PC gaming has come a very long way since the early days of blocky, 16-colour graphics. The latest games feature breath-taking cinematography, with atmospheric lighting and super-realistic physics effects. With the rise of quad-HD 4K displays, they also offer incredible detail – pushing as many pixels to your desktop as you’d see on a 50-foot cinema screen.
And the technology doesn’t stop there. Thanks to the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift headsets, VR gaming is a growing trend, opening the door to incredible first-person experiences that are more immersive than any movie.
To get the full enjoyment from modern PC games, you need a graphics card that’s capable of handling all of this visual magic in real time. If you demand nothing less than the ultimate gaming experience, you can spend a small fortune on Nvidia’s monster Titan X card, as we discuss below.
But you don’t have to break the bank to experience incredible entertainment. These top five cards, starting at just £200, all have the power to deliver high-resolution, real-time gaming with bags of detail, and even to generate 360° virtual reality experiences.
Read on to learn more about what’s on offer – and find your perfect graphics card.
Choose the best graphics card: Buyer’s guide
Which brand should I buy?
The hardware inside a graphics card will normally be made by either AMD or Nvidia – but the cards themselves are sold by a wide range of companies. Often the different companies will have their own spin on a card: for example, a GeForce GTX 1060 card sold by MSI might be a different physical size or have different connectors to one sold by Palit. Some card manufacturers also overclock their GPUs, for an extra speed boost.
Since all these companies compete with one another, however, the big difference though is likely to be price. You can be confident that all versions of a GPU will perform very similarly, so shop around to see which brand offers the best deal.
What do the specs mean?
Modern graphics cards get their power from hundreds or thousands of tiny stream processors – little chips that do the basic mathematical work of building up 3D scenes. Generally speaking, the more processors a card has, the more calculations it can carry out at once, which translates to higher performance. However, AMD and Nvidia GPUs work differently, and different cards are clocked at different speeds, so the number of stream processors doesn’t always tell the whole story.
The other important number is how much onboard memory a card has: the options above range from 3GB up to a huge 12GB. This memory is used as super-fast workspace for the GPU, so if you don’t have enough of it, things will slow down. This isn’t always a case of “more is better”, though: 4GB is enough for all but the most demanding games, and you won’t see any benefit from going higher. However, future titles may feature more ambitious effects: going up to 6GB or 8GB provides a degree of future-proofing.
Give me, give me, give me the power
A high-performance graphics card can draw a lot of power, so you need to be sure your PC is capable of driving it. If your power supply is rated at 500W or more then you should have no problem installing any modern card, but if it’s less powerful – the rating is normally written on the side – then check the card manufacturer’s recommendations before investing.
You might also need to check that your power supply has the right connections available: lightweight cards draw all the power they need from the PCI-Express slot, but high-performance cards might need you to plug-in a separate six-pin or eight-pin power connector – or both – direct from the power supply.
Using multiple cards for a speed boost
If you really want to squeeze the best performance out of a system, it is possible to use multiple graphics cards together. However, there are limitations: normally you’ll need to be using two identical (or at least similar) cards to see a worthwhile benefit.
All the same, if your new graphics card is replacing something fairly beefy, it might be worth hanging onto the old card. The latest DirectX 12 games can take advantage of “explicit multi-GPU” design, which allows work to be divided up across all available GPUs, regardless of their make and model.
The best graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia
1. Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080: The flagship of the current generation
Price when reviewed: £660
Your eyes don’t deceive you: the GTX 1080 costs a whopping £660, which may be as much as the rest of your PC put together. But it’s an incredibly powerful graphics card, based on Nvidia’s latest “Pascal” core, delivering performance that would have been simply unthinkable even a year ago.
That’s partly thanks to a huge 2,560 stream processors, which give this card an incredible amount of parallel processing power. They’re fast too, running at speeds up to 1.73GHz. And they’re backed up by a huge 8GB of video RAM, with an incredible 10,000MHz effective bandwidth.
If all those numbers make your eyes glaze over, don’t worry: the practical upshot is very easy to understand. This is the most powerful mainstream graphics card on the market – leaving aside the ridiculous Titan X, which we’ll come to below. It has enough power to run even today’s most demanding games smoothly at 4K resolution, with all the detail settings turned up to maximum.
That means there’s not only plenty of power for today: there’s enough headroom to ensure that GTX 1080 will be able handle future games for a good few generations to come. That £660 price tag may be steep, but it’s an investment that should keep you gaming for years.
Read our full Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 review for more details
Key specs: 2,560 stream processors (max 1,733MHz), 8GB GDDR5X
2. Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 3GB: A great little card at a very tempting price
Price when reviewed: £200
The GTX 1060 comes in two variants, offering either 3GB or 6GB of RAM. The 3GB variant isn’t quite as powerful as the more expensive version: not only does it come with less video memory, it also has slightly fewer stream processors.
