Top Graphics Cards 2023

The RTX 4070 brings Ada Lovelace down to the mainstream with a $599 price tag. It's basically on par with the RTX 3080 in a more compact and efficient package, with DLSS 3 Frame Generation sweetening the pot.

The RX 7900 XTX and XT sport AMD's latest and greatest RDNA 3 architecture, with impressive rasterization performance. Ray tracing remains a second class citizen, and while faster than the previous generation, AMD can't touch Nvidia's in DXR games — and that's not even counting DLSS, which continues to see widespread use.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is an absolute monster of a graphics card, delivering RTX 3090-level gaming performance at a lower price. However, the high starting price may still be a turn off for budget-conscious folks that just want to get some PC gaming in.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 is the most powerful graphics card you can buy today, delivering playable 8K gaming performance, along with jaw-dropping 3D rendering and encoding performance. However, you have to pay a high price for this level of power. For the vast majority of people, it's probably not worth the investment, but for creative professionals (who are the ones Nvidia is primarily targeting with this card), the RTX 3090 is a downright bargain.

The AMD RX 5600 XT 6GB is a great performer at 1080p with ultra settings and is plenty capable at 1440p using medium settings. This overclocked Sapphire model beat out the RTX 2060 while costing less and uses less power. It’s a tough card to beat at its $300 price point.

Based on the same TU116 processor as GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1660 loses two Streaming Multiprocessors and swaps out GDDR6 memory for slower GDDR5. As a result, it remains an excellent choice for gaming at 1920x1080 but isn’t recommended for 2560x1440. Just be sure to comparison shop before making your purchase. Hot deals on Radeon RX 580 cards may warrant a look, despite their lower performance.

MSI's hopped-up Gaming 4G version of the GeForce GTX 980, overclocked out of the box, zooms ahead of any other single-chip gaming graphics card we've tested. (It's a quiet runner, too.)

An exceptionally powerful graphics card, the GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition is a home run for gaming at 4K or high refresh rates. Only its pricing and the lack of games supporting ray tracing and DLSS keep it from being a grand slam right from launch.

Radeon RX 5700 XT stands up better to GeForce RTX 2060 Super than we expected at the same $400 price point, simultaneously eclipsing the performance of Radeon RX Vega 64 in the process. AMD’s own Radeon VII is slightly faster, but also significantly more expensive. Although a lack of hardware for accelerating ray tracing does hurt the Radeon’s value proposition in our opinion, gamers who insist they aren’t interested in the technology have a good alternative for smooth 1440p frame rates.

AMD's new Radeon flagship graphics card, the Radeon VII is a worthwhile if power-hungrier alternative to the GeForce RTX 2080 for 4K gaming, but it generally isn't as fast at 1080p or 1440p resolutions.