The ever-evolving world of GPUs has been delivering the hits lately, so it's a perfect time to be shopping around for the best graphics card. With the recent release of mainstream-oriented cards from Nvidia like the 1660 and 1660 Ti and the ray tracing oriented 2060, as well as AMD's recent high-end offering, the Radeon VII, the hardware pool is broadening daily. There's also Intel's impending release of a discrete graphics part, and the news that Pascal architecture will be getting ray tracing support in an upcoming drive update. With all this shuffling and technical talk, we can understand if you've missed some of the biggest pieces, but if some of the terminology is breezing over your head, be sure to pop over to our for explanations of some of the more obscure corners of the PC lexicon.
Best Video Cards for Gaming: Q1 2019. So for people looking to spend less than $500 on a graphics card, the 2018 holiday season didn’t change much from mid-year. While AMD's upcoming Navi.
Our choice for the best graphics card available looks much better at a sweet discount, especially when it's bundled with one of the few games to take advantage of ray tracing and Bioware's latest, Anthem. With all this hardware dropping at a staggering pace and the rising level of competition, it can be a bit confusing choosing the best graphics card for you. So what should you look for? Obviously, price is a major factor, and part of that decision will be deciding what kind of performance you're in the market for. If you're only looking for a 1080p 60 FPS experience and aren't particularly concerned about ray tracing, a card like the 1660 is more than sufficient to fill the GPU shaped hole in your life.
Alternatively, if you are convinced by Nvidia's ray tracing and DLSS rhetoric but are still working with a limited budget, the 2060 is a strong choice. Of course, if you're looking for top performance, you'll need to step up to the 2080 (or 2080 Ti) or, on team red's side, the Radeon VII. A high end card of this caliber is virtually mandatory if you want to play modern, triple-A titles at anything approaching 4K Ultra and 60 FPS. Of course, if the video card isn't the only bottleneck in your system and you want a more comprehensive upgrade, check out our roundup to find the best prebuilts money can buy. Or if you're looking for some great peripherals to plug into your PC, our and roundups have you covered.
1. Nvidia GeForce GTX 2080 Founders Edition. Expensive The best card on the market now in terms of performance and price. While the 2080 is still an expensive proposition, the crypto-mining craze has abated somewhat and it's finally possible to find the Founders Edition at the listed MSRP, $799 (or cheaper).
While the step-up version, the 2080 Ti, is more powerful, the additional $400 isn't worth it for a relatively marginal increase in computing power (between 10 and 30 percent), especially considering the relatively limited use cases for ray tracing that exist at the moment. While Battlefield V looks great with ray tracing enabled (and will reportedly perform 50% better after the recently announced patch), it's one of an extremely limited field of games currently taking advantage of the technology.
As more games that exploit ray tracing make their way into the wild and the Ti's price declines it may look like the stronger value proposition, but right now the 2080 is king of cards. Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660.
Dips at 1440p If you're looking for a modern, entry level graphics card that provides reasonable performance at a sub $250 price point, the 1660 is the choice for you. Slotting into the space vacated by the GTX 1060, and providing something like 13-15% better performance at less cost, the 1660 takes advantage of the Turing architecture implemented in the RTX lineup but paired with the widely available (and thus inexpensive) GDDDR5 VRAM. The 1660 is clearly Nvidia's play to get into that golden market below $250 where, according to Steam Hardware Survey results, the vast majority of PC gamers shop. It's a mainstream play, perhaps aimed in part at mitigating the slower-than-expected sales of the 20-series family, but it delivers exactly what you expect at a price you can live with. AMD Radeon VII.
Short on features AMD finally responded to Nvidia's high-end 20-series cards earlier this year in the shape of the Radeon VII, their most powerful consumer offering aimed at demanding gamers who are AMD diehards or remain skeptical of the ray tracing bandwagon. It's a great card that delivers extremely strong 1440p and reasonable 4k Ultra performance, and the first ever GPU manufactured with 7nm lithography. It's a powerful card at a reasonable price and, if you want a top shelf AMD card or favor their HMB2 memory solution, it's really your only choice. A good thing, then, that they've delivered a competitive card. It's roughly analogous to the RTX 2080 in terms of horsepower and retails for a $100 less, though it doesn't come with any of Nvidia's much vaunted RT or Tensor cores for ray tracing and DLSS. If those aren't features that entice, however, the Radeon VII is a great alternative to Nvidia's growing stable.
