If you’re looking to buy a graphics card for your next PC for gaming or content, you’ll probably at least consider an Nvidia card, and with good reason.
As you’ll see in our holistic best graphics card guide, the company has had a hot streak in most cases with its 30-series graphics cards rivaling or beating their AMD rivals in our in-game and synthetic benchmarking tests.
But because there are astronomical differences in the price of each card, and there are more options to choose from than can be easily counted, it can be difficult to know which specific Nvidia card is worth your money, especially if you have a regular one. gamer who doesn’t keep up with the latest innovations in Tensor and RT cores.
If you only have a 1080p monitor and want a small build to play Fortnite or Destiny 2, there’s no point in investing in a high-quality 70 or higher card. But if you’re playing in 4K and interested in next-gen features like ray-tracing lighting, it’s worth paying more.
To help you find the right option, we’ve created this guide to the best Nvidia graphics cards on sale right now that we’ve tested. The last point is especially important, as we don’t have the recently unveiled RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 in our labs for testing yet, which is why they aren’t on this list.
If you’re interested in the best possible gaming experience in 4K, we recommend that you wait until we test the new Lovelace architecture 4000 series cards.
At a glance
- Best 4K Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti – Check Price
- Best Mid-Range Graphics: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti – Check Price
- Best Affordable Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 – Check Price
How do we test?
Every graphics card we review is benchmarked in one of our test rigs using a mix of synthetic testing and in-game checks. We use uniform specifications in the banks to help us make direct comparisons between the cards based on the data we collect. We also assess the thermals to make sure the cards don’t get too hot, as well as the power consumption.
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti
The best card for 4K gaming
Pros
- Excellent performance in 4K
- Ray tracing support
- Future-proof connectivity
cons
- The performance gain you get doesn’t fully justify how much more expensive it is over the regular RTX 3080
The Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti will soon be replaced by the newer RTX 4080, which Nvidia claims is between 2x and 4x faster, but as we haven’t benchmarked and tested the newer GPU yet, we can’t recommend it at this time.
For the near term future, the 3080 Ti is the card we can recommend for high-end 4K gaming – although we’d honestly recommend waiting and seeing how the 4080 performs before pulling the trigger.
The 3080 Ti was and remains a powerful graphics card that delivered excellent speeds in all our tests. Demanding titles, including Cyberpunk 2077, ran with maximum graphics and ray tracing in 4K. Online shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield generally failed to ever drop below 100fps, even at their highest settings in our bench, including 16GB of DDR4 memory and an Intel Core i9-9900KF.
The only downside is that, based on our experience, it’s an outright powerhouse that requires a top-notch PSU. Nvidia also failed to leave much room for overclocking, with the Founders Edition version we tested generally failing or overheating with even small increases in clock speed.
Reviewer: Alastair Stevenson
Full review: Nvidia RTX 3080 Review
Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti
The best mid-range option
Pros
- Solid 1080p Ray Tracing Performance
- Lowest power consumption of all Ampere cards
- Cheapest current gen’ card on the market
cons
- Still not massively overclockable
- Only 20% cheaper than an RTX 3070
Nvidia has yet to unveil its RTX 4070 or RTX 4060 cards, so for now the RTX 3060 Ti remains our top graphics card choice for wanting a mid-range GPU.
The card proved to be fantastic value for money with speeds after 60fps for all the games we tested with graphics settings up to 1080p. This included Control, which is often used as the foundation for ray tracing performance. With ray tracing turned off, it also delivered 1440p with major titles including Borderlands 3 and Horizon playing at over 60fps.
As a final blessing, it also has much lower power consumption than the RTX 3080 Ti, allowing it to run on lower capacity PSUs.
It currently still sells for around £400/$400, marking it as a mid-range card. Its closest rival, the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT, is slightly cheaper at the moment, making it a valid alternative if you’re not married to an Nvidia card. But AMD didn’t offer quite as fast performance in our checks.
Reviewer: Alastair Stevenson
Full review: Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti review
Nvidia RTX 2060
The most affordable option
Pros
- Solid 1080p and 1440p performance
- Future proof with Turing
- Decent value compared to the 1070
cons
- Ray tracing and DLSS are still not widely supported
If you’re on a budget, you might want to look at the Nvidia RTX 2060. Even though it’s now two generations behind Nvidia’s latest Lovelace architecture, the Turing card is still a reliable workhorse.
During our benchmarks, the RTX 2060 was able to play less demanding titles, such as Battlefield 5, with ray tracing at playable frame rates in 1080p. However, it struggled to break 40 fps on demanding single player titles like Cyberpunk.
But if you disable ray tracing, performance for most titles in 1080p is solid. It will run Fortnite, Destiny 2, Division 2 and most other online games above 60 fps without any problems. This is a major reason why we recommend it as a fantastic option for buyers on a very strict budget, despite its age.
Reviewer: Alastair Stevenson
Full review: Nvidia RTX 2060 Review
Frequently Asked Questions
No, despite being one of the largest makers of desktop GPUs, the company has direct competition in every category and price range through AMD and its Radeon line of cards. Intel will also target the graphics card market in the near future with its desktop Xe series.
Nvidia cards consistently test well when we review them and are a regular feature in our best GPU guide that offers solid gaming performance. However, we have yet to review the latest 4000 series cards.
This depends on what you want to do. If you just want to play Fortnite or do basic editing in PhotoShop, you can spend just £250/$250 on a boarding pass that does the job. For more demanding tasks like 4K gaming, you’ll want to spend more on a mid-range or top-end card. These usually cost anywhere from £500/$500 to over £2000/$2000.
Test data from Trusted Reviews
You can see a detailed breakdown of the test data we collected by viewing the cards in this list in the table below.
I
Energy consumption
Peak temperature
3DMark Time Spy Extreme
3DMark Port Royal
Borderlands 3 frame rate (4K)
Borderlands 3 (Quad HD) frame rate
Borderlands 3 (Full HD) frame rate
Horizon Zero Dawn Frame Rate (4K)
Horizon Zero Dawn Frame Rate (Quad HD)
Horizon Zero Dawn Frame Rate (Full HD)
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Comparison Specifications
You can see all the specifications of the cards in the table below.
I
UK suggested retail price
US MSRP
EU suggested retail price
CA RRP
Manufacturer
Size (Dimensions)
Publication date
Date of first review
Ports
Energy consumption
Video memory
Increased clock speed
CUDA cores
architecture
Ray tracing?
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