Picking the best graphics card your budget allows could be the most important upgrade you'll ever make. If you love playing games, then the best graphics cards on this list will ensure you can run any modern game at 1080p, or even 4K.
However, even if you don't play games, and are a digital creative, then installing a powerful graphics card in your PC will allow you to quickly open, render and edit high resolution photos and videos, creative complex digital artwork, and build 3D environments and models. The best graphics cards will help you do this faster, and will speed up your workflow to enable you to take on more work and make more money.
Similar to in our best memory cards article, there are two main types of graphics cards. The first type are consumer cards, which are usually created to play computer games. These can range in price from budget GPUs that cost less than £100, to cutting-edge monsters that cost over £1,000.
The second type are professional graphics cards. These are extremely powerful GPUs that, as the name would suggest, are aimed at creative and AI pros, and often come with incredibly high price tags.
In the past, if you were a creative, you would be better off investing in a professional GPU. However, these days many gaming and consumer graphics cards offer incredible performance that comes close to professional GPUs, and for a fraction of the cost. While they don't have quite the weight of professional GPUs, they can often be a more affordable alternative – and ultimately, you don't want to spend money on something that is additional to your needs.
Best of all, both Nvidia and AMD, the two major GPU players, released brand new graphics cards towards the end of last year, and these offer even better performance, while actually being more affordable as well.
So, in our guide to the best graphics cards for creatives, we've got a mix of consumer and professional cards from AMD and Nvidia, with top GPU choices for everyone, no matter your budget. For more in-depth buying advice, jump to what to consider when buying a graphics card section.
The best graphics cards available now
Nvidia's newly-launched is our new pick for the best graphics card you can buy right now. It brings all the advancements of Nvidia's latest Ampere architecture, including next generation ray tracing capabilities and 10GB of fast GDDR6X memory, which means it can easily handle 4K gaming. Of course, for creative professionals, it's an excellent choice as well, with ray tracing and AI support that speeds up your workflow, be it rendering ultra high definition video, or creating complex and realistic 3D models. Best of all, while it offers up to 80% performance increases over the last generation RTX 2080, it's also more affordable thanks to Nvidia's aggressive pricing. The only issue is that this GPU is in such high demand, it's currently hard to find in stock.
AMD is on an a bit of a roll at the moment with its graphics cards, and the proves that it can make graphics cards that aren't just incredibly powerful, but also offer excellent value for money. For the price, you're getting a mid-range card that can easily handle the latest games at 1080p and 1440p at their highest settings, which means getting amazing graphics in your games is now more accessible than ever before. If you're not a gamer, and want a GPU for creative work, then the RX 5700 is still a fantastic choice, thanks again to its balance of price and performance.
AMD released the Radeon Pro VII at the end of last year, and it stormed straight into the top of the graphics cards for professionals. It's based on the Vega 20 architecture, and includes 60 CUs, 3,840 processors and 16GB of memory, enough to give it plenty of power.
The Radeon Pro VII is a fast card that's suitable for intensive processes such as high-end CAD, 3D or video editing work. It also supports multiple cards, via AMD's Infinity Fabric Link, so it can handle even the most complex of tasks.
Overall, this is a fantastic card for creative professionals, though if you just want something for gaming, it might be more than you need.
Read our full Radeon Pro VII review for more information.
If you want to get hold of Nvidia's latest generation of graphics card, but you can't afford the RTX 3080, then the is a brilliant alternative. It offers amazing value for money thanks to its excellent performance, that matches the last generation (and far more expensive) RTX 2080 Super, while keeping the price impressively low. For gamers, this is the best 1080p graphics card out there, and if you're a creative professional, then it can also make a big difference to your productivity. However, if you want to work or play in 4K, you may want to think about spending more on the RTX 3080 instead.
Nvidia's ultra-high-end is currently the most powerful consumer graphics card in the world, with a huge 24GB of memory, which means it can easily handle any modern game – or even the most intensive creative workloads. It's expensive, sure, but compared to professional cards, it's actually very good value, giving you the kind of performance you'd have once spent three or four times as much. For example, it's actually $1,000 cheaper than the RTX Titan, while offering better performance. So, if you're a gamer wanting the very best experience at 4K – or even 8K – resolutions, or you want professional-grade performance without the huge price tag, this is definitely worth considering. However, it is still very expensive, and it's also huge. You'll need to make sure your PC is big enough to be able to hold it. Also, like the RTX 3080, it's currently quite hard to find in stock.
