The best graphics card

The best graphics card

No other component can have as big of an impact on your gaming experience as your graphics card. Processors, memory, motherboards, and storage are important, but the graphics card is the pixel pumping heart of any gaming PC. As such, it warrants the biggest chunk of your budget, regardless of whether that's an extreme enthusiast build costing thousands or a budget friendly entry-level PC. With Nvidia's new GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti now available, and prices dropping on previous generation hardware, now is a great time to buy one a new graphics card. Determining the best graphics card to buy is a balancing act of money, performance, your display and settings, and the games you play. Buying the fastest graphics card available and pairing it with a CPU that's several years old will often limit your framerates, and similarly you don't need a top-shelf card just to run games at 1080p. But if you're sporting a Core i7-8700K or faster CPU and are eyeing the new 4K HDR G-Sync and FreeSync displays, you'll want as much performance and memory as possible.

High-end buyers will want to look at the latest and greatest Turing GPUs, including the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti, with the RTX 2070 slated to launch on October 17. While Nvidia's new GPUs are extremely expensive, they're also the fastest options, and ray tracing technology as well as deep learning features like DLSS have a good chance of becoming important features over the coming years. If you're more interested in saving money, however, the existing GeForce 10-series and AMD RX 500 and RX Vega cards still perform admirably, delivering a better overall value.

We've revamped our guide with a streamlined format. Detailed testing results are at the end, and we have additional options that cater to gamers of all types and budgets. Please note that the cards are ordered by performance, with the fastest cards first, and the order does not factor in value. These are the best graphics cards right now.

1. Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti

The fastest graphics card for 4K, ray tracing, and everything else

GPU Cores: 4,352 | Base Clock: 1,350MHz | Boost Clock: 1,545MHz | GFLOPS: 13,448 | Memory: 11GB GDDR6 | Memory Clock: 14 GT/s | Memory Bandwidth: 616GB/s

2. Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080

Second fastest GPU at a more reasonable price

GPU Cores: 2,944 | Base Clock: 1,1515MHz | Boost Clock: 1,710MHz | GFLOPS: 10,068 | Memory: 8GB GDDR6 | Memory Clock: 14 GT/s | Memory Bandwidth: 448GB/s

3. Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

A potent graphics card at a new lower price

GPU Cores: 3,584 | Base Clock: 1,480MHz | Boost Clock: 1,582MHz | GFLOPS: 11,340 | Memory: 11GB GDDR5X | Memory Clock: 11 GT/s | Memory Bandwidth: 484GB/s

4. Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti

Perfect for 1440p and 144Hz displays

GPU Cores: 2,432 | Base Clock: 1,607MHz | Boost Clock: 1,683MHz | GFLOPS: 8,873 | Memory: 8GB GDDR5 | Memory Clock: 8 GT/s | Memory Bandwidth: 256GB/s

5. AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 8GB

Powerful and packing HBM2, this is AMD's best GPU

GPU Cores: 3,584 | Base Clock: 1,156MHz | Boost Clock: 1,471MHz | GFLOPS: 10,544 | Memory: 8GB HBM2 | Memory Clock: 1.6 GT/s | Memory Bandwidth: 410GB/s

6. AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB

The best card for mainstream gaming right now

GPU Cores: 2,304 | Base Clock: 1,257MHz | Boost Clock: 1,340MHz | GFLOPS: 6,175 | Memory: 8GB GDDR5 | Memory Clock: 8 GT/s | Memory Bandwidth: 256GB/s

7. Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB

Great 1080p performance and a good price

GPU Cores: 1,280 | Base Clock: 1,506MHz | Boost Clock: 1,708MHz | GFLOPS: 4,372 | Memory: 6GB GDDR5 | Memory Clock: 8 GT/s | Memory Bandwidth: 192GB/s

8. AMD Radeon RX 570 4GB

Another great 1080p card, for a bit less money

GPU Cores: 2,048 | Base Clock: 1,168MHz | Boost Clock: 1,244MHz | GFLOPS: 5,095 | Memory: 4GB GDDR5 | Memory Clock: 7 GT/s | Memory Bandwidth: 224GB/s