The best graphics cards in 2022

The best graphics card for PC gaming fuels your games and does it without charging you an incredibly high price in today's market. Nvidia and AMD GPUs are starting to drop down to normal prices, but stock can still flicker in and out. It's better, but not so much better that you can safely expect consistent, retail prices. And the last thing you want to do is pay for an overpriced card on Ebay or through a third-party seller.

That said, we've still managed to check the latest graphics cards and put them through our extensive benchmarking tests. In order to provide a definitive list of the top GPUs worth buying (at around MSRP). This information is especially useful if you plan on shopping around for the best prebuilt gaming PC which, honestly, might be the easiest way to nab the best graphics cards in 2022.

At least we can revel in the fact the GPU market is finally getting competitive again. With the launch of the Radeon RX 6800 XT things got very interesting, leaving both Nvidia and AMD vying for the top accolade. It's a close call, but the GeForce RTX 3080 just about takes the crown. In fact, the GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3070 are two of the best graphics cards to date. Soon, Intel will drop in with its Arc Alchemist graphics card—that's going to make the GPU landscape a little more complicated.

Right now we have plenty of tips on how to buy a graphics card if you're unsure where to start your hunt. If you're not 100% on a GPU just yet, scroll on to see our recommendations from Nvidia and AMD's latest line-ups.

Best graphics card

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1. Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080

The best graphics card for PC gaming right now

Incredible gen-on-gen performanceMakes 2080 Ti look mid-rangeRay tracing no longer a sacrificeNeeds a beefy PSUIn high demand

Okay, right now, the RTX 3080 is rare as pigeon eyelashes, but there is no doubt Nvidia's new RTX 3080 is the best graphics card today. It represents a huge generational performance boost over the previous RTX 20-series. That's impressive when put up against either the RTX 2080 or 2080 Super, but when you consider that this nominally $699 card can not just match but massively outperform the $1,200 RTX 2080 Ti, it really hits home.

The thing which really stands out from our testing is the difference it makes to ray-tracing performance. The first generation of ray tracing-capable cards required such a huge frame rate sacrifice that most people shied away from turning it on, but that's no longer the case with this generation.

When you can now get ray-traced performance that exceeds the frame rates you'd get out of the top card of the RTX 20-series when running without it, you know that this is a whole different beast. And hey, the RTX 3080 can actually run Crysis.

Nvidia has managed this by adding a whole load more CUDA cores to the mix in this 8nm GPU and updated Tensor Cores (for extra DLSS goodness) and second-gen RT Cores to make with the ray-traced pretties.

The RTX 3080 may need a fair chunk more power—you'll want at least an 850W PSU—and be tricky to get hold of, but this is the most desirable graphics card around today. Which I guess is also why it's so tricky to get hold of.

If there was one bit of advice for buying a GeForce RTX 3080 it would be that it's worth trying to get your hands on the Founders Edition if at all possible. Pick your expletive, because the RTX 3080 Founders Edition is ****ing great. Far from just being the reference version of the 'flagship' Ampere graphics card, because of that cooler and redesigned PCB, it is the ultimate expression of the RTX 3080. And if you end up with another version of this fine-ass GPU then I'm afraid you're likely to feel a little hard done by.

Chances are you're going to have to make do. The Founders Edition cards are not produced in the same volumes as the third-party versions from the likes of Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, Palit, and Colorful, to name but a few. Given the stock shortages, you're going to be happy with whatever RTX 3080 you can get your hands on. Especially if you can get one near to the MSRP. And besides, some of the cooling options on these third-party cards are impressive in their own right, so it's not all bad by any stretch.

Regardless of whichever card you get your hands on, the performance uplift you get over the previous generation is huge and pretty much unprecedented. Maybe we've become used to more iterative generational deltas, especially considering the slight difference between the GTX 1080 Ti and RTX 2080, for example. But we're going to continue beating the Ti drum, because it bears repeating—the fact the $699 RTX 3080 absolutely smashes the $1,200 RTX 2080 Ti is still staggering.

Nvidia has gone big with the RTX 3080, and the result is an outstanding gaming card that sets a new benchmark for both high-end 4K gaming performance and for ray tracing. Now we just need Nvidia and Samsung to make more of them so we can all enjoy the best GPU of this generation.

Read our full Nvidia RTX 3080 review (10GB Founders Edition).

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2. AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT

AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture at its best

4K excellenceCheaper than an RTX 3080Moderate ray tracing performanceSlower than the 3080 at 4K

As a red team alternative to Nvidia's high-end graphics cards, there have been few finer than the RX 6800 XT. A highly competitive card that comes so close to its rival, with a nominal performance differential to the RTX 3080, is truly an enthusiast card worth consideration for any PC gamer with 4K in their sights.

