The best graphics cards and GPUs are the pixel-pumping hearts of any gaming PC, with everything else coming second. Without a potent GPU, even the best CPUs for gaming won’t manage much. No one graphics card will be right for everyone, so we’ve provided options for every budget and mindset below. Whether you’re after the fastest graphics card, the best value, or the best card at a given price, we’ve got you covered.
Where our GPU benchmarks hierarchy ranks all of the cards based purely on performance, our list of the best graphics cards looks at the whole package. Current GPU pricing, performance, features, efficiency, and availability are all important, though the weighting becomes more subjective. Factoring in all of those aspects, these are the best graphics cards that are currently available.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but if you’re not regularly following the graphics card market, prices are jacked up right now. Supply of previous generation GPUs mostly disappeared in late 2024 and the new generation parts haven’t launched in sufficient quantities to match the demand. Tack on new tariffs in the U.S. and the demand for AI data center parts and we have a confluence of factors that all spell increased prices.
In the past four months, there have been eight new GPU launches. The Intel Arc B580 kicked things off in mid-December, with the new Arc Battlemage B-series GPUs, and we should have realized then that things were going to get bumpy. We called it the “$249 champion” in our review, but in general it’s been selling for $400. The follow-up Intel Arc B570 wasn’t nearly as impressive in terms of performance, but pricing has made it a far more attractive option in retrospect.
The Nvidia Blackwell RTX 50-series GPUs were teased at CES 2025, with the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 launching at the end of January. Both immediately sold out and real-world scalper GPU prices have been up to twice (or more) the MSRPs. The RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 mostly had the same fate, though the latter at least has been trending somewhat closer to its nominal $549 MSRP — we’ve seen cards pop up for $650 or so in the past week.
Not to be left out, after being pushed back a couple of months, the AMD RDNA 4 RX 9000-series GPUs landed on March 6. The RX 9070 XT at $599 looks like an awesome deal in terms of specs and performance, while the vanilla RX 9070 at $549 isn’t quite as compelling. But both those MSRPs are a fantasy right now, with real-world pricing tending to be $700~$900.
What about previous generation GPUs? The supply of new Nvidia Ada Lovelace RTX 40-series, AMD RDNA 3 RX 7000-series, and Intel Alchemist Arc A-series GPUs has mostly dried up, with the exception of the lower-tier models that were selling at $300 or less. Prices went up on most of those as well, while the higher-tier cards often cost more (if you can find them) than the newer GPUs that replaced them. It would be dumb to buy an RTX 4080 Super for $1,698 when you can buy an RTX 5080 for $1,359. The newer GPU isn’t massively faster, but it does manage about 10% higher performance (without MFG) and can generally be found for $1,500 or less now.
