Top Graphics Cards 2023

Nvidia's RTX 3050 delivers good performance for its theoretical $249 starting price. Unfortunately, that also means there's not a snowball's chance in hell that it won't sell for radically inflated prices. It lands between the previous-gen RTX 2060 and GTX 1660 Super, both of which currently sell for far more than Nvidia's asking price.

The RTX 4060 Ti lands with truly mainstream pricing starting at $399. It's a lesson in compromise, barely outperforming the previous-gen 3060 Ti and limited in what it can do by the narrower 128-bit memory bus and 8GB of VRAM. DLSS 3 Frame Generation helps, but it can only do so much.

The Intel Arc A750 makes the RTX 3050 look pathetic and even gives some tough competition to the 3060, though AMD's RX 6600 makes Intel's offering a little less enticing. Still, it's good to see competition from Intel in the GPU space.

The MSI Radeon RX 6950 XT Gaming X Trio performed similarly to the other RX 6950 XT card we've tested, but it used 13% more power on average. MSI pushed too far up the voltage and frequency curve on this model.

The PowerColor RX 6650 XT Hellhound Spectral White offers a minor upgrade over the existing RX 6600 XT, at a slightly higher price. The bump in memory speed from 16Gbps to 18Gbps helps a bit, but this feels more like AMD building more of a separation between the RX 6600 and the next step up rather than a card that was really necessary.

The Zotac GeForce RTX 3050 Twin Edge OC features a boost clock of 1807MHz, 30MHz higher than the reference clock. It only makes a small difference in performance, but the official MSRP of the card is $150 higher. Cards like this will be far more common than Nvidia's hypothetical $249 baseline price, at least until the GPU shortages are over.

The Gigabyte RX 6600 XT Eagle effectively matches the performance of other cards using Navi 23, but the heatsink and fans leave us wanting something better. Only buy this if you don't have any other reasonably priced choices or need the dual HDMI 2.1 ports.

If you can find it at MSRP and competing graphics cards' prices remain inflated, Gigabyte's Radeon RX 6600 XT Gaming OC Pro 8G will do nicely for high-refresh 1080p gaming, but a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti at or near list price is a better alternative.

AMD tuned the Radeon RX 6600 XT for ultra-fast 1080p gaming and it shines in that regard, but slower 1440p performance and a sky-high price hold it back from full praise. The custom cooling design of the Asus ROG Strix model we used for this review is phenomenally frigid.

AMD’s Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card is a good graphics card for 1440p and 1080p gaming. It doesn’t handle ray tracing well, however, and comes with a too-high price that makes a lot of business sense in today’s environment.