The RX 6800 XT was the first of AMD's RDNA 2 GPUs to enter the fray, and while we've had plenty of other cards since, this is the one that shines brighter than most and makes the most sense financially. At least it does if you consider its MSRP, and with AMD's GPUs returning to reasonable price levels quicker than Nvidia's, this could actually give the red team the edge in the short term.

A key battleground for Nvidia and AMD this generation has been on the memory front—covering both bandwidth and capacity. The RX 6800 XT comes with 16GB of GDDR6 across a 256-bit bus for a total bandwidth of 512GB/s. That means AMD has Nvidia's 10GB RTX 3080 on the ropes in terms of capacity but falls slightly behind in raw bandwidth to the RTX 3080's 760GB/s.

AMD has an ace up its sleeve in throughput terms in the form of its Infinity Cache, which bolsters the cards 'effective bandwidth' considerably. Some 1,664GB/s, by AMD's making—a 3.25x improvement over the RX 6800 XT's raw bandwidth. In gaming terms, it means you're looking at similar performance, despite the very different underlying technologies.

It's a tough call between the RX 6800 XT and the RTX 3080, but the latter pips AMD to the post with the final touches à la RTX. The RX 6800 XT is $50 cheaper, delivers high 4K performance, and a hefty VRAM increase over the RTX 3080. However, it's easy to argue that an extra $50 dropped on the RTX 3080 is money well spent: a small price to pay for greater 4K performance, much-improved ray tracing, and DLSS. All are available today and with years of developer support in the bank.

That said, AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution has gained considerable momentum among developers and offers solid upscaling that's worth enabling in supported games.

The RX 6800 XT leaves AMD in an incredibly strong position going forward, delivering what is required to get the entire industry to take notice, and with a strong proposition to offer gamers instantly at launch. And it's no surprise to hear the cooperation between Zen and RDNA engineers had a part to play in all this, too.

All of which is to say that AMD has evolved on what was already a promising architecture in RDNA and delivered it in a fantastic graphics card in the RX 6800 XT. And not the least bit impressive in just how swiftly it has achieved near performance parity with Nvidia. There's still some way to go to claw back market share from the green team, but step one on RTG's to-do list (build a high-end GPU) can be confidently checked off with the release of the RX 6800 XT.

We're big fans of what AMD has managed to accomplish with the RX 6800 XT, a return to form for the Radeon Technology Group that injects some much-needed competition into the GPU market and offers a worthy red team alternative for any high-end gaming PC build.

Read our full AMD RX 6800 XT review.

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3. Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti

More affordable Ampere

Finally! Something a little more affordable2080 Super performanceUnder $400Annoying 12-pin power connectorNot quite good enough for 4K

The best value Ampere to date, the RTX 3060 Ti is very closely related to the RTX 3070. Both utilize the same GA104 GPU (the RTX 3060 Ti has fewer SMs enabled), with the same 8GB of GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit bus.

While 17% less capable in core count than its pricier sibling, the RTX 3060 Ti makes up for it with some judicious GPU Boost frequencies. That partially explains why the RTX 3060 Ti can be within 17% to just single digits off the pace of the RTX 3070, despite operating at a silicon disadvantage. Not bad for a $399 card (if you can find it for that price).

If you haven't already done the maths: At $399, the RTX 3060 Ti is 20% cheaper than the RTX 3070, so performance per dollar is on the up with the diminutive graphics card. That's why we love it so; it's a great GPU for the full stack of resolutions and has decent ray tracing capability to boot, courtesy of second-generation RT Cores.

The RTX 3060 Ti delivers gaming performance that's rather stupendous when you look at generational gains over even the RTX 20-series—next to the GTX 10-series, it's quite frightening, actually. There's exceptional 1080p and 1440p performance in a tiny package here, the likes of which would've set you back something close to twice as much cash a couple of years ago. And that's pretty great.

This card is even capable of dabbling with high-fidelity 4K gaming, although you're going to have to massage some graphics settings in order to really crack a solid 60fps in more demanding games. And that's often just in terms of average framerates, to keep your GPU above 60fps requires a lot of tinkering. That can sometimes take the fun out of 4K gaming in the first place. It's a much smoother affair at 1440p, and at 1080p you can pretty much max everything out and just go.

The Nvidia extras can help here too—DLSS, Reflex, and even Nvidia Broadcast all add to the overall experience. There's a solid base of genuinely great features behind RTX and the Nvidia package that's only been improved upon with Ampere, none more so than the ray-tracing performance for that matter.

