Best Graphics

AMD’s Radeon RX 460 is now available for less than $100. At that price, it makes a great entry point for gamers on a budget, becoming our top choice for HD and eSports titles. You can even expect solid performance at 1920x1080 at relaxed quality settings.

At the heart of Radeon RX 460 is AMD’s Polaris 11 GPU, code-named Baffin. Fourteen compute units enable 896 Stream processors and 56 texture units in a three-billion-transistor chip. Our review sample came with 4GB of GDDR5 memory on a 128-bit bus. But the least-expensive models only give you 2GB. We’re not worried—at HD and FHD resolutions, running out of memory shouldn’t be a problem.

AMD says its RX 460’s board power dips under 75W. However, the cards we’ve seen come equipped with six-pin connectors. Just be sure your PSU is ample before picking a partner board.

It took us a while to warm to the 1050 Ti. After all, it costs quite a bit more than Nvidia’s vanilla 1050 and isn’t a whole lot faster. But this next step up over the RX 460 opens the door to a better-looking experience using high or medium quality settings at 1920x1080. Beating it with an AMD product means shopping for a Radeon RX 570 and paying at least $65 more - if you can find one in stock.

This is one of two cards based on Nvidia’s GP107 processor. The other one, GeForce GTX 1050, takes the full 768-core GPU and loses two SMs, ending up with 640 CUDA cores. So, paying a little extra for the Ti gets you more compute resources, plus an additional 2GB of GDDR5 memory.

Nvidia seemed determined to get us review samples that didn’t need auxiliary power. Exercise caution as you shop though, particularly if you’re upgrading an older PC or building a compact HTPC, as some models do come equipped with six-pin connectors.

Given rising prices and general unavailability of AMD’s Radeon RX 570 and 580 cards, we turn to Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1060 6GB as our choice for great 1080p and good 1440p performance.

There was never anything wrong with the 1060, per se. It was simply more expensive than the Radeon competition. Once AMD’s RX 580 launched, Nvidia’s mainstream solution wasn’t even consistently faster. But it is fairly easy to find right now, and we have to take that into consideration when we revise our recommendations each month.

You’ll find two versions of the GTX 1060, both based on the GP106 GPU. Make sure you’re shopping for the 6GB model, which features 1280 CUDA cores, 80 texture units, and 48 ROPs.

The GeForce GTX 1070 is armed with 1920 CUDA cores, 120 texture units, and 8GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit bus. What’s more, a 150W TDP keeps the 1070’s power requirements conservative: Nvidia recommends a 500W PSU with one eight-pin connector.

But performance is what makes this card special. If you really want to max out quality at 2560x1440, the GTX 1070 is compelling. It’s significantly faster than the Radeon R9 Fury X in DirectX 11 games, and it holds its own against AMD’s Fiji-based GPUs in newer DirectX 12/Vulkan titles. We have a really hard time jumping from last month’s Radeon RX 580 recommendation to a $390+ GTX 1070 at 2560x1440. But AMD’s cards aren’t readily available, so they concede our mid-range recommendation to Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1060 6GB. A GTX 1070 is the most logical step up from there.

We're also sticking with the GeForce GTX 1070 as our recommendation for playable performance on Oculus’ Rift and HTC’s Vive. While you could still get away with previous-gen GPUs, Nvidia’s Pascal architecture includes a lot of optimization for VR. The GTX 1060 isn’t quite fast enough for our liking in fast-paced VR games, so the 1070 earns recognition instead.

Up until recently, Titan X was top-of-the-line. But it also set you back $1200. Now we can recommend the GTX 1080 at its new $500 price point for playable 4K frame rates and the $700 1080 Ti for maxed-out quality settings.

The GP104-based 1080 wields 2560 CUDA cores, 160 texture units, and 8GB of GDDR5X on a 256-bit bus. Its performance is rivaled only by Nvidia's GP102-based boards, and yet it's rated for just 180W.

The Titan X (Pascal) introduced gamers to brutal speed, but at an equally devastating $1200 price tag. GeForce GTX 1080 Ti brings roughly the same frame rates down to $700, securing our recommendation for the best 4K performance available from a single-GPU solution.

Its GP102 processor is the same one found on Titan X. You get the same 3584 CUDA cores and 224 texture units. But Nvidia shaves off one 32-bit memory controller, eight ROPs, and 256KB of L2 cache. To compensate, the chip’s base clock rate is set to 1480 MHz. And the use of 11 Gb/s GDDR5X actually lends 1080 Ti more theoretical memory bandwidth than Titan X with its 10 Gb/s modules.

These days, partner cards abound. If you’re willing to go with Nvidia’s reference design, we’ve even seen Founders Edition boards selling in the $670 range.