The most productive graphics card in 2025: our picks for all budgets

Looking to upgrade your GPU? There’s never been a better time to hunt down the best graphics card to suit your performance goals and budget. NVIDIA and AMD have both released standout options, including the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Super, each offering remarkable power for gamers and content creators.

Meanwhile, the Intel Arc B580 has proven to be the best 1440p graphics card for most gamers, balancing performance and incredible affordability for a better price than even the best cheap graphics cards of the last generation.

If you’re looking for maximum power, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 maintains its name as the best choice for gaming and professional tasks, although you pay a premium for its high-end capabilities.

Whatever your preference, we’ve thoroughly tested and selected the top picks for 2025 so far, even as we await new potential entries on our list from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia once they are announced at CES 2025. Below, you’ll find our comprehensive list to ensure you find the best graphics card to meet your needs and budget.

Value |★★★★☆Features |★★★★★Performance|★★★★★

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE surprised me earlier this year with its better balance of functionality and affordability, making it an easy choice as an overall graphics card.

Value |★★★★★ Features |★★★★☆ Performance|★★★★☆

The Intel Arc B580 is a surprising GPU for its value. More than capable of delivering high-performance 1440p gaming, Intel’s “mid-range” GPU is priced lower than cheaper 1080p graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia .

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John has been working with PCs since he was a teenager, long before he started writing about PC hardware or pursuing his master’s degree in computer science. Needless to say, he knows PCs inside and out, and has personally tested (and retested) each and every graphics card on this page, whether or not he wrote our original review and validated the effects found here.

Below you will find detailed articles on each of the best graphics card options on this list. I’ve tested each one very well and have the knowledge of games and other features you need to make the right selection based on your wants and budget.

Our opinion:

✅You want fantastic overall performance: Other than 3D modeling work, this card has some of the best performance at this price I’ve ever seen.✅You don’t want to spend a fortune on a great graphics card: While this is still a pricier midrange offering, it’s cheaper than Nvidia’s rival card and sits just within range of what gamers are likely willing to spend on a new GPU.✅You want some creative performance as well: While its 3D modeling performance is lacking, it’s fantastic with photo editing, video processing, and other creative workloads.

❌ You’re not looking to game at 4K: If all you plan on doing is gaming at 1440p, the RX 7800 XT or RX 7700 XT might be better options that’ll save you a good bit of money.❌ You do a lot of 3D modeling work or machine learning research: AMD isn’t the best when it comes to 3D modeling, which is tied heavily to Nvidia’s CUDA graphics language, and this card isn’t immune to that deficit. Likewise, its AI/machine learning hardware lags behind Nvidia’s tensor cores.

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE is a game-changer in the mid-range GPU market, offering an unbeatable combination of functionality and features well above its value. From 4K gaming to device learning, the RX 7900 GRE is generally the graphics card you can buy right now.

Originally introduced exclusively in China only, the RX 7900 GRE is now to be had international beginning at $549, making it a direct competitor to the weaker Nvidia RTX 4070 whilst taking on the more dear RTX 4070 SuperArray and even when leaving. leading in some key areas.

My benchmarking shows that this card excels at rasterization and has ray tracing functionality that narrows the gap between AMD and Nvidia in this market segment. Especially in gaming, it manages to outperform the RTX 4070 Super when upscaling is enabled, which is a true testament to the evolution of AMD’s FSR upscaling technology.

Plus, it’s a capable art card, making it a wonderful selection for graphic designers, photographers, and video editors. 3D modeling is still the Achilles’ heel of this card when it comes to content creators.

While it may not outperform the RTX 4070 Super, overall it’s a strangely tough card that offers good value for money.

Read the full AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE review

Our opinion:

✅ You need a wonderful graphics card on a limited budget. The Intel Arc B580 is priced at a reduced MSRP. No other $250 card will be as smart for 1440p gaming. ✅ You are looking for wonderful gaming functionality. Speaking of functionality, the Arc B580’s gaming assets are just a price proposition. You probably won’t sacrifice functionality with this card.

❌ You’re looking for a budget creative GPU. While the B580 has some promise as a video editing card, if you’re looking for a GPU for creative work, Nvidia cards are the better bet.❌ You want a cheap GPU for AI workloads. Like its creative prowess, the Intel Arc B580 is decent enough for dedicated AI workloads, but can’t hold a candle to competing Nvidia cards.