There's just the small issue of availability, that which has loomed over all the other RTX 30-series launches to date. Price hikes have undermined this card's very reason for existing, and until it returns to something like its MSRP of $399, it just isn't as enticing a card.

Even so, if the RTX 3080 and RTX 3070 are out of reach, the RTX 3060 Ti certainly makes for a decent stand-in. Perhaps the most impressive demonstration of what this card has achieved is seeing how it stacks up to the 20-series generation: It topples the RTX 2080 Super in nearly every test.

Read our full Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti review (Founders Edition).

(Image credit: Future)

4. Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070

Finally, a reason for every 10-series gamer to upgrade

Turing-topping frame ratesRelatively low powerThis FE card is smolAnnoying 12-pin power connector

Perhaps the only high-end Ampere that's anything close to reasonably affordable, the RTX 3070 is also impressive for its ability to match the top-string Turing graphics card, the RTX 2080 Ti, for less than half of its price tag.

At $499, it's still a significant sum by any means—we're talking next-gen console equivalent pricing here—but it's hardly an exorbitant sum when compared to PC gaming's top graphics silicon today. In return, you're gifted a 4K-capable graphics card that doesn't require too much fiddling to reach playable, if not high, framerates. And it'll absolutely smash it at 1440p, no question about that.

It's a little surprising to see the RTX 3070 Founders Edition still sporting the 12-pin power connector of the RTX 3080, and therefore it comes with a single 8-pin to 12-pin adapter in the packaging. Nvidia has once more delivered a super-compact PCB with this FE card, which makes the whole shroud far smaller than the RTX 3080.

Despite coming with two front-loaded fans the spinner at the tail of the card is there to amplify the airflow across the heatpipes and that does seem to aid the cooling performance of this smart little GPU.

The RTX 3070 also offers up Nvidia's reliable driver stack, the GeForce Experience app, ShadowPlay's recording, and the new Broadcast suite, the impressive Reflex latency-spiking setup, and the latent potential of RTX IO bringing the next-gen consoles' most potent feature to the PC. And of course, you have ray tracing and the ever-improving DLSS enhancements.

That's a lot to add onto the impressive raw performance that the RTX 3070 offers, and it does make a difference to a lot of people.

Nvidia's xx70 series of cards is often the real sweet spot for PC gamers, and the RTX 3070 is ever that. This is the Ampere card which represents a genuine performance upgrade for the vast majority of us, at a price that we can almost swallow. For all those people who sat on their GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti cards throughout the RTX 20-series, now really is the time to upgrade.

Read our full Nvidia RTX 3070 review (Founders Edition).

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5. AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT

If you’ve money to burn

Occasional RTX 3090 performance……but cheaper!Can lag behind RTX 3080 at timesMediocre ray-tracing performance

The RTX 3090 may have sat unchallenged at the top rungs of graphics performance at launch, but it wouldn't be long until AMD rustled together a challenger in the RX 6900 XT, or 'Big Navi.' The RX 6900 XT hopes to knock Ampere's finest from its perch on high and send it spiralling back down to Earth. And it gets kind of close, too, with 4K performance a little off the pace of the RTX 3090—and all for one-third off the asking price.

For that reason, it's simply the better buy for any PC gamer without any ulterior motives of the pro-creator variety. But there's a reason it's not number one in our graphics card guide today, and that's simply due to the fact it's not that much better than an RTX 3080, and sometimes not at all. It's another $300 on top of the RTX 3080's recommended price tag, and you'd hope for higher performance in both rasterized and ray tracing workloads. Yet, inevitably its ray-tracing acceleration lags behind the competition.

Even within AMD's line-up, there's no pressing argument to pick this up over more-affordable offerings. With a $350 price premium over the RX 6800 XT, the RX 6900 XT offers little return on your sizeable investment—the RX 6900 XT is 53% more expensive than the RX 6800 XT yet offers just 5.25% more performance in games.

That's why it's strange that AMD is making a point of the RX 6900 XT being a card built for 'gaming first'. Even Nvidia didn't make that mistake, billing the RTX 3090 as a pro-creator card with a substantial increase in memory capacity over the second-run gaming card below to help justify the cost.

It's far more difficult to justify the cost of the RX 6900 XT, sharing as many qualities with far cheaper cards as it does and with the slight performance gain it's able to deliver from its few upgrades.

While I'm a big fan of RDNA 2 and the leaps AMD RTG has made to get it to compete at this level in a short period of time are impressive, the RX 6900 XT is simply not its finest form. It's not the easiest card to recommend for the vast majority of gamers, even those that have their sights set on the high-end. For most, the RTX 3080 is still the card to beat.

