If you haven’t thought about upgrading your graphics card, then that’s probably a good indication that you do need to upgrade your graphics card. Here are some of the best options for those that are ready to buy today.
Upgrading a graphics card is one of the easiest ways you can improve your home PC experience, as the graphics card plays a major role in much of the heavy lifting done by your computer. Whether it’s PC gaming, video editing, or just about anything where graphics are involved, an upgrade can breathe new life into a device and fix many of the slowdown issues often encountered with PCs.
Of course, in some cases it might actually be cheaper to buy a new PC. With graphics cards being such workhorses, and capable of doing so much, they are often not the cheapest part of a home PC build. However, you don’t always have to spend the absolute most to get a massive (and instant) boost in performance. First off, let’s take a look at the best option when money’s no object.
Best Graphics Card Overall
If the best is simply defined as the fastest then the NVIDIA Titan RTX is the one to go for. According to NVIDIA, this is not only its fastest card, but “the fastest PC graphics card ever built.” Much of its power comes from the Turing GPU working in conjunction with the Tensor Core and RT Core - the latter of which is likely to especially appeal to those interested in ray tracing. The only problem with the Titan RTX is that it is really expensive, considering it costs $2,499. If that’s a little too premium-priced, then a very good alternative is NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Although the RTX 2080 Ti is not quite as fast as the Titan RTX, it only costs about half as much.
Best Graphics Card Under $500
Even at half the cost of the Titan RTX, the RTX 2080 Ti is still going to be too much for most people. However, there are plenty of options you can buy that are much cheaper, including below the $500 marker - two of which are the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060S (or Super) and the AMD Radeon RX 5700. Both of these are directly comparable as they both feature 8GB RAM, similar core and boost clock maximums, and similar memory bandwidths. In fact, all of this leads to these two graphics cards also being very similar priced. Not only can either of them be picked up for less than $500, but neither one will set you back $400. Whichever of these you opt for, you’re getting a great mid-range solution to take care of everything graphics-related, including 1440p gaming. The RTX 2060S might be the better option of the two (and it is usually a little cheaper as well), although if you want the most value for the $400, then the Radeon RX 5700 is probably the one to go for.
More: NVIDIA’s New Graphics Card Specs Leaked, And They’re Completely Insane