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti. Supply issues The 1070 Ti, another iteration on the now prolific Pascal, is one of the best mid-range cards on the market. If you’re looking for a card to power games at 1440p resolution and that can easily handle VR, and aren’t looking for the blistering performance of cards hundreds of dollars more expensive, the 1070 Ti admirably balances performance and cost.
Approaching the performance levels of the base 1080 for significantly less cost, the 1070 Ti is a granular answer to the challenge of AMD’s Vega line. If you want killer performance but aren't ready to upgrade to something in the 20-series family, the 1070 Ti is a great upgrade option that will save you a few bucks, at least until Nvidia starts to properly phase them out.
Need more parts? Here are the in 2019. And here are the best. You may want more RAM. Here's our guide to the 5. Radeon RX 580 8GB.
Starting to show its age If you have yet to make the leap to a 4K display, spending a tremendous amount of money on an overpowered GPU may seem like an act of excessive decadence. While you’re saving cash for a new 4K monitor/panel, the $200 the 580 shaves off the price of the next tier of cards is very significant, and AMD’s budget option can easily cope with the tail of the 1080p era. For the budget conscious and anyone looking to ensure your PC is keeping pace with current generation consoles, the 580 is a great solution.
And its 8GBs of GDDR5 is generous in comparison to Nvidia’s similarly priced 1060 line, overhead that will be greatly appreciated as rendering demands continue to escalate. Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060. Still pricey for an 'entry level' card Nvidia's latest release in its RTX line, the 2060, is the cheapest way to prepare your rig for our ray tracing, DLSS enabled future. As well as packing Nvidia's much touted new features, the 2060 outperforms the card it's meant to replace, the 1070.
It gets you everything packed into the 2070's stable, just slightly less of each, but if you're looking to grab a card to handle 1080p and 1440p gaming the 2060 is the least expensive way to get onboard the ray tracing bandwagon. If you've already got something in the 1070 range, the jump to the 2060 might seem premature, especially around launch when they'll be hovering near full price.
But if you're looking to step up from a 970 or lower card, the 2060 is your best bet for great performance that will, to some extent, future proof your setup for the inevitable proliferation of DXR. Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links.
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AMD’s next-gen Navi GPUs have been a known quantity for a number of years now, but the number of concrete facts about them, such as their specs, release date and price, are still few and far between. With so much of the recent conversation around what’s next for gaming graphics cards being dominated by the will-they-won’t-they circus of cards, it’s easy to forget that Navi’s still in the running. Still, despite numerous missed shows and AMD’s own silence on the subject, the shroud of mystery surrounding Navi is starting to become ever-so-slightly clearer with each passing month. There’s still a lot we don’t know about what AMD have up their sleeve, but to help you separate probably likely facts from clearly made-up fiction, I’ve put everything we know so far into one handy guide. Here’s everything we know so far about AMD’s next-gen Navi cards. AMD Navi: what is it?
Navi is the current codename for AMD’s next generation of graphics cards. Set to replace AMD’s current Vega cards, such as the and, Navi will feature a brand-new architecture and what’s currently being called ‘Next Gen Memory’. Imaginative, I know.
Whether that’s GDDR6 memory, the next iteration of HBM2 (High Bandwidth Memory 2) that’s currently in AMD’s Vega cards or something else entirely, nobody knows. What we do know, however, is that the Navi name has been appearing on AMD roadmaps as far back as 2016. The only problem is that it keeps getting delayed. AMD Navi release date: why the heck are they taking so long? At one point, Navi was supposed to arrive by the end of this year – that is, 2018. But then the current 14nm version of Vega got pushed back, which in turn bumped back the 7nm version of Vega that was meant to come next.
As a result, Navi was shunted back yet again, and for a while, we had no idea when it would ever see the light of day. It now would appear these delays were due to the fact that AMD’s Navi GPUs will likely form the basis of Sony’s next console box, the PlayStation 5, according to a recent exclusive report from.
