Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
1080p at 60fps for next to nix.
This price point is about as low as you can go and still get a ‘real’ gaming GPU. For budget gamers, what you’re aiming for at this price is a card that can average around 60fps at 1080p in modern games, and you can generally get that with the 1050 Ti, provided you turn the detail settings down to Medium/Normal.
This end of the market is surprisingly competitive, with a few cards hovering around the $200 price point that are worth considering, including AMD’s Radeon RX 560 — recently launched, and largely based on the RX 460 from mid-2016, but with 15% more cores and slightly faster clock speeds. Nvidia’s budget cards (the GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti) are from late-2016, so they’re also getting long in the tooth.
Ultimately, though, if you have $200 to spend, you want to spend all of it. The RX 560 is selling for around $160 to $170 on the street — it isn’t too bad a card, and it’s essentially neck and neck with the GTX 1050 on bang-for-buck. But spend an extra $30–$40 and you’ll be able to pick up a card that’s about 20–25% faster — the 1050 Ti. Like the GTX 1050, it’s based on Nvidia’s most recent Pascal architecture, so they’re cut from good stock. However, they’re also cut down quite deeply. At around $170, the slower GTX 1050 proves to be quite good bang-for-buck if you’re looking strictly at 1080p performance in current games, but its 2GB of VRAM is going to find it hitting a wall sooner rather than later. The 1050 Ti doubles that to 4GB, and it’s about 15–20% faster overall. That makes it a good deal more futureproof — and, in our book, worth the extra cost.
Verdict
While there are cheaper options out there, this one takes home the gold for all-round value.