Graphics Card Buying Guide: The Best GPUs for 2024
The year is off to a raring start, with brand new graphics cards offering greater performance (and lower prices) to accelerate games like never before. In order to play at higher resolutions, higher detail levels, and higher frame rates, it’s a great time to treat yourself to a new GPU.
Whether you’re looking to run indie games at 1080p, esports at 1440p, AAA games at 4K resolution, or anything in-between. AMD’s RX 7000-series just keeps getting cheaper, and NVIDIA has expanded its RTX 4000 series with some amped-up Super models that raise the value of this generation.
Here are the best graphics cards you can buy in 2024, for a range of uses and prices.
Best graphics card for 1440p: NVIDIA RTX 4070 Super
One of the new kids on the block, NVIDIA’s RTX 4070 Super represents the biggest leap in specs and real-world performance over its non-Super counterpart. The RTX 4070 will continue to be sold and shipped, and still represents a great 1440p graphics card, but the RTX 4070 Super is available at a competitive price, and it is much more capable.
At 1440p resolution, it delivers around a 15% greater average frame rate than the RTX 4070. This is thanks to the increase of more than 20% to the CUDA core count, bringing the total to 7,168. Elsewhere the design remains the same, with 12GB of GDDR6X memory, which is plenty for the latest games and offers some light future-proofing against games that need more than 8GB for DirectStorage support.
The overall card does demand a little more power, with a TDP of 220W, but that’s only a 10% rise and easily handled by both the reference and aftermarket cooler options.
The 4070 Super has support for DLSS 3.0 and frame generation, supports AV1 encoding, has Tensor cores for handling NVIDIA’s new AI capabilities, and can produce high frame rates in just about anything. Ray tracing performance is excellent, and though it’s not really a card for 4K gaming, in less-demanding games it is absolutely capable of it.
Best graphics card for 1080p: Intel Arc A770
There are several great 1080p graphics cards in 2024. NVIDIA’s RTX 4060 offers awesome budget performance with solid ray tracing. AMD’s RX 7600 is also an excellent budget options for those looking to spend less. But the king of the hill at 1080p, for now, has to be Intel’s Arc A770. It has heaps of raw power to throw at any game at this resolution and can even dabble in 1440p in some games if you don’t mind playing with the in-game settings to maintain performance.
That added raw power is super-helpful in games with ray tracing, too. Combined with Intel’s ray acceleration blocks, this card is more than capable of playing even demanding games with ray tracing enabled.
The Arc A770 also supports Intel’s XeSS upscaling algorithm and AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), both of which are competitive with NVIDIA’s Deep Leaning Super Sampling (DLSS). In supporting games, the A770 can leverage the former two technologies to really boost its frame rates.
Intel’s GPUs keep getting better with each driver release, too, so there’s some real fine-wine long-term potential with this card.