With the PS5 supposedly arriving in 2020, AMD obviously needed to make sure Navi was going to be ready in time in order to meet Sony’s deadlines, and apparently diverted two thirds of its graphics team to the project to ensure its timely completion. As a result, this left just a third of their engineers to sort out the launch of their Vega cards. WCCFTech also asserts that Vega was made primarily with Apple in mind (most likely for their new 5K iMac Pros), who also had their own roadmaps in mind. If true, it’s no wonder Vega had such a slow and ponderous start.
For gamers after the possible, it’s all been a bit frustrating. As much as the move probably saved AMD’s bacon in terms of providing a more reliable, not to mention source of income while they re-positioned their CPU side of the business with the successful launch of their Ryzen processors (AMD’s custom GPUs for the PS4 and Xbox One each accounted for 10% of the company’s overall revenue last year), it does mean AMD’s gaming chops over in consumer PC land have suffered as a result.
Indeed, as powerful as the Vega 56 and Vega 64 are, they’re still not quite the respective equals of and – especially when they’re so much more expensive and harder to come. And judging by the rest of WCCFTech’s findings, the wait for a proper GTX 1080Ti killer is only going to get worse. According to WCCFTech, there are at least three different Navi GPUs set for release. Navi 10, which will utilise a 7nm manufacturing process, will likely be the first Navi graphics card to make it out the gate, and is set to arrive in either the second half of 2019 or early 2020. Something called Navi 14 will then follow this “soon after”, but Navi 20, AMD’s first high-end Navi GPU based on the 7nm process, probably won’t arrive until later in 2020, and may even be as late as 2021. And even then there’s no telling whether it will stand up to Nvidia’s next-gen Turing cards or end up as just another dud lost in Nvidia’s shadow.
For the time being, it looks like PC gamers’ frustration is set to continue. AMD Navi specs / price: is it going to be worth the wait? It’s not all doom and gloom, however, as another report, this time from, suggests that while the Navi arriving in 2019 (which we can assume from WCCFTech’s information is the so-called Navi 10) may not be a ‘true’ high-end card in the same vein as the Vega 64 / GTX 1080Ti, it will at least offer comparable performance to many of today’s top-end GPUs – specifically the GTX 1080. I realise that might not sound particularly comforting for a card that’s still over a year away, but the key piece of the puzzle we’re missing right now is price.
If the Navi 10 can deliver GTX 1080 levels power at a fraction of its current cost (around £500 / $530), then things are going to get a lot more interesting, especially if the Navi 10 is indeed going to be the successor to AMD’s current card like Fudzilla propose, which at time of writing goes for something around the £260 / $280 mark. Admittedly, Fudzilla doesn’t actually cite any sources, anonymous or otherwise, for this information, so the idea of it being a half-price GTX 1080 could all be a load of gubbins. But in some ways, it does make a lot of sense. After all, it isn’t the GTX 1080 that’s the right now.
It’s the – a mid-range card that’s the neck-and-neck rival of the RX 580. It’s also astronomically expensive to produce high-end GPUs so early in a new manufacturing process, so it’s not entirely surprising that the Navi 20 might end up taking another year before it joins its Navi 10 and 14 siblings. Indeed, as AMD have previously said themselves, Navi graphics cards will use a 7nm manufacturing process, which is probably about as cutting-edge as you can possibly get these days and a heck of an improvement over their current 14nm Vega cards. To give you an idea about what that means in practice, AMD said at their Computex conference earlier this year that their 7nm Vega GPUs would be twice as energy efficient, offer twice the memory density, and deliver a performance increase that’s x1.35 better than what we’re seeing now – and that’s just with their current Vega tech. Throw Navi’s new micro-architecture into the mix and we could theoretically see even greater gains in performance and power efficiency. Navi should also be able to take advantage of – the shiny new animation technique that makes light and shadow look so impossibly realistic that you’d swear blind you couldn’t possibly be looking at a real life video game. The 7nm Vega chip with 32GB of HBM2 memory AMD showed off at Computex certainly can, so there’s no reason why Navi shouldn’t be able to as well. Unfortunately, the rest of Navi’s inner specs remain very much a mystery. We’ll no doubt learn more about Navi’s potential performance boost when AMD’s 7nm Vega cards arrive properly later this year, even if they’re not actually getting turned into proper consumer gaming cards, but for now, the wait continues.