s out.

And there is more to come from the RTX 2080, and we’re confident it will eventually deliver on Nvidia’s fresh fine wine approach. For now, though, with few affordable reference card versions, it’s a tough sell. But as prices for the GTX 1080 Ti go up as stock volume goes down, and the reverse happens to the RTX 2080, it is fast becoming the go-to card compared to the Pascal GPU.

Read our full Nvidia RTX 2080 review.

RUNNER-UP

Nvidia RTX 2070

Approx. – $500 | £465

Pros
 Faster than a GTX 1080
 Entry level for ray tracing

Cons
 Overclocked cards aren’t really worth it
 It’s a 3rd tier GPU for $500…

Nvidia’s third-tier Turing GPU is a really impressive graphics card, it’s just a shame that it’s arrived at GTX 1080 pricing rather than at the old GTX 1070 level. But it does outperform the old Pascal cards, and gets mighty close to the 1080 Ti when you throw some serious overclocking its way. But those factory-overclocked cards are hard to recommend given their super-high pricing.

We still don’t know what the real-time ray tracing and AI processing will eventually offer, but the RTX 2070 does seemingly represent the cheapest entry point if you want to get in at the ground floor of the new tech.

Read our full Nvidia RTX 2070 review.

RUNNER-UP

Nvidia GTX 1070 Ti

Approx. – $480 | £451

Pros
 Generous 4K performance
 Prices are still dropping

Cons
 Stock will soon run dry
 Some OC cards are still expensive

The GTX 1070 Ti offers a little more bang for your buck than the GTX 1070, and along with the RTX 2070 now makes the GTX 1080 essentially redundant. Thanks to the near-full performance GP104 GPU, at 2,432 CUDA cores, this card only suffers at the hand of its cut-down GDDR5 memory, as opposed to the GDDR5X found on the GTX 1080.

The GTX 1070 Ti is more than capable of 4K gaming, although as with the GTX 1070, you may need to drop the graphic fidelity a little to smooth out those stutters at times – especially in memory-intensive games. It’s worth considering if you can’t stretch to an RTX 2070… while stocks last.

Read our full Nvidia GTX 1070 Ti review.

Winner: BEST cheap GRAPHICS CARD

AMD RX 570

Approx. – $170 | £134

Pros
 Finally a great price
 Serious 1080p performance
 Wider memory bus than 1050 Ti

Cons
 The RX 580 is only a little bit more

The RX 570 is finally at a non-ridiculous price now that stock has filtered back into the channel. Actually, with the card sitting cheaper than the Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti at the moment, it is actually a kind of ridiculous price… in a good way. Even at its standard sub-$200 level it’s not a bad option.

You are missing out on the higher level of video memory you get with the 8GB version of the RX 580 or the GTX 1060 6GB, but 4GB is absolutely fine if you’re still rocking a 1080p monitor. With its only slightly cut-down Polaris 20 GPU it’s still got the gaming goods, and if you can’t stretch to the price of an RX 580 or GTX 1060 then the second-tier Polaris card won’t disappoint.

Read our full AMD RX 570 4GB review.

Runner-up

Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti

Approx. – $170 | £150

Pros
 Great 1080p gaming performance
 Bargain price
 Doesn’t need a PSU connection

Cons
 4GB VRAM might become restrictive

The Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti is a fantastic little card; a welcome surprise given just how capable the GP107 GPU is when dealing with the latest games running at their highest 1080p settings. With seriously GPU-taxing titles you’ll need to knock back your in-game graphics settings a touch, but for something like Grand Theft Auto V you can hit just under 60fps comfortably.

Where the GTX 1050 Ti really stands out is in opening up PC gaming to a wider audience. Because its efficient GPU draws all its power from the PCIe bus, without needing an extra connection from the PSU, it can be an instant upgrade for any off-the-shelf office PC. You can turn pretty much any ropey old PC from the last five years or so into a 1080p gaming machine to be proud of. You can’t ask much more than that.

Read our full Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti review.

Not everyone is lucky enough to be totally weapons free on budget when it comes to the most important component in a gaming PC: the graphics card. That’s why it’s so important – if you can’t afford an RTX 2080 Ti you still need to make sure your money is well-placed in hardware that is going to deliver the best performance for your given budget.

What next? These are the best gaming monitors to go with your GPU

While the RTX 2080 Ti is the boss of 4K gaming, the GTX 1060 and RX 580 are fighting it out for the all-important price/performance crown. The RX 580 is a little cheaper right now, so it just about noses ahead right now, however, both offer fantastic frame rates even when the settings are cranked up to the max, and you won’t be left high and dry with either Nvidia or AMD in your system.

The entry-level is almost entirely dominated by the green team, however. The GTX 1050 Ti is a great card for middling performance in AAA titles, and fantastic performance in some of the most popular, and less demanding, competitive games around. Perfect for Fortnite on a budget.

But the RX 570 4GB is starting to drop down to a price that makes it almost the same price point as the 1050 Ti. It’s sporting the same VRAM capacity, but has a much wider memory bus, and higher gaming performance too.