Radeon gaming graphics cards

We have plenty of tips on how to buy a graphics card if you're unsure where to start your hunt, but scroll on to see our recommendations from Nvidia and AMD's latest line-ups. Although Covid and cryptocurrency booms among other things have helped to stretch the GPU market to its limits, we've still managed to test every new graphics card from the most recent generation. We've put each GPU through our gaming benchmark test bench wringer, with in-depth analysis comparing thermal performance, power draw measurements with dedicated tools, along with average frequencies and frame times.

Finally, as we've noticed from our testing, the GPU market is getting competitive again. Soon enough, Intel will drop in with its Arc Alchemist graphics card. That's likely to make the GPU landscape a little more complicated.

Nvidia's Ampere GPU generation has set the bar high for prospective contenders. So we'll have to wait and see if there's room for Intel's contributions. However, the cheaper cards are awaiting release. Okay, right now, the RTX is rare as pigeon eyelashes, but there is no doubt Nvidia's new RTX is the best graphics card today.

It represents a huge generational performance boost over the previous RTX series. The thing which really stands out from our testing is the difference it makes to ray-tracing performance. The first generation of ray tracing-capable cards required such a huge frame rate sacrifice that most people shied away from turning it on, but that's no longer the case with this generation.

When you can now get ray-traced performance that exceeds the frame rates you'd get out of the top card of the RTX series when running without it, you know that this is a whole different beast. And hey, the RTX can actually run Crysis. The RTX may need a fair chunk more power—you'll want at least an W PSU—and be tricky to get hold of, but this is the most desirable graphics card around today.

Which I guess is also why it's so tricky to get hold of. As a red team alternative to Nvidia's high-end graphics cards, there have been few finer than the RX XT. A highly competitive card that comes so close to its rival, with a nominal performance differential to the RTX , is truly an enthusiast card worth consideration for any PC gamer with 4K in their sights.

All are available today and with two year's worth of developer support in the bank. Yet we're still big fans of what AMD has managed to accomplish with the RX XT, a return to form for the Radeon Technology Group that injects some much-needed competition into the GPU market and offers a worthy red team alternative for any high-end gaming PC build. That's why we love it so; it's a great GPU for the full stack of resolutions and has decent ray tracing capability to boot, courtesy of second-generation RT Cores.

Perhaps most impressive of this graphics card is how it stacks up to the series generation: It topples the RTX Super in nearly every test. Perhaps the only high-end Ampere that's anything close to reasonably affordable, the RTX is also impressive for its ability to match the top-string Turing graphics card, the RTX Ti, for less than half of its price tag.

In return, you're gifted a 4K-capable graphics card that doesn't require too much fiddling to reach playable, if not high, framerates. And it'll absolutely smash it at p, no question about that. Its gaming performance credentials are undoubtedly impressive, but what makes the RTX our pick for the sensible PC gaming connoisseur is the entire Nvidia ecosystem underlying the RTX stack today.

DLSS is a neat trick for improving performance, with only a nominal loss in clarity, and other features such as Broadcast and Reflex go a long way to sweetening the deal. And it gets kind of close, too, with 4K performance a little off the pace of the RTX —and all for one-third off the asking price.

For that reason, it's simply the better buy for any PC gamer without any ulterior motives of the pro-creator variety. But there's a reason it's not number one in our graphics card guide today, and that's simply due to the fact it's not that much better than an RTX , and sometimes not at all.

Yet, inevitably its ray-tracing acceleration lags behind the competition. With that in mind, for raw gaming alone, the RX XT is a cheaper alternative to the RTX is still a victim to its own extreme price tag. Though when all is said and benchmarked, it is the uber high-end RTX Ti that we'd recommend to any PC gamer looking to go all out on their next build.

It's also more than capable of real-time ray tracing, courtesy of 80 RT Cores. The reason we don't rate this card higher up in our list of the best graphics cards, however, is down to its price. Massively inflated pricing, or lack of stock, notwithstanding.

However, the RTX wields it well, managing to dispatch the RTX by a large margin in most games, and by enough of a gap in the rest to make it worthwhile. Best gaming PC : the top pre-built machines from the pros Best gaming laptop : perfect notebooks for mobile gaming. With a decent generation-on-generation improvement and plenty of speed at p and p, the RTX 12GB is a graphics card easily argued for.

It's also nominally cheaper than the RTX was on launch day, though it's not so easy to find it as a discrete number nowadays. That said, this card often crops up within pre-built gaming PCs , and for a decent price all-inclusive too.

You could attempt to manually refresh every store page in the hopes of striking gold on the next restock; that's one way to go about it. Power Connectors: 2 x 8 pin. Outputs: 1 x DisplayPort 1. Specifications Stream Processors: 2, Core Clock: 2. Memory Clock: 16 Gbps. Outputs: HDMI 2. Specifications Stream processors: 2, Core clock: 1, Memory clock: 16Gbps. Power connectors: 1 x 8-pin. Outputs: 1. Memory Clock: 14Gbps.

Power Connectors: 1 x 8-pin and 1 x 6-pin. Reasons to avoid - No ray tracing. Radeon RX XT. Specifications Stream Processors: 4, Power Connectors: 2 x 8-pin. Outputs: DisplayPort 1. Reasons to avoid - Doesn't dethrone Nvidia. Specifications Stream Processors: 1, Power Connectors: 1 x 8-pincompu. Reasons to avoid - Not particularly exciting - Struggles in demanding p games.

Memory Clock: 16Gbps Power. Connectors: 8-pin x 2. Outputs: DisplayPort v1. Reasons to avoid - Obnoxiously expensive.

Memory Clock: 7Gbps. Power Connectors: 1 x 8-pin, 1 x 6-pin.