For the price though it’s a steal. It uses the same Pascal core as the GTX 1080 card, and while performance naturally isn’t quite as exceptional, it still gives an impressive showing in modern games. We were able to fully enjoy a wide range of titles with high detail settings in 1080p resolution, and could even turn up to 2,560 x 1,440.
If you’re looking for a graphics card to drive a 4K monitor, the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB might not be the perfect choice; it isn’t quite powerful enough to keep things whizzing along at that super-high resolution. And while 3GB of video RAM is fine for today’s games, it might struggle to keep up with the most demanding games that come out next year, or the year after.
But let’s not downplay the GTX 1060’s capabilities. There’s enough power here to let you fully enjoy the visual effects in modern games – and even to get stuck into VR gaming – for just £200. For many of us, that’s the perfect formula.
Read our full Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 3GB review for more details
Key specs: 1,152 stream processors (max 1,708MHz), 3GB GDDR5
3. AMD Radeon RX 480 4GB: A tempting alternative to Nvidia’s low-cost GPUs
Price when reviewed: £200
AMD’s GPUs have struggled to keep up with Nvidia in this generation, but if you prefer the Radeon way of doing things, the RX 480 is well worth a look. Based on AMD’s latest Polaris core, it’s available in 4GB and 8GB configurations, but for our money the 4GB card is the better deal. Coming in at the same price as Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1060 3GB, it offers 33% more video memory.
In games with particularly ambitious visual effects, that extra memory can make a noticeable difference. In the highly demanding game Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, we were able to turn the detail settings all the way up to Ultra at 1080p, and the RX 480 still kept up a minimum of 30 frames per second. In the same game, the 3GB GTX 1060 could manage only 25fps.
The RX 480 isn’t ahead in all games, however: it fell slightly behind the GTX 1060 in several other performance tests. The margin wasn’t huge, though: overall, it’s a decent card that will deliver smooth gaming at high resolutions (though not at 4K). If you’re a fan of AMD’s drivers, or if you just prefer the Radeon brand, the 4GB RX 480 certainly deserves a place on your shortlist.
Key specs: 2,304 stream processors (max 1,266MHz), 4GB GDDR5
4. Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070: A super-powerful card at a price that’s not entirely crazy
Price when reviewed: £400
The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 has a lot in common with the high-end GTX 1080. That is to say, it’s basically the same card, with a few economies to bring the price down to a slightly easier-to-swallow £400.
Thus, instead of the 2,560 stream processors of the 1080, you get “only” 1,920. And although you still get 8GB of onboard RAM, it only runs at 80% of the speed.
The good news is that, since the GTX 1080 is so ludicrously powerful in the first place, the GTX 1070 remains a very formidable graphics card. It’s perfectly equal to playing modern games in 4K resolution: the only concession might be that you have to nudge the detail down from “ultra” to “high”, or put up with a frame rate that’s closer to a (perfectly playable) 30fps than to a silky smooth 60fps. But those aren’t huge compromises at all.
In other words, don’t be discouraged by the fact that the GTX 1070 isn’t quite at the pinnacle of Nvidia’s range. It’s still an extremely powerful graphics card, and while we wouldn’t exactly call it affordable, it’s a much more reasonable proposition than the GTX 1080.
Read our full Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 OC review for more details
Key specs: 1,920 stream processors (max 1,835MHz), 8GB GDDR5
5. Nvidia Titan X: The most powerful gaming card on the market, bar none
Price when reviewed: £1,099
The Titan X isn’t for everyone. The price alone ensures that: you can buy a complete new gaming PC for less. It’s an exclusive design too, which has to be ordered directly from Nvidia. You won’t see this baby on the shelves in your local shop.
Needless to say, that eye-watering price buys you a lot of technology. With 3,584 stream processors, there’s 40% more processing power on hand than the mighty GTX 1080. The memory allocation is up too, to 12GB of lightning-fast GDDR5X memory.
The upshot is uncompromising gaming performance. No matter what we threw at the Titan X, it breezed through. Every game we tried ran beautifully smoothly with maximum detail settings, at 4K resolution. And we’re not just talking about scraping a playable 30fps: many games kept up a minimum of at least 50fps even in the most complicated scenes. Average frame rates were even higher.
Nvidia can’t expect to sell many of these incredible cards, but if you happen to be a millionaire looking for the very best gaming experience on the planet, then this is the one to get. You’ll certainly get better bang-per-buck elsewhere, but if you’re even considering the Titan X, you’ll know that’s not the point.
Key specs: 3,584 stream processors (max 1,531MHz), 12GB GDDR5
