Now that we’re one day removed from Nvidia’s huge announcement for desktop gamers, I trust many of you are feeling tempted to make a September splurge and upgrade your graphics card. Whether you’re going for a reasonable upgrade (the $499 RTX 3070) or the 8K, 60-frames-per-second beast (the $1,499 RTX 3090), there’s still the matter of what to do with your current graphics card, whether it’s an aging beauty or, like mine, a fairly pristine GeForce RTX 2080.
Now that we’re one day removed from Nvidia’s huge announcement for desktop gamers, I trust many of you are feeling tempted to make a September splurge and upgrade your graphics card. Whether you’re going for a reasonable upgrade (the $499 RTX 3070) or the 8K,60-frames-per-second beast (the $1,499 RTX 3090), there’s still the matter of what to do with your current graphics card, whether it’s an aging beauty or, like mine, a fairly pristine GeForce RTX 2080. Before we get to the gear, let me take a moment to note that now is the perfect time to not upgrade to one of Nvidia’s just-announced cards. That might seem counterintuitive, so let me explain. Right now, there’s an absolute fire sale going on in the third-party markets. Hit up eBay, for example, and you will see lots and lots of newly listed (used) graphics cards from people who are all looking to get as much cash as they can to help pay for an RTX 30-series upgrade. Be that fish that swims against the current, not with it. If you’re not yet sporting a 4K monitor, let alone a 1440p display, you might not need RTX 30-series-level firepower for your gaming system. You can still probably get more than 60fps on the highest quality settings using an RTX 2060; bump up to a 2070 or 2080 (super or regular), and you’ll even be able to kick on ray tracing and maintain those precious 60 frames per second—or get close.