But the RX 6900 XT does come with assurances that the RTX 3080 can't make, such as its 16GB of GDDR6 memory, which is a whole 6GB greater than the 10GB of (faster) GDDR6X memory on the green team card. With that in mind, for raw gaming alone, the RX 6900 XT is a cheaper alternative to the RTX 3090. It's still a victim of its own extreme price tag, though.

Read our full AMD RX 6900 XT review.

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6. Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti

The new king of GeForce gaming

Superb 4K performanceNearly an RTX 3090 for less cashExcellent ray tracing capabilityA lot pricier than the RTX 3080Power hungry at 350WRuns pretty hot

The RTX 3080 Ti isn't the mightiest GeForce graphics card that Nvidia makes. That accolade originally went to the RTX 3090, by a hair, and was more recently claimed by the RTX 3090 Ti. Though when all is said and benchmarked, it is the uber high-end RTX 3080 Ti that we'd recommend to any PC gamer looking to go all out on their next build.

The arrival of the Ampere generation did a lot to diminish the awkwardness or fiddly nature of 4K gaming, but the RTX 3080 Ti truly squashes it. Setting up for high performance 4K gaming remains a pricey investment, but you needn't be as cautious as we once had to be on a game-by-game basis. You can relatively comfortably set your game to high or ultra settings and get comfortable, even high, frame rates at 4K.

The last thing you want when gaming at 4K is to turn down graphics quality settings, and with the RTX 3080 Ti you shouldn't have to nearly as much as we've come to expect at 3840 x 2160.

The RTX 3080 Ti tends to fall a little behind the RTX 3090, although it appears the more expensive card only sees marginal benefit for an increase in core counts and memory—the RTX 3080 Ti is only single percentage points off the pace.

With performance close to the RTX 3090 at 4K, the RTX 3080 Ti is as much a gaming graphics card as its progenitor. With a vast bounty of CUDA Cores and speedy GDDR6X memory, this card demolishes any game you can throw at it with relative ease. It's also more than capable of real-time ray tracing, courtesy of 80 RT Cores.

The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti remains an impressively powerful graphics card despite some inflexibility ingrained in the price—it will see some save a few pennies on ultra-high-end gaming PC builds and still claim top performance. The Ampere architecture is excellent, and stuffing more of it under that unassuming black and (polished) grey shroud simply makes for a great gaming chip.

It does, then, achieve what it set out to do: break the back of just about any game, API, or graphics-intensive task, even at 4K, and do so in a way that appeals directly to gamers' sensibilities. Though it's not quite the high-end price-to-performance champion the RTX 3080 is, the RTX 3080 Ti FE is in small part a better buy than an RTX 3090 FE.

The reason we don't rate this card higher up in our list of the best graphics cards, however, is down to its price. Launching at $1,200, it's only a stone's throw away from the $1,499 RTX 3090. Massively inflated pricing, or lack of stock, notwithstanding.

Read our full Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti review (Founders Edition).

(Image credit: Future)

7. Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 12GB

Nvidia’s shot at a more affordable Ampere GPU

Ready for 60fps at 1440p or greaterDecent gen-on-gen performance improvementMore readily available to purchase in pre-built PCsNot always massively faster than an RTX 2060RTX 3060 Ti is a better buy at $399

The decision to load the RTX 3060 with 12GB of GDDR6 memory appeared a strange one at first, and in many ways it still is. It's more memory than the RTX 3080, after all, albeit slower stuff, and it tops out the RTX 3060 Ti too. However, the RTX 3060 wields it well, managing to dispatch the RTX 2060 by a large margin in most games, and by enough of a gap in the rest to make it worthwhile.

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And we're not going to turn our noses up at 12GB of VRAM when 6GB is the likely alternative.

Perhaps the most newsworthy shake-up for the Nvidia RTX 3060 came with the announcement of a hash rate limiter, which was designed to keep the card from operating at its full capability while mining Ethereum, the crypto of choice for GPU mining. Nvidia hoped that'd sway miners towards its new CMP line-up, built from off-cut GPUs not fit for gaming consumption, while supposedly leaving more GeForce cards for gamers. It didn't stop the card from selling out of course.

With a decent generation-on-generation improvement and plenty of speed at 1080p and 1440p, the RTX 3060 12GB is a graphics card easily argued for.

It's also nominally cheaper than the RTX 2060 was on launch day, though it's not so easy to find it as a discrete number nowadays. That said, this card often crops up within pre-built gaming PCs, and for a decent price all-inclusive too.