The Intel Arc B580, the GPU marvel of 2024 when it was unveiled last December, offers phenomenal 1440p gaming functionality to gamers for under $250/£250/AU$450 MSRP, something AMD and Nvidia haven’t achieved for two generations.

Additionally, all of the issues that Intel’s previous Arc Alchemist GPUs suffered from have been consistent with this newer version, earning me a rare 5-star score in my review.

While the card has its drawbacks (its ray tracing functionality lags behind Nvidia’s and it’s not the most productive art GPU on the market for the price, for example), it is strictly a GPU for gamers, and having Considering how long it’s been since PC gamers had an attractive graphics card at this price, it has an elegance of its own.

That said, if you want the absolute best graphics card performance at 1440p or 1080p, there are better cards for that, like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti. But those other cards are substantially more expensive, and they just don’t offer a good enough reason to buy them when the Arc B580 is right there, offering nearly equal performance on average and costing 10%-40% less than its competition.

If you are looking for the most productive and affordable graphics card, look no further; that’s all.

Read the full Intel Arc B580 review

Our opinion:

✅You need fantastic mid-range performance: Considering how rugged this card is in all categories, overall, this is one of the most productive graphics cards located in the midrange. ✅You need very solid ray tracing performance: With the adult age of its ray tracing cores, the RTX 4070 Super is definitely the most productive ray tracing GPU in the midrange. ✅It also needs artistic performance: with its forged CUDA backbone, the RTX 4070 Super is a wonderful choice for those looking to pursue artistic content work.

❌ You don’t need to spend a fortune: the price of the competition, there are better graphics cards for your money than the RTX 4070 Super❌ You don’t care about ray tracing or computing performance: the maximum advantages that this card brings table are its ray tracing and tensor cores, but if you don’t care about ray tracing or device learning tasks, the RX 7900 GRE will offer higher overall gaming performance.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super meets the main expectations we had for this card when it was announced at CES 2024 and offers attractive functionality at the same price point as its predecessor.

This newcomer outperforms the RTX 4070, providing more SM for advanced processing and a faster base clock speed. However, its 12GB GDDR6X VRAM limits its 4K prowess, so for optimal 4K performance, the Nvidia RTX 4080 Super is a better bet. For high-end 1440p gaming, however, the RTX 4070 Super excels thanks to its physically powerful specs, DLSS 3 with Frame Generation, and Nvidia Reflex technology.

And while the RTX 4070 Super generally outperforms the RX 7800 XT, particularly in ray tracing, AMD holds the edge in gaming performance with the RX 7900 GRE, especially now that AMD’s frame generation tech for FSR has hit the scene.

Despite stiff competition, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super continues to stand out as the most productive Nvidia graphics card for maximum people, especially mid-range users, for a balance between gaming prowess, content creation features, and natural performance.

Read the full Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super review

Our expert review:

✅ You need consistent 4K functionality at 60fps: You’ll be able to run almost any PC game at its highest settings at 60fps in 4K with this card. ✅ You need exceptional ray tracing: Ray tracing functionality is only the RTX 4090. ✅ You don’t need to spend much more than $1000: With an MSRP of $999. 99, you’ll only pay a little over a thousand dollars once you have it acquired. taxes and shipping.

❌ You don’t have a whole lot of cash to burn: This card is a top-tier premium GPU, so expect to pay a lot for it.❌ You do have a whole lot of cash to burn: At this level of GPU, the RTX 4090 is still going to offer you even better performance if having the best-of-the-best-money-be-damned is what you’re after.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super is a powerhouse of a graphics card, offering unparalleled 4K performance at its sub-$1000/£1000/AU$1,500 price point.

With a 1.4% performance gain over the RTX 4080 and a 7% advantage over the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, this card is the perfect choice for enthusiasts seeking top-notch 4K graphics. It even comes close to the RTX 4090’s performance, at a 40% lower cost.

The RTX 4080 Super is, on balance, the best 4K graphics card available, making it an ideal choice for those seeking exceptional 4K performance without breaking the bank.

Its impressive performance and competitive pricing make it a standout option in the market, and its sleek design (at least for the Founders Edition from Nvidia) makes it a showpiece for those who want to flaunt their gaming setup.

While it may not be the best option for those on a budget or for mid-range options, the RTX 4080 Super is a high-end purchase that delivers exceptional results.