With pricing and a specification that places the in the middle of the pack, this new Nvidia card will no doubt find its way into more affordable off-the-shelf PCs than the pricey, high-end RTX series, with capabilities that roughly sit between the (still impressive) GTX 1070 and GTX 1060.
It has 6GB of GDDR6 memory and a modest 1,536 Cuda cores, and is based on the newer 12nm Turning architecture of the RTX cards, but without the ray tracing hardware.
Capable of delivering excellent gaming performance at 1080p and 1440p, and plenty of grunt for accelerating plugins and filters in creative software, the GTX 1660 Ti is priced extremely well, and is being offered by some manufacturers (such as PNY) in an extra short design that can squeeze into tiny PCs.
AMD is gunning for Nvidia's crown when it comes to high-end performance, and while the fight between the two companies may not be of interest to you, what it does mean is that both companies are now releasing powerful graphics cards at more competitive prices. In this fight, then, it's consumers like us that win. So, the is an AMD GPU that excels in both gaming and creative scenarios, including ray tracing (new for AMD graphics cards), and performance that beats the RTX 3070, while costing less.
The is our top recommendation for a workstation-class graphics card at a (just about) affordable price, with excellent performance in design applications. It’s comes in a svelte single-slot design that helps it fit into small cases, and requires less power than a bulkier GeForce card
OpenCL and Cuda applications in particular absolutely fly on the new Turing architecture so the RTX 4000 will make a massive difference in when working with all kinds of creative software, plug-ins and filters, driving excellent performance when rendering images, 3D and video.
Every generation, Nvidia releases its flagship model, then a second, steroid-enhanced version of it, with high pricing that is really only something the most enthusiastic PC users will consider. The remains a brilliant GPU with 4,352 Cuda cores, almost double the ray tracing hardware of the vanilla RTX 2080 and almost double the graphics processing power.
This card alone costs more than the average mid-range PC though, but with some serious hardware behind it, the investment could be well worth considering, including for designers whose workstation doubles up as a gaming PC – as Cuda and OpenCL performance has leapt forward along with gaming performance.
AMD has just slipped out a nifty new professional-grade graphics card, the , to steal some of Nvidia’s thunder, bringing the performance of its higher tier WX9100 card to a tasty price point (relative, of course, to the generally much higher pricing of Radeon Pro and Quadro cards).
It’s still based on the current Vega architecture, but has 3,584 cores, with 8GB of ultra-fast HBM2 memory to deliver some great performance in specific tests.
Depending on the tools you use, AMD cards may offer better performance. 3D animators who rely exclusively on Maya or Blender, for example, may benefit from choosing AMD over Nvidia, although we’d recommend some further research, and considering your workflow before investing. OpenCL applications work great with AMD graphics cards and the WX8200 is absolutely the best choice for an AMD professional-grade card around right now.
If you’re not interested in gaming, the Quadros are a better choice for creative software than GeForce cards. While the 8GB Quadro RTX 4000 (at number 7) is the best all-round affordable choice, the packs in a lot more performance, and is aimed at ultra high-end users, willing to pay serious bucks for serious performance levels.
For that, you’re getting a lot more rendering power than the previous Pascal generation, driving Cuda and OpenCL applications to new levels, and leaving every other graphics card looking comparatively weak.
Choosing the AMD option in gaming graphics cards often is about getting better value for your money, which explains why the the is one of the best cards for gamers on a tight budget.
It comfortably wins the battle for performance over Nvidia’s Geforce GTX 1050, almost matching the GTX 1060 for a considerably lower price. With only 4GB of memory, it might struggle at resolutions beyond 1080p, but this tier of cards is about solid frame rates at HD resolution anyway, rather than 4K.
The best graphics cards: What to consider
Graphics cards (or GPUs) serve two roles in modern computers. In games, they accelerate 3D visuals with all their under-the-hood hardware power used to determine the frame rate and resolution for those visual effects, whizz-bang explosions and pyrotechnics we’ve come to expect in modern games.
For digital creatives, including graphic artists, designers, illustrators and 3D professionals, the same hardware can be harnessed in tools such as Adobe Creative Cloud (both Premiere and Photoshop), Blender, Maya and 3DS Max, to dramatically boost rendering times – at least in specific parts of the software, such as when applying certain plugins, filters and effects. A powerful graphics card can make a huge difference with some tools, and some effects can not even run on a CPU alone.
It's also worth noting that for each graphics card, there is a generic kind of reference model, which often isn’t for sale. Then each manufacturer (MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, and so on) will sell their own versions, which will all look slightly different.
