And, for the most part, it makes the previous flagship card of the Ampere generation look well off the pace. This is a vast GPU that packs in 170% more transistors than even the impossibly chonk GA102 chip that powered the RTX 3090 Ti. It's unstoppable, and will stay ahead of the pack as we now know AMD's highest performance graphics card, the RX 7900 XTX, is well and truly an RTX 4080 competitor. On the one hand, it's a hell of an introduction to the sort of extreme performance Ada can deliver when given a long leash, and on the other, a slightly tone-deaf release in light of a global economic crisis that makes launching a graphics card for a tight, very loaded minority of gamers feel a bit off.īut we can't ignore it for this guide to the best GPUs around simply because, as it stands today, there's no alternative to the RTX 4090 that can get anywhere close to its performance. But it's no model, and it's no moon, this is the vanguard for the entire RTX 40-series GPU generation and our first taste of the new Ada Lovelace architecture.Ī hell of an introduction to the sort of extreme performance Ada can deliver. It looks like some semi-satirical plastic model made up to skewer GPU makers for the ever-increasing size of their cards. That said, you can find many RTX 3060 gaming PCs going cheap in the best prebuilt gaming PCs (opens in new tab), and they're often still good value for money, so all is not lost. And we also don't recommend Nvidia's budget GPUs right now, such as the RTX 3060, as AMD and even Intel have them roundly beat on price. We suggest avoiding the high-end RX 6950 XT and RTX 3090 Ti nowadays, as these cards are generally being pushed out by similarly priced newer options. These two Alchemist generation cards are going even cheaper today, and the same goes for AMD's more impressive budget graphics cards, like the RX 6600 and RX 6650 XT. Most recently, we saw Intel enter the game with two more affordable graphics cards, the Arc A770 and Arc A750. Neither Nvidia or AMD has released their new generation of budget GPU for the desktop yet. On the other end of the market, there's not much new to write about. The RTX 4070 Ti isn't as cheap as we'd like, but at least it's more reasonable than Nvidia's finest for a perfectly 4K capable card. Then there's the RTX 4080, which is a bit too pricey for us, and the RTX 4070 Ti. Nvidia has its RTX 40-series led by the RTX 4090, and that thing really is a beast of massive proportions. For the high-end gamer, you've plenty of new cards to choose from.

Intel graphics card for gaming