There are plenty of Black Friday deals going on, and we also have our Black Friday graphics card deals hub if you want to look at all the options for a new GPU. But if you’re just looking for my overall pick for a 1080p, 1440p, or 4K monitor, I can narrow things down quite a bit. And not surprisingly, those resolutions also equate to my top budget (less than $250), mainstream ($400–$450, give or take), and high-end ($700+) GPU picks right now.
First, a few quick words of advice. Don’t buy a GPU with only 8GB of VRAM. Just don’t do it. Yes, it will probably work in most games at 1080p medium to high settings, but there are enough titles now pushing beyond 8GB of video memory use even at 1080p that there’s not much point in going that route. 8GB GPUs have been commonplace since 2016 and it’s easy to find better alternatives now.
Second, don’t get sucked into the ray tracing hype. The number of games where RT effects truly make the graphics look so much better that it’s worth the performance hit is something I can still probably count on one hand. If you want a feature that’s worth the extra cost, Nvidia DLSS ends up being way more useful than better ray tracing — though frame generation still ends up being a highly contentious addition to games and hardware.
Last and perhaps most importantly, new GPUs are just over the horizon. As I wrote earlier in the week, don’t waste a bunch of money on a soon-to-be-outdated high-end GPU. But it’s not just the high-end getting a refresh; we expect to see Intel’s Battlemage B580 GPU arrive in December, possibly at around $250. We’ll need to see how that stacks up to the existing cards. For the mainstream GPUs, AMD’s RDNA 4 could tackle that market segment in January, while Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs are expected in January as well.
So, we want real deals rather than just an additional $10 off. And that can be hard to find at times, but here are my top three graphics card picks right now.
The best 1080p GPU deal right now: Arc A770 16GB
Let’s be frank: If we’re looking for a budget 1080p gaming GPU deal, closer to $200 will be far better than closer to $300. And since I arbitrarily ruled out 8GB GPUs at the start — which nixes the RX 6600 class cards, along with Nvidia’s RTX 4060 — the best pick right now ends up being Intel’s Arc A770 16GB.
The A770 16GB has reached an all-time low of just $229 now, probably in advance of the Arc B580 arriving in a few weeks. How will the B580 stack up? We’re not sure, though rumors point to it having 12GB of VRAM. In the meantime, the A770 provides plenty of memory and decent performance, especially for 1080p. On a related note, Arc Alchemist really seems to come into its own with 16GB of VRAM — there are a lot of games where it ends up being noticeably faster than the A750, primarily due to the added memory.
The A770 ends up being roughly on par with AMD’s RX 6650 XT, but with twice the VRAM for the same price — and about 25W higher power draw on average. It’s also about 10% faster overall than Nvidia’s older RTX 3060 12GB, which still costs $269. Intel’s drivers have come a long way over the past couple of years, and you also get good AV1 encoding support. There are still occasional quirks, but showstopping bugs are very rare these days.
But really, if Arc B580 actually hits the rumored $250 price point, we think waiting a few weeks will be the better course of action.
The best 1440p GPU deal right now: Radeon RX 7800 XT
For 1440p gaming, similar logic to the budget pick leads to similar conclusions. You absolutely need at least 12GB of VRAM at this pricing tier, and 16GB represents a ‘safer’ pick in the long term. That rules out Nvidia’s 4060 and 4060 Ti 8GB cards, while the 4060 Ti 16GB costs just as much as the RX 7800 XT — and there’s no question that the 7800 XT offers far more performance than a 4060 Ti 16GB, with 40% higher rasterization performance at 1440p!
Overall, the RX 7800 XT lands just a few percent behind Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Super, but it currently costs $130 less. That’s not even remotely close in terms of bang for the buck. In our GPU benchmarks, the $450 7800 XT averaged 106 fps at 1440p, compared to 110 fps on the $580 4070 Super and 98 fps on the $500 4070. Convert that to FPS per dollar and you get a 20–25 percent better value from AMD’s GPU.
You could take a step down to the RX 7700 XT as well, currently starting at $380. You end up with basically the same FPS per dollar, at a lower starting price. But if you’re serious about 1440p gaming, the additional VRAM is definitely worthwhile. RX 7900 GRE also warrants a look, but right now it costs $520 — that’s 16% more money for about 8% more performance and the same amount of memory.
Ultimately, thanks to a reduction in street pricing, the RX 7800 XT currently comes out as the best overall value for 1440p gaming.
The best 4K GPU deal right now: Radeon RX 7900 XT
4K gaming will literally take every ounch of GPU performance you can throw at it, and then some. It’s why upscaling and frame generation have almost become de facto requirements to get a good 4K gaming experience. But even with those framerate boosting technologies, a more potent GPU remains your best bet for a great 4K gaming experience.
There’s a short list of viable options, and 16GB represents the minimum amount of VRAM I’d be comfortable with at 4K. For Nvidia, that leaves us with the RTX 4070 Ti Super starting at $750 or the RTX 4080 Super for $990. From AMD, we really do want more GPU horsepower than the above 7800 XT or even a 7900 GRE, so that leaves the RX 7900 XT and the halo RX 7900 XTX, starting at $623 and $830, respectively. And when you crunch the numbers, unless you really want Nvidia’s DLSS and ray tracing, the 7900 XT comes off as the clear winner.
In our rasterization testing, the 7900 XT averages 81 FPS at 4K. The 7900 XTX bumps that by 17% to 95 FPS, but it also costs 33% more. Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Ti Super isn’t too far behind the XT at 79 FPS, but it also costs $127 more. And the 4080 Super delivers 92 FPS with a substantially higher price. Converting to FPS per dollar, the 7900 XT beats the XTX by 14%, the 4070 Ti Super by 24%, and the RTX 4080 Super by 40%.
You can make the ray tracing argument, of course. If you feel RT is worth the price of admission, the 4070 Ti Super offers the best FPS per dollar, beating the 4080 Super by 9%, the 7900 XT by 16%, and the 7900 XTX by 33%. But again, we feel the benefits of RT in games have been grossly exaggerated considering the performance hit.
Subjectively, we’d say rasterization performance accounts for about 80% of what you should worry about in a gaming GPU, and ray tracing makes up the remaining 20%. Apply that weighting and the 7900 XT still ends up as the best 4K choice, though you’ll still probably want to enable upscaling and framegen in games where those are supported features.
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