Must-have graphics cards of 2024 for all budget Gamers

The RTX 4090 from Nvidia is unquestionably the best graphics card. However, you need to subjectively consider the benefits and drawbacks of investing $1,600 or more on a single GPU. Not everyone will enjoy it. To determine the best card at various price points, we examined every new GPU from the stables of Nvidia, AMD, and now Intel. You might be surprised by the outcomes.

You have a wide selection of new cards to choose from if you’re a high-end gamer. The RTX 4090, the flagship model in Nvidia’s RTX 40-series, is a beast of epic proportions. The RTX 4080 is a touch too expensive for us, and the RTX 4070 Ti is also an option. Although the RTX 4070 Ti isn’t as inexpensive as we’d like, it is still more affordable than Nvidia’s best for a card that is perfectly capable of 4K.

There isn’t much new information to report on on the other side of the market. Although Nvidia hasn’t yet introduced a real budget GPU for the desktop, the mid-range RTX 4060 Ti is available now, with the RTX 4060 due in July, to muted enthusiasm. Most recently, AMD’s $269 RX 7600 was made available. But with the Arc A770 and Arc A750 graphics cards, Intel currently dominates the low-cost market. Today, these two Alchemist generation cards are even more affordable.

Since the high-end RX 6950 XT and RTX 3090 Ti are currently being replaced by similarly priced newer choices, we advise staying away from them. As AMD and even Intel currently outsell Nvidia’s entry-level GPUs, such as the RTX 3060, we likewise do not suggest them. 

• Nvidia Geforce RTX 4090

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card is overtly aggressive. While there are some additional curves added to what may otherwise look like a respin of the RTX 3090 shroud, it still has that novelty graphics card style. It’s a huge enormous lump of a pixel pusher.

It appears to be some sort of plastic mockery designed to poke fun at GPU manufacturers for making cards that are getting bigger and bigger. The RTX 40-series GPU generation’s vanguard and our first look at the new Ada Lovelace architecture, however, make it neither a model nor the moon.

• Nvidia Geforce RTX 4080

The Nvidia RTX 4080 is a comparably quick graphics card that, at $1,200, absolutely should be, and when you include in DLSS 3, you get around twice the performance of the analogously priced RTX 3080 Ti from the previous generation. Frame Generation is true dark magic.

However, assessing the RTX 4080 is more difficult than managing Jen-Hsun’s spatulas. Even though it’s much simpler today, there is only a 16GB version and it doesn’t have a second 12GB half-breed following it. 

It’s not a good look for both of the major GPU manufacturers to announce their next-generation graphics cards with a starting price of, at best, $900 during a period of significant economic trouble and uncertainty worldwide. There will be debates that the $1,200 RTX 4080 is an unquestionable triumph because of its superior performance to the RTX 3080 Ti. 

The RTX 4080 easily surpasses comparable older-generation cards, most notably the $1,200 RTX 3080 Ti, and so delivers the coveted generation-to-generation performance boost. However, neither of these GeForce GPUs belonged as a $1,200 GPU.

• AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX

Nevertheless, there are many advantages to the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX. GPU generations frequently feature fewer process nodes, revised designs, bigger caches, updated shaders, greater memory, and a long list of other improvements. However, all of that at once? The entirety in one fell sweep is what RDNA 3 offers. 

When purchased for its initial $999 price, the RX 7900 XTX is an excellent 4K GPU. It is the market leader in its niche and provides a considerable performance improvement over RDNA 2’s in the $1,100 RX 6950 XT or $999 RX 6900 XT. It costs money, but it isn’t any more expensive than the card it replaces.

Admittedly, the RX 6950 XT is currently closer to $800 or less than its full price. Nevertheless, the RX 7900 XTX has sufficient speed to warrant its pricing. For a card that typically beats an RX 6950 XT by 20% or, on a few times in my benchmarking, a lot more, you are paying about 20% more than an RX 6950 XT as it is now. 

• AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT

The Navi 31 GPU used in AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XT and the company’s top graphics card, the RX 7900 XTX, have had their backs slightly shortened. With a starting price of $899 and a current price below $800, it provides a slightly more affordable entry point into the RDNA 3 generation, albeit you might mistakenly believe that it isn’t all that much less expensive than the best. At $999, the RX 7900 XTX is enticingly affordable. 

First off, it seems to be an improvement over the RX 6950 XT, and given the launch price gap between the two, that’s a promising sign for AMD’s development of the RDNA 3 architecture. Considering its capabilities, the reference cooler on this also seems to be rather capable for the budget, with temperatures running relatively cool.

• Nvidia RTX 4070 TI

The RTX 4080 12GB’s deactivation, rebranding, and subsequent price increase were the nicest things that could have happened to this inferior Ada GPU. This card, which will hereafter be referred to as the RTX 4070 Ti, renders AMD’s RX 7900 XT obsolete.

The RTX 4070 Ti is frequently equal to or quicker than an RTX 3090, which is arguably its most impressive quality. When compared to the $1,500 GPU from the previous generation, especially at the highest 4K resolution, this appears to be a significant generation-on-generation performance increase.

It is faster, especially when third-generation RT Cores are taken into account, but it is obvious that the higher clocks and larger L2 cache are working very hard to give it the advantage over the previous Ampere card in terms of raw frame rates.

When compared to the new AMD RDNA 3 cards, the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT, it appears much more promising. Although it is typically slower than the fastest Radeon GPU, the RTX 4070 Ti frequently outperforms the RX 7900 XT, which is still more expensive.

• Nvidia Geforce RTX 4070

$100 less than the RTX 3080 is the Nvidia RTX 4070. That’s the simplest, yet most simplistic, method to sum up the graphics card used by the green team. This is the fourth GPU of the notoriously pricey Ada series, and it performs similarly to the fourth-tier Ampere card in terms of typical metrics. It appears to be merely a less expensive chip, then.

But it goes beyond that. This clever new Nvidia card, the RTX 4070, is an RTX 3080 with advantages. This is the first Ada graphics card to use the same GPU as the previous model, albeit with some of the best features scaled back to make the card more inexpensive. Additionally, it means that Nvidia can make use of any chip that doesn’t pass muster as an RTX 4070 Ti, which otherwise requires the entire AD104 die, or a mobile RTX 4080.

Even while the RTX 4070 costs less than the RTX 3080 ($599), Nvidia is once again increasing the price of cards in ostensibly comparable classes. Since the price of the previous generation’s RTX 3070 was $499, the $599 RTX 3070 Ti is practically being replaced by this new GPU.

• Nvidia Geforce RTX 4060 TI

The RTX 4060 Ti is a strictly controlled graphics card that is rigidly taped out to achieve a specific performance level as cheaply as possible and to give Nvidia a place to put any AD106 GPUs that don’t meet the standards for the higher-spec mobile RTX 4070 chips.

Without DLSS 3 and Frame Generation, it doesn’t feel like a particularly thrilling generational upgrade over the previous Ampere card. It has been engineered to outperform an RTX 3060 Ti by as little a performance margin as possible, and you can’t really argue with the business motivations for doing so. 

It’s also important to note that the RTX 4060 Ti will become the GPU of choice for mid-range PC gamers if either the price of the 8GB version drops significantly or the 16GB version eventually replaces it at the $399 price point (instead of the $499 sticker price that card is set to launch at).

• AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT

AMD has officially made the RDNA 3 architecture available, but it’s not for gamers on a tight budget because the least expensive card costs $899. RDNA 2 is the result.

Not even the cheapest chips are being discussed here. By most standards, the Radeon RX 6700 XT remains a high-end card. However, its pricing is gradually moving toward the more reasonable end of the market, and that is something we adore to see.

The Radeon RX 6700 XT is more than just a straightforward halving of the hardware from AMD’s top RDNA 2 chip, the Radeon RX 6900 XT. It is a straight slicing down the middle in certain instances, for sure. The RX 6700 XT has 40 compute units (CUs) for a total of 2,560 RDNA 2 cores and 64 ROPs, which is exactly half of the Navi 21 GPU’s maximum configuration. However, the card has more memory and Infinity Cache than is necessary.