Read the full Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super review

Our expert review:

✅ You need exceptional 1440p performance: This card delivers significant 1440p gaming performance, especially at this value point. ✅ There’s no need to sacrifice ray tracing entirely: AMD, through it all, delivers perfect raster and ray tracing performance. ✅ The RX 7800 XT is rarely very cheap, but it’s worth a lot more than Nvidia’s RTX 4070.

❌ You need the most productive artistic GPU: The advent of AI accelerators is helping this card, but Nvidia still dominates artistic workloads. ❌ You need the most productive ray tracing and scaling possible: If tracing radii and scaling are your thing, then the RTX 4070 Super will be the most productive buy here. ❌ You’re on a tight budget: while this card is much less expensive than its direct competitor, it still doesn’t come close to it. what we would call “cheap”.

The AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT is Team Red’s flagship mid-range graphics card and is very powerful, especially for the price.

Powered by AMD’s RNDA 3 GPU architecture, it boasts 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM and a wide memory bus, making it capable of handling high-res 1440p textures with ease, and can even dabble in 4K gameplay with the right settings.

Against the GeForce RTX 4070, the RX 7800 XT emerges with a slight 2% merit in overall gaming performance. This is especially true in rasterization, the RX 7800 makes it the most sensible option.

Its lower MSRP than Nvidia’s rival card makes it valuable, providing exceptional functionality at a great price. Despite some limitations in cross-generation functionality, the RX 7800 that AMD offers. be providing here.

Read the full AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT review

Our opinion:

✅ You need the most productive graphics card on the market: There’s no festival here. It’s the most productive, plain and simple. ✅ You need local games with 4K ray tracing: this is literally the only card that can consistently run full ray tracing in a local 4K solution. Array ✅ You’re a 3D graphics professional: If you paint with 3D rendering mains like Maya, Blender, and others, this is your graphics card.

❌ You’re not looking to do native, max-4K gaming: Unless you work for Pixar or Industrial Light & Magic, you probably don’t need this card.❌ You’re on a budget: This card is incredibly expensive, even on sale.❌ You’re concerned about power consumption: With a TGP of 450W, this card has a near-bottomless appetite for power.

Yes, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 is expensive. It also requires a 16-pin connector or adapter. And it’s very, very big. But the first release of Nvidia’s new 4000 series is an absolute powerhouse capable of doing everything you need. This is the most powerful GPU on the market and will probably be for a long time.

In our testing, we found it performed significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 with two to four times the performance in synthetic benchmarks and up to 100% improved framerates with some games. What’s more, DLSS 3 is a revolution in terms of gaming frame rates, and in games that support it, the RTX 4090 with Frame Generation turned on will absolutely push even the best gaming monitors to the limit of what they can do.

That said, there are a lot more GPUs than most people would probably wish for in this decade, and for the price being touted, you should look for this card, especially for the prices being touted lately. To have the toughest graphics card available, this is the card for you.

Read the full Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 review

There are a few vital things when buying a graphics card, the first being the resolution of the screen. If you have a 1080p monitor, a 4K graphics card will be a lot tougher than you probably need, and since 1080p graphics cards are much cheaper, buying something tougher than your monitor can handle is a waste of money.

For 1080p, look at the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT or the Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti and below. These two cards are top of the line giving you the best 1080p graphics card, but the AMD Radeon RX 7600 is still perfect for 1080p use.

For 1440p, you deserve the AMD Radeon RX 7800 with a tighter budget.

For 4K, you will need a minimum of an AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE or Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti, though realistically, you’ll need an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT or Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti Super to get good enough 4K performance. The RX 7900 XTX and RTX 4080 Super are also fantastic choices in this category, though skip the base RTX 4080 unless you can get it for less than a grand.

For creatives, generally speaking, the Nvidia RTX lineup is going to give you better creative performance for video editing and 3D modeling, while the AMD Radeon cards are slightly better at dealing with rasterization workloads like Adobe Photoshop. Serious video or 3D creatives will need at least an Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti Super, as it has 16GB VRAM for chewing through creative pipeline workloads. Photographers and graphic designers can get by with much less, like an RTX 4070 or RX 7700 XT, though the RX 7800 XT and RX 7900 GRE are also both good options.

For gaming, AMD has sometimes been better this generation in terms of gaming performance, especially now that AMD FSR 3 has brought Fluid Motion Frames to compete with Nvidia’s DLSS 3 Frame Generation technology. AMD cards still lag Nvidia in ray tracing, but that gap has narrowed significantly to a difference of a few frames between the two, in my experience.

