H OW W E T E S T

While the CPU is the brain of your PC, games will push your graphics card to its limits. It’s the component you’ll want to upgrade most frequently. For gaming systems, it’s also likely the most expensive part. It’s critical to find one with the best ratio of price to performance.

With the new RTX 20-series cards from Nvidia, it’s easy to get caught up in a race to the top. Smooth framerates at 4K? I’d like that, but would I pay as much for a GPU as I would on a midrange PC? Probably not. For this test, I’ve gathered Nvidia’s three shiny and new RTX cards, along with the top AMD and Nvidia cards from the previous generation. I’ve rounded out our testing with one of my favorite midrange cards—the sort of card most of us can afford.

I’ve tested these on 12 modern games at 4K, 1440p, and 1080p resolutions. My test system uses an overclocked Core i7-8700K with 16GB DDR43200 CL14 memory, on a fast SSD. This is to minimize the impact of other components on performance, and lets me zero in on the graphics cards.