The RTX 3060 Ti remains the mid-range champion. The Nvidia RTX 3060 strays a little too far from the pack of high-end Ampere to have the same impact generation on generation. But in that same breath, it must be said that the RTX 3060 is a fine upgrade for a 10-series or older card, especially if at close to the MSRP, and one that will likely see you confidently through the next few years of major game releases.

Read our full Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 12GB review (Zotac Twin Edge).

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8. Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050

The best sub-$300 graphics card, in theory

DLSS and ray tracing supportWay faster than an RX 6500 XTShould be at least RTX 2060 performanceLong term stock and pricing unknowable

There is no graphics card under $300 that we would recommend bar the GeForce RTX 3050. Though it didn't take much to defeat AMD's Radeon RX 6500 XT. The RTX 3050 is still a difficult GPU to recommend heartily, however, as it's neither readily available nor as cheap as it should be.

Graphics card FAQ

How do I get a GPU in the the graphics card shortage?

Even though prices are starting to drop down to normal levels, it’s still difficult to find cards in stop for long periods of time. You could attempt to manually refresh every store page in the hopes of striking gold on the next restock; that’s one way to go about it. Or, you could sign up for a trusty app that goes about trawling major retailers for you. It’s not a bot that tries to snap up stock the wrong way; it just does the refreshing, so you don’t have to.

We've had success with the app HotStock in the UK, and sites such as Stock Informer offer a similar service in the US, although we've not used this service to score stock personally.

Similarly, you can find plenty of free Discord servers with dedicated stock alert bots and eagle-eyed community members, such as the popular StockDrops server.

And don't forget Twitch streams. Those dedicated to finding your stock will often fire out a deafening klaxon the moment stock appears. We recommend checking out Falcodrin on Twitch for Nvidia GPUs, but there are plenty of kind souls out there offering a similar service.

Is there an easy way to get a new graphics card?

It’s not for everyone, but the best way to ensure you’ll receive a graphics card this year, and a modern one at something close to MSRP, is to buy a prebuilt gaming PC. It’s a worthy consideration if you’re considering a total rebuild at some point in the future, at least. System builders appear to enjoy a more stable supply of graphics cards, and while some still expect delays, you are at least guaranteed a PC with GPU in situ eventually.

Which is better GTX or RTX?

The older GTX prefix is now used to denote older Nvidia graphics cards which don’t have the extra AI and ray tracing silicon that the RTX-level cards do. This RTX prefix was introduced three years ago with the RTX 20-series, and highlights which cards have GPUs which sport both the Tensor Cores and RT Cores necessary for real-time ray tracing and Deep Learning Super Sampling.

Is ray tracing only for RTX cards?

The RTX prefix is only used to denote cards which house Nvidia GPUs with dedicated ray tracing hardware, but they are still using the same DirectX Raytracing API Microsoft has created, and which is used by AMD’s RDNA 2 GPUs. These AMD GPUs are able to suport real-time ray tracing, though with a higher performance impact than on Nvidia’s GPUs.

Intel’s upcoming Xe-HPG GPUs, with the Alchemist graphics cards first to use them, will also support ray tracing using Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing API when they launch early next year, too.

Is SLI or CrossFire still a thing?

If you’re looking for maximum performance, you used to run two cards in SLI or CrossFire. However, it’s become increasingly common for major games to ignore multi-GPU users completely. That includes all DXR games. There’s also the fact that fewer of the next-gen cards actually support the linking of two cards. On the Nvidia side, only the $1,500 RTX 3090 comes with NVLink connections, only for creative apps.

So, no. It’s not a thing.

Do I need a 4K capable graphics card?

The obvious answer is: Only if you have a 4K gaming monitor. But there are other things to consider here, such as what kinds of games do you play? If frame rates are absolutely king for you, and you’re into ultra-competitive shooters, then you want to be aiming for super high fps figures. And, right now, you’re better placed to do that at either 1440p or 1080p resolutions.

That said, the more games, such as CoD: Warzone that incorporates DLSS, the more Nvidia cards will be capable of making a close approximation of 4K visuals on your 4K monitor, but at higher frame rates.

What’s a Founders Edition graphics card?

The Founders Edition cards are simply Nvidia’s in-house designs for its graphics cards, as opposed to those designed by its partners. These are usually reference cards, meaning they run at stock clocks.

Briefly, for the RTX 20-series, Nvidia decided to offer Founders Editions with factory overclocks. These had made it a little difficult to compare cards, as Founders Edition cards give us a baseline for performance, but Nvidia has since returned to producing them as reference again.

The best graphics cards in 2022