As much as we all love PC gaming in the hardware team, it's kind of hard to ignore the fact that it's one darn expensive hobby. Fortunately, you really don't have to spend a ridiculous amount of money on a GPU to enjoy great graphics at high frame rates.
- We're curating the best deals this Black Friday on PC gaming products we love
The best GPUs this Black Friday for less than $400
- XFX Radeon RX 9060 XT 8 GB | $260 (save $70)
- PowerColor Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB | $350 (save $20)
Starting off with a card that's a good $140 under our budget limit, the 8 GB Radeon RX 9060 XT is by far the best GPU you can buy at this price. There are certainly cheaper graphics cards than this (Intel's Arc B570 is $200 at Newegg, for example), but they're nowhere near as good as AMD's little pocket rocket.
Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5060 is the Radeon's main competition, but it's actually a little bit more expensive ($279 at Walmart), and there's a very simple fact as to why it's not worth considering: it's slower than the RX 9060 XT. Take a look at some Cyberpunk 2077 performance figures to see what I mean.
Now, I know these results are for the 16 GB version of the 9060 XT, but the 8 GB version is honestly no different. The RTX 5060 isn't slower because it doesn't have enough VRAM (if that were the case, the RX 7600 XT would be performing a lot better). It simply doesn't have the same level of FP32 throughput, texturing, and pixel fill rate as the AMD card.
We used Cyberpunk 2077's Ultra RT preset in these benchmarks, which uses a fairly heavy amount of ray tracing—something that AMD's GPU used to be relatively poor at. With its RDNA 4 architecture, that's no longer the case, as you can see.
The same is true with upscaling and frame generation: the RX 9060 XT performs very well with them both enabled, and while DLSS 4 does still have the upper hand when it comes to visual quality, the gap between AMD and Nvidia in these aspects is smaller than it's ever been.
Now, I did say that there are two cards that I would get for under $400. So what's the other one?
Like it was going to be anything else! Admittedly, you can buy the superb 16 GB GeForce RTX 5060 Ti for $400 at Newegg, but that's not under my limit. Besides, the $50 difference between AMD and Nvidia's best mainstream GPUs is a little too large for my liking, given our budget-consciousness.
The two cards are practically neck-and-neck in Cyberpunk 2077, but the 5060 Ti does tend to pull ahead in more games than it lags behind or equals the RX 9060 XT. Taking all things into account, I'd prefer to pocket the fifty bucks rather than pay for a handful more frames per second.
You might consider the 8 GB GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, which you can get for $320 at Newegg, but I'd argue that if you're trying to save as much money as possible by sticking with 8 GB of VRAM, you're better off with the RX 9060 XT. And if you do want the extra memory, to give the card a longer lifespan in your gaming rig, then...well...it's still the RX 9060 XT!
As things currently stand, the number of games where 8 GB of VRAM is a problem is pretty small, and while that's likely to increase over time, it's not going to be a catastrophic problem for many years.
Intel's Arc B-series of graphics cards has plenty of VRAM, but the combination of the slightly twitchy Battlemage architecture and the equally twitchy drivers makes them too unpredictable for my liking. There are, however, very good value for money, so if you really want to go as cheap as possible, the Arc B570 is the one to go for.
Other than that GPU, though, it's Team Red all the way, if you're looking to keep under $400 this Black Friday.
👉Shop all of Amazon's Black Friday GPU deals👈
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
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