Quadro vs GeForce vs Radeon vs Radeon Pro
Nvidia and AMD make two kinds of graphics cards that are roughly aimed at either gaming or design use. For Nvidia, you probably already know the GeForce gaming brand, while it’s the Quadro cards that are for professionals, and with AMD it’s Radeons for gaming and Radeon Pro for creative software. The catch is that the professional-grade cards cost a lot more.
If your livelihood depends on your design work, it’s the Radeon Pro and Quadro cards you should be looking at
For the higher pricing of Quadros and Radeon Pros, you get basically the same hardware specification found in much cheaper gaming cards. They’re the same underlying design, the same architecture, and similar specifications, but with a few crucial differences. Quadro and Radeon cards have certified drivers. That means they have been tested for compatibility with specific software, offer better performance with design software (in certain circumstances) and are (allegedly) less likely to run into issues. They have ECC memory for extra precision. And sometimes they run at lower clock speeds, meaning they have lower power requirements and less thermal demands.
These aren’t niche features. If your livelihood depends on your design work, you don’t care about gaming, and want absolute reliability, it’s the Radeon Pro and Quadro cards you should be looking at.
Another difference you’ll find is how the two classes of graphics cards are manufactured. With gaming cards, Nvidia and AMD produce and sell reference designs, but a long list of other manufacturers, including Asus, MSI, Zotac, EVGA and Sapphire, sell variations on the reference specification – with different cooling systems and faster clock speeds, but generally always the same core design. For Quadro cards, Nvidia works with a single manufacturer – PNY – to produce all its hardware.
The best graphics cards: Jargon buster
Look at any graphics card review and it will be full of three-letter acronyms that are used to illustrate the kind of software performance you can expect. But it can leave you wondering which of these figures matter in a modern graphics card.
The key specifications often quoted in reviews and by manufacturers are memory (capacity, bandwidth and speed) the number of cores (basically the guts of the hardware) and the card’s clock speed (in MHz). These specifications vary between GPU generations and across the various tiers, and the cores in Nvidia and AMD cards aren’t the same. Nvidia uses the term Cuda cores while AMD refer to its GCN cores. Performance between AMD and Nvidia absolutely can’t be compared by suggesting an AMD card has more or fewer cores than an Nvidia card.
The best graphics cards: How to pick the right one for you
There are some basic things to be considered when shopping around. A higher resolution you are working at (or gaming) needs more memory. If you intend to work with 4K resolution either on your screen or with larger textures, you need a graphics card with more memory. 8GB or more is now common on the higher tier cards.
The faster the performance of your card, the better detail and more advanced graphical effects you’ll be able to switch on in games, at higher resolutions. 60fps is the sweet spot for fluid performance, but if you’ve invested in a144Hz display, you’ll be working your graphics card even harder to keep up. Expect the Nvidia 2000-series cards to make short work of 60fps, 4K gaming, or 144fps, FullHD (1080p) gaming.
The number of cores really determines the overall rendering power of the card. These vary dramatically across the various price and performance tiers, from the entry level £100 cards to the £1000+ behemoths.
The clock speed of the graphics card is quoted as a base figure and a “GPU boost”. Similar to the Turbo mode on Intel CPUs, when a graphics card is under heavy load it will run at a higher clock speed for better performance, until it hits a predetermined maximum, which is in place to avoid overheating.
Don’t forget to also consider the display(s) you work with, and the outputs of the graphics card you buy. All modern graphics cards use digital video outputs only, either HDMI or DisplayPort (which may be either a small square-ish miniDP connector or a big D-shaped connector).
For 4K or 5K displays, all graphics cards now support at least the DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0 standards that offer the bandwidth needed for 60hZ refresh rates – which was a serious problem on older graphics cards when higher resolution displays first became a mainstream proposition a few years ago. When 8K displays finally become more realistically affordable, this same problem will rear its head again.
Lastly, the single biggest differentiator of performance in graphics cards, which may be obvious to some readers, is the hardware generation of the series of cards, always codenamed for reference. Nvidia names its cards after scientists – Pascal, Turing, and so on, while AMD is a little more obscure, with Polaris and the newer Vega architecture sitting on the market currently.
Nvidia and AMD roughly produce a new series of graphics card every two years (it varies) and when a new generation comes out, it means raising the bar in all technical areas – more cores, more memory, more bandwidth and more features, often squeezing into the same power and thermal demands of the previous generation of card.
For the best possible performance and best future proofing, only ever look at the newest cards.
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