I love graphics cards. They're absolutely my favourite PC component. That's not a hot take; I'm a simple man and thing-makes-pretty-pictures-flow-faster-in-front-of-eyes is an easy thing to become obsessed with. And I've had a long time to get nerdy with them, too, having built my first PC in the early '90s and been professionally testing PC gaming hardware since 2005.
This generation has been a bloody nightmare.
But this year... well, this year our relationship has hit a bit of a rocky patch. Especially as I've been trying to get my head around what I can actually recommend as the best graphics cards right now.
Yet there have been some genuinely fantastic graphics cards released this year. The hardware may not be significantly different to what has come before, but there have been interesting tweaks—such as AMD's introduction of machine learning-based upscaling with FSR 4 and vastly improving its ray tracing chops, and Nvidia ushering in a new era of neural rendering and giving us Multi Frame Generation.
But everything else about this generation has been a bloody nightmare. From the marketing to Nvidia's dreadful drivers and missing ROPs, to the review and release shenanigans, it's been a horrible time to be a GPU fanboi and worse still for anyone who actually needs to buy a new graphics card. That's because outright the very worst thing has been the pricing.
No matter what the MSRP might be—for Nvidia, a little cheaper than last generation, and for AMD a lot cheaper than Nvidia—they've born little relation to what retailers were charging at the point of sale. Sometimes sticking another few hundred on top, sometimes doubling the price, all because of scarcity and demand. Oh, and some orange dude with a toupée and adult diapers dragging the global economy through the gutter.
Pricing is starting to settle down on a global level, and while it might still be a bit funky in the US, we can at least start to get a bead on what the best graphics cards are right now. And so, I've created a whole new list, with AMD's RX 9070 sitting pretty at the top, as the best graphics card for most PC gamers.
It's a quality, affordable (finally) 16 GB GPU that is able to go toe-to-toe with Nvidia on ray tracing and can be seriously overclocked, too. At its MSRP it's a great card, though, it's still tough to find it down that low.
The mid-range battle is a tough one to call though, with both the RTX 5070 Ti and RX 9070 XT putting in a good shout as to which should be the winner. With prices often very close together across the globe, I'm siding with the RTX 5070 Ti for its feature set and impressive overclocking potential, giving it a performance lead over the AMD GPU.
The hardest, however, is the budget card pick. Right now, I've gone for the Intel Arc B570. A bold choice, I know. At its ~$200 MSRP, there's nothing that can touch it, but with the release of the RTX 5050 offering little more than RTX 4060 performance, Multi Frame Generation, and a $250 price tag, I would expect to see that offering at least 10% higher performance for similar money. So that's a pick that might well change when the cards get restocked and we actually get to test one.
For now though, these are the best graphics cards of the class of 2025.
Quick list
1. Best overall: AMD Radeon RX 9070
2. Best value: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB
3. Best budget: Intel Arc B570
4. Best mid-range: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti
5. Best high-end: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090
Best graphics cards
The best overall graphics card
The AMD Radeon RX 9070 is our current pick for the best graphics card for most PC gamers. Its price/performance combo, coupled with the improvements that AMD has made to both its ray tracing and upscaling tech, makes it a winner for me.
The best value graphics card
With a one-two right at the top of this guide, it shows just how well AMD's new RDNA 4 cards have done. The AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT shows both the red team's commitment to good value, and delivering a bunch of VRAM through the stack.
The best budget graphics card
It was anything but a shoo-in for Intel's cheap Arc B570 to get a pick in our best GPU guide, but it's got a lot of VRAM for the money, and when it's around its MSRP there's nothing that can touch it. Until the RTX 5050 comes back into stock, maybe.
The best mid-range graphics card
It's a bit of a fight between the RTX 5070 Ti and RX 9070 XT for this spot, but the Nvidia just wins as globally the price delta between them isn't so great. And prices being similar, the GeForce card has a better feature set, better overclocking, and higher overall fps.
The best high-end graphics card
While it may only be some 30% faster than the RTX 4090, there is no other consumer GPU on the planet that comes close to its power or potential. And it also has the Multi Frame Gen magic trick at its disposal to deliver ludicrous frame rates in compatible games.
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