The Best Graphics Cards of 2017

What is the benefit of your display card for the computer? The 10 best graphics cards you can use to make your computer and games look better. What are the best video cards you can use?

10. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Graphics Card

The GTX 1050 is a slightly toned down version of the GTX 1050 Ti, for an even lesser price, thereby making this, the best graphics card you can buy for under $100. The card offers a floating point performance of 1.8 TFlops, which is the same computing performance that the highest end $3500 MacBook Pro packs. It has the same memory bandwidth as the GTX 1050 Ti at 112 GB/s, but the VRAM and CUDA cores have been cut down to 2GB GDDR5 and 640 cores respectively. The GTX 1050 is usually found on laptops like the Dell XPS 15 and Inspiron 15 7000 series. If your budget is too low and your money doesn’t allow for a GTX 1050 Ti, then this is the card you should be going for, without a doubt.

9. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Graphics Card

Although the GTX 1050 Ti performs noticeably lower than the RX 470 from AMD, it’s priced considerably lower than the latter as well. The price to performance ratio of the GTX 1050 Ti is what makes this card a steal. This game should quench your thirst for 1080p gaming if you’re willing to turn down the graphical settings to medium or high for decent frame rates. The GTX 1050 Ti packs 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM, 768 CUDA cores, 112 GB/s memory bandwidth and 2.1 TFlops of floating point performance. All of these for an asking price of just under $140. Well, with this graphics card, NVIDIA has finally managed to satisfy the budget gaming market.

8. AMD Radeon RX 470 Video Card

If you’re looking for a sub-$200 graphics card, this is pretty much it. It’s performance lies between the RX 480 and GTX 1050 Ti. It performs noticeably better than the lower priced GTX 1050 but falls short of the RX 480. This card should still be able to handle all the games on high settings at Full HD resolution while maintaining a stable 60 fps frame rate on most of them. The RX 470 boasts 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM, 211 GB/s memory bandwidth and 4.9 TFlops of peak floating point performance. 

Remember the time when sub-$200 graphics cards were the worst performing ones, especially due to the price to performance ratio? Well, AMD has finally managed to solve that with their Polaris line-up of graphics cards. The RX 470 is currently available on Amazon for as low as $184.

7. AMD Radeon RX 480 Gaming Graphics Card

Although the GTX 1060 manages to edge out the RX 480 on DirectX 11 performance tests, it’s exactly the opposite on DirectX 12 performance tests, as the RX 480 offers slightly better frame rate on most of the games, thanks to better DirectX 12 driver support from AMD. Similar to the GTX 1060, the RX 480 is also available in two variants – 4 GB and 8 GB. It’s also slightly more affordable than the GTX 1060, as the 4 GB variant is available for just under $190 on Amazon. It boasts a floating point performance of 5.8 TFlops, which sounds good on paper, but when it comes to real-time performance, we barely see any gains over the GTX 1060.

In addition to being considered as the most affordable “VR-Ready” GPU, this card should be able to handle all the latest games on the highest settings at 1080p resolution. A slightly overclocked 8 GB variant from Asus can be purchased for a price similar to the overclocked GTX 1060.

6. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Budget Graphics Card

This mid-range graphics card from NVIDIA is aimed at budget minded consumers promising stellar gaming performance at 1080p Full HD resolution. It manages to maintain a stable frame rate of 60 fps on almost all of the games at 1080p and competes against AMD’s RX 480 for the budget market. Performance-wise, it manages to edge out the RX 480 in most games while gaming in DirectX 11. The GTX 1060 features 6 GB of GDDR5 memory, although it’s also available in a 3 GB variant for a slightly lesser price.

It also packs 4.4 TFlops of computing performance and a memory bandwidth of 192 GB/s. The 6 GB factory overclocked variant of the GTX 1060 from Zotac is currently available on Amazon for a price of just under $240 and the 3 GB variant can be bought for under $200.

5. AMD Radeon R9 Fury X Graphics Card

Finally, we’ve got an AMD graphics card on the list. While we’re still waiting for the announcement regarding the top of the line AMD Vega GPUs, which is expected to be available by the second quarter of this year, don’t underestimate the Fury X. Although the card is almost 2 years old old, its still a capable card for QHD (1440p) gaming, falling just short of the GTX 1070. It’s also the world’s first card to feature High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), featuring 4 GB of VRAM, 512 GB/s memory bandwidth and a double precision floating point performance of 8.6 TFlops, which is still quite impressive, especially considering the time it was made available.

The graphics card has received multiple price cuts over a span of almost 2 years and it’s currently available on Amazon for as low as $436, which is still quite steep if you pit it against the newer, faster GTX 1070.

4. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 GPU

This graphics card is primarly aimed at QHD (1440p) gaming rather than 4K gaming, but make no mistake, this card is still a beast for the price it’s available at. During its announcement last year, NVIDIA claimed it performs slightly better than the older TITAN X Maxwell which was released in 2015. When the benchmarks were out, people realized that all the claims were in fact, true, as the card was able to edge out the TITAN X in most of the tests. Featuring an 8 GB of GDDR5 VRAM, 6.46 TFlops of computing performance and memory bandwidth of 256 GB/s for an asking price of just $379 is what makes this graphics card a steal.

3. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Graphics Card

Well, if you were expecting the TITAN X Pascal at the third spot, I’m sorry to let you know that it has been completely replaced by the TITAN Xp. Also, it wouldn’t make any sense at all. So, here’s our third spot, last year’s GTX 1080. It received a price cut after the GTX 1080 Ti was made official recently. GTX 1080 is still quite capable for 4K gaming, being able to maintain decent frame rates on all the games. It features 8 GB of GDDR5X memory, 320 GB/s of memory bandwidth and 9 TFlops of computing performance. However, a supercharged version of the GTX 1080, boasting faster RAM expected to be made available by the end of this month. Although the asking price is $599, you will be able to find the GTX 1080 for as low as $530 on Amazon.

2. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming Graphics Card

Well, this one used to be the fastest graphics card money could buy, until NVIDIA ruined everything with the announcement of TITAN Xp a couple weeks ago. Promising 5% performance over the TITAN X Pascal during it’s launch, it’s easily capable of handling almost all of the games at 4K resolution with a stable 60 fps frame rate. Under the hood, it packs 11.3 TFlops of computing performance and 11 GB of GDDR5X memory.

The base and boost clocks have been slightly bumped up from the Titan X Pascal. The asking price for the GTX 1080 Ti is same as the launch price of the GTX 1080 at $699, which makes it a much more compelling option than the TITAN XP.

1. NVIDIA TITAN Xp Graphics Card for VR and 4K Gaming

Hands down, the most powerful graphics card ever made. Aimed at prosumers, the latest TITAN Xp card is nowhere close to affordable for most of the people because of its price tag of more than 1200 dollars. The TITAN Xp is basically a mid-cycle refresh to last year’s TITAN X Pascal, featuring a fully enabled GP102 GPU, promising 10-15% performance improvement over its predecessor for the same price. While it might sound like a sweet deal, keep in mind that the GTX 1080 Ti can be bought for almost half the price if you’re willing to sacrifice that 10% performance gain.

This card is definitely not for everyone, however if you still want the bragging rights of owning the most powerful graphics card right now, we won’t stop you. 4K gaming at 60 fps is an absolute breeze, as it can comfortably reach 80-90 fps on most of the latest games available right now. It’s currently available on Amazon at a much higher price than the official number given by NVIDIA.