You need a powerful graphics card to run cutting-edge PC games at 4K resolution. These high-end GPUs are the top performers we’ve tested for pixel-packed gaming.
Thanks to streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and even YouTube, it’s finally getting easier to find actual 4K (also referred to as Ultra HD) video content. But, as awesome as 4K video looks, if you’re aiming to immerse yourself in a pixel-dense world, it’s hard to beat playing cutting-edge games in 4K. And from a hardware perspective, that’s a much more daunting prospect.
Only the latest consoles—the Sony PlayStation 4 Pro, the Microsoft Xbox One X, the PlayStation 5, and the Xbox One Series X—are capable of rendering games at 4K. Though these consoles can run games at 4K, they don’t always do so with the best graphics settings. If you want to enjoy the best graphics possible in modern-day games, you’ll need to buy or put together a powerful gaming PC, and for that the PC graphics card you buy matters—a lot.
What follows are the very best graphics cards for 4K gaming that we’ve tested for 2024. Following that, we’ve included a helpful guide demystifying several terms and ideas surrounding the graphics processing space to help you make an informed purchase.Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Founders EditionNvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super Founders EditionNvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super Founders EditionNvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition
Gaming in general is a compute-intensive task that is highly demanding on the components inside of your PC, but many factors can increase or decrease the workload of running games. In general, the more graphically impressive a game is, the harder it will be for the computer to run quickly. Though the art used in games is vitally important, graphical effects like antialiasing, depth of field, ray-traced lighting, shadows, and motion blur often have an arguably greater impact on a game’s visual appearance. These effects, among many others, help to create the sense of depth and realism that make games look so immersive. In general, newer games implement more of these techniques and may introduce new graphical technologies that increase the workload even more.
Another factor that has a major impact on performance is the resolution at which you are attempting to render a game. This is far more straightforward than the discussion of graphics settings, as changing the resolution tends to have a relatively linear impact on performance, and it’s very easy to understand. To explain this, let’s examine the 1080p, 1440p, and 4K resolutions against each other.
A game rendered at 1080p is displayed with a resolution of 1,920 by 1,080 (horizontal by vertical), with a total of 2,073,600 pixels on the screen. Any graphics card rendering a game at this resolution will need to determine the exact color of each of these pixels to create the images on the screen. The color of pixels may need to be calculated multiple times to accommodate graphics settings that might alter the color of individual pixels in the finished scene. Afterward, a fraction of a second before the image is shown on screen, the graphics card will save a 1080p image of the scene to its internal memory (RAM) before sending it to the monitor for display.
For each additional pixel, the work required by the graphics card increases proportionally. As a result, rendering at a 2K resolution of 2,560 by 1,440 with a total of 3,686,400 pixels is roughly 70% to 80% more demanding than rendering a game at 1080p. That’s difficult enough, but in truth, it’s nothing compared with gaming at 4K. The standard 4K resolution is 3,840 by 2,160 with a total of 8,294,400 pixels, which effectively makes gaming at 4K four times more intense than gaming at 1080p and more than twice as demanding as gaming at 1440p.
All of this needs to be taken with a pinch of salt as it’s not quite perfectly linear. Theoretically, it should be, but here again, a multitude of factors can throw things off. Some games are better optimized for running at 4K than others, and game developers may implement techniques to help reduce the performance penalty associated with gaming at 4K. Some graphics cards simply lack the bandwidth or raw muscle to handle gaming at 4K and will reach their performance limit while generating fewer frames than expected.Key Considerations: Graphics Settings and Video Memory
None of this is to say that you can’t or shouldn’t game at 4K, but it’s best to go in mindfully and prepared to work around the challenge of gaming at 4K. Buying the most powerful graphics card that reasonably fits your budget is often the best option if you are intending to game at 4K. Be mindful that reducing graphics settings can make gaming at 4K more viable on lower-end hardware, too. With lower graphics settings and the right game, gaming at 4K might be possible with far weaker hardware than you would expect.
Some may question if it is worthwhile to game at 4K if you have to reduce the graphics settings, and this is a fair question.