For AI/machine learning, I don’t really want to tell you that you want to get an Nvidia card. Nvidia’s tensor cores are just a few years ahead of what AMD and Intel can offer, and most ML teams expect you to use Nvidia hardware, so you just have to lean on it. If you’re a researcher or a more casual hobbyist, anything with 12GB of VRAM will do, but any Nvidia card with 16GB of VRAM or more is preferred, even if they’re top-of-the-line cards like the Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti.

When it comes to the best graphics cards, it’s incredibly important to make sure I’m testing everything on an equal playing field. That’s why, whenever a new graphics card comes out, I test it with a suite of around 7-10 games and across several resolutions, all on current drivers.

This means that I recheck all existing generation graphics cards (as well as the latest generation cards if a card replaces an existing card on the market) within the market segment or performance category of a given card for each test. I make sure that all the cards are verified on the same hardware, i. e. the same CPU, the same memory at the same speed, the same motherboard, and the same SSD. This way I can be sure to know the performance of the graphics card compared to other cards. I also make sure to use the most productive components imaginable for my test to give every graphics card I test the maximum room to run at its maximum productivity without worrying about CPU, RAM, or CPU bottlenecks. SSD.

I make certain to record how much force card consumes as well as the temperatures it res under load to make certain we can put forward it to other folks who would possibly be involved about top force intake or formula temperatures.

I look at any new features a card introduces or exploits for the first time, such as new updates to its scaling technology, and compare them to competing cards in its category.

Finally, I collect scores across synthetic, creative, and gaming categories, formula teams like 3DMark, PugetBench for Creators, and integrated playtests like Cyberpunk 2077. Within each category, I use a geometric mean formula to average scores to decrease the weight of the excess. check the effects (so averaging a score of 200,000 and 5,000 is not that biased) to download a final score for this category.

I then take the geomean of the three category scores, mitigating somewhat the outsized values of synthetic benchmarks with scores in the tens or hundreds of thousands that can overpower gaming benchmarks that report results in double or triple-digit values. This geomean gives us a card’s final score, which I then divide by its US MSRP to come up with its final value score.

Generally speaking, the gaming graphics card depends on several factors, but mainly your budget and your monitor solution will determine the gaming card in your system.

For 4K gaming, the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX is as good as it gets, while the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT is the best 1440p graphics card. For 1080p, the Nvidia RTX 4060 is the way to go, while the AMD Radeon RX 7600 is the best budget graphics card of this generation, though the Intel Arc A770 and Intel Arc A750 offer compelling alternatives for the budget-conscious.

The age-old question about whether Nvidia or AMD is the better graphics card will probably never go away, especially now that Intel is also throwing its hat into the GPU ring.

Right now, AMD and Nvidia are on equal footing, although AMD’s cards from this generation have been particularly powerful. Intel is in its first generation of discrete graphics cards, so there are still many development issues to be resolved.

Overall, if you like ray tracing, Nvidia will most likely have the advantage for you, while AMD offers the perfect rasterization and gaming functionality while being cheaper.

The most rugged graphics card for gamers and creatives currently on the market is the RTX 4090. In fact, it has an astounding 24GB GDDR6X memory pool with its 384-bit memory bus. It is the Ada board that will be built on the AD102 chip and exceptionally uses the longest length of silicon.

An RTX graphics card is much larger than a previous GTX model. Nvidia discontinued the GTX line when it launched the RTX 20 series a few years ago. The RTX GPUs are capable of real-time ray tracing and can use the company’s DLSS AI upscaling generation to boost frame rates in more difficult games.

Generally speaking, AMD and Nvidia face off in the budget and mid-range market, with Team Green leading the way in creativity. However, while the RX 7900 XTX is a perfect high-end GPU, it is outperformed by the RTX 4090 in direct comparison. That said, AMD has a tendency to win over gamers with a more competitive price/performance ratio, so things are pretty balanced.

John (He/Him) is the Components Editor here at TechRadar and is a programmer, gamer, activist, and Brooklyn College alumnus currently living in Brooklyn, New York.

Named by the CTA as a CES 2020 Media Trailblazer for his science and technology reporting, John specializes in all areas of computer science, including industry news, hardware reviews, PC gaming, as well as general science writing and the social impact of the tech industry.

You can watch it online at Bluesky @johnloeffler. bsky. social

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