I’ve been professionally prodding graphics cards for the past two decades, and this is what I’ve learned about buying GPUs.
Buying a new graphics card can be a tricky prospect, full of difficult decisions for even the most experienced of PC builders and gamers. But if you’re buying your very first GPU then it can feel like an absolute minefield. Never fear, though, as I’m here to try and take the edge off some of those worries.
And you shouldn’t let any such concerns put you off, either, because the best graphics card upgrade will be the single most impactful change you can make to your existing gaming PC. It’s not hard either. As an upgrade it will likely be just a simple case of taking one big lump of graphics card out and sticking another one in, though there are some things you can do to make it easier for yourself which I’ll cover down the page.
But once you have a shiny new GPU in your PC it will feel like a whole new rig the next time you boot a new game. In fact you’ll probably want to go back and play all those games where you struggled to get 60 fps out of your old card, all over again. The big end of year sales are almost here, and we’ll be picking out the best Black Friday graphics card deals if you need a little more help choosing the right GPU for you.
So, without further needless waffle, here are the five things I always tell people before they buy their first graphics card:1. Your budget1. It’s all about your budget
It probably sounds obvious, but the first and most important consideration is how much you can really afford to spend on your graphics card. There is such a spread of GPU prices that you can spend almost anything, from $200 all the way up to $1,700 on a new graphics card, with a host of different options and a pretty linear spread of gaming performance as the prices ramp up.
So the first thing you need to do is be confident about what’s in your GPU war chest before you even think about looking because you can always spend more on a graphics card. The temptation to spend just another $50, or another $80, or another $100 when you’re already in deep can often be too much to bear. So make a budget you can realistically stretch to without putting yourself in penury and stick to it.
Relative pricing is also an important consideration, too, as buying a $500 graphics card from the previous generation doesn’t automatically equate to a higher performing $500 GPU in the next generation. Case in point is the last couple of Nvidia GeForce graphics card generations; if you bought an RTX 3070 for $499 and were hoping for a big performance boost with the equivalent $499 RTX 40-series card. well, you were in for a shocker. That $499 card was the 16 GB RTX 4060 Ti and represented an almost complete performance stagnation compared with the older RTX 3070 despite having twice the video memory.
And this is where we come in, as professional tech prodders, offering performance analysis on all the latest graphics cards to give you an idea of how they stack up in relation to each other. But there is another, more quick and dirty way to see how your current GPU performs in relation to any other you’re looking to buy.
3DMark is an industry standard benchmark for graphics cards and, while it doesn’t tell the whole performance story, can still be a good general indicator of relative gaming performance. The 3DMark free version, which you can find on Steam, will allow you to run the Time Spy test, and then in the online database search you can compare your own score to any potential GPU you’re looking to buy. Just take the average score for that card in the same Time Spy benchmark database and see how it stacks up against your own rig to give you an idea of where it all stands in the hierarchy of GPUs.2. Buy the graphics card not the brand
There is a lot of unnecessary tribalism in the world of PC hardware, with some folk claiming to be AMD ’til they die or bleeding green with Nvidia. But screw that.
