You’ll need a powerful graphics card (or two) to run cutting-edge PC games at 4K resolution. These high-end GPUs are the top performers we’ve tested for pixel-packed gaming.
Editor’s Note: Before you dive into this guide, as you’ll see from many of the prices above, the availability and pricing situation for GPUs is anything but „normal“ right now is anything but „normal“ right now, and has been skewed since early on in the pandemic. If you plan to buy a card soon, also see this buying-strategies guide this buying-strategies guide for advice on finding cards at a fair price. If you want to wait it out a bit longer, check out this how-to tutorial this how-to tutorial on getting the most performance from the GPU you already own. 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 PC 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 —will output games at 4K. But really, if you want to play brand-new AAA games at 4K with the best visuals, you’ll need a desktop PC equipped with a very powerful graphics card—especially if you want your in-game eye candy dialed all the way up. After all, if you’re investing in a 4K monitor or a 4K TV for gaming, you want things to look as good as they can. Running games at 4K resolution but dialing down the detail and effects settings in your games is working at cross-purposes. So the PC graphics card you buy matters—a lot.4K Gaming: High-End Cards and Dual-GPU At the moment, to deliver smooth frame rates at high settings at 4K resolution on a PC (that’s 3,840 by 2,160 pixels, for the record) with the most-demanding games, you’ll need to opt for one of the most powerful consumer-grade graphics cards available. These days, those cards include Nvidia’s „Ampere“-architecture GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition and the one-step-up GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition, ( right in the middle we have the RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition), or one of the many custom-cooled and/or overclocked models based on these cards‘ GeForce RTX 3080 or RTX 3090 graphics processors (GPUs). The GeForce RTX 3070 is also an excellent choice for one-step down play from a RTX 3080 that’s still capable at 4K, while the more recently released seat filler between those two, the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, is a bit expensive for its capabilities at $599 list price but hits 60fps at 4K more reliably than its predecessor. Also in play for 4K: Cards based on AMD’s mid-2019 addition to its lineup, the Radeon RX 5700 XT (as long as you don’t mind turning down your settings a bit), as well as both as both cards featured in the new Radeon RX 6000 Series, the Radeon RX 6800 XT and the RX 6800, as well as the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT. But none of these cards, GeForce or Radeon, comes cheap, most of them starting around $400 list price for the base models of the RX 5700 XT, and as high as $1,799 (!) for some third-party overclocked RTX 3090 cards, not even counting what price gougers add to the list prices these days. You could also, in theory, pick up two GeForce RTX 3090 cards and use them in a paired NVLink arrangement to push well above 60fps. On the opposite tack, you can scrape by with a single GeForce RTX 3070, or a GTX 3060 Ti for around $400, again if you are lucky enough to find one at list price. Note that NVLink is only possible now with the very expensive GeForce RTX 3090. In some games, an NVLink setup should deliver better gaming performance than a single RTX 3080 or RTX 3090 card. Note, though, that if you do go this two-card route, multi-graphics setups can introduce side issues. Most games don’t ship on launch day with the optimizations to take advantage of multiple-card graphics, and some games never deliver multi-graphics support at all. We also expect multi-card support to fade faster in 2022 and beyond, as support for it is limited to such elite cards. For this reason, if you’re the kind of enthusiast PC gamer who likes to jump on games on the day they’re released, multi-GPU setups aren’t ideal solutions. Also, you might run across issues with frame timing, in which onscreen game frames don’t get delivered exactly in sync, resulting in a subpar experience. For this reason, we recommend buying the best single card for the performance level you’re after, whenever possible. If money is no object, that single card is the $1,499-MSRP Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, which might as well be in a class all its own (though it more appropriately belongs alongside content creator-focused cards like the Titan RTX). The RTX 3090 has been found to be, on average, only around 10% faster in gaming than the $699 GeForce RTX 3080, despite costing nearly twice as much for the Founders Edition card. Maybe it’s for this reason that the RTX 3090 has been billed by Nvidia as „the world’s-first 8K gaming GPU,“ and early tests show while that claim isn’t a stretch,8K gaming is so far beyond feasible for 99.9% of buyers right now that it’s effectively a moot point. These cards are made for much more than gaming, deployed more often in creative fields that do a lot of 4K and 8K video editing,3D rendering, or 3D modeling. In a price-for-performance sense, they’re major overkill for games, and they are often not optimized to take advantage of top titles as efficiently as the gaming-centric GeForce RTX 3080 cards (and its lessers) are. So yes, while technically the GeForce RTX 3090 could push 4K-gaming frames with grace, at that price you’re better off going with a single RTX 3080 and spending the leftover $700 or $800 upgrading your RAM, CPU, and motherboard at the same time, or saving the difference. Again, this assumes you can find one of these cards at close to list price.4K Gaming Cards: The Best „Budget“ Options If your budget can’t quite bear laying out $500 or more for a graphics card (though you don’t exactly have much of a choice otherwise, these days), you can find some less-expensive cards that can handle 4K gaming at lower settings. You won’t get the absolute best visuals possible, but 4K gaming is technically attainable. If you don’t mind running games closer to medium detail settings at 4K, but you still want to experience the pixel-dense glory of games running at 3,840 by 2,160, the last-generation AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT and the GeForce RTX 2060 Super are both still capable engines, and actually have a higher chance of being in stock than more recently released options from either company. Just remember that you won’t be able to play many games at the highest detail settings unless settings like DLSS or an image sharpener are activated. The card set to replace both the RTX 2070 and the RTX 2070 Super, the Editors‘ Choice-winning Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition ($499 MSRP), blows out the value proposition of what smooth 4K gaming has cost up until now.
