15 best graphics cards in the world today: Updated

Best graphics cards: Overview

What graphics card should you buy? Our 15 best graphics cards in the world article is regularly updated.

PC gaming is currently going from strength to strength. Upcoming games such as Bioshock Infinite and The Darkness II look set to raise the graphical bar even higher, and recent games look phenomenal on the PC. Just compare Skyrim running on a decent PC and graphics card to it running on an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 and the difference is like night and day. Plus as the consoles stagnate due to their ageing technology, it's something that's only set to continue.

In order to experience such games at their best, though, you're going to need to ensure you have a machine that's up to the task. And by machine, we're primarily focusing on your graphics card.

So welcome to our best graphics card article – it's constantly updated with the very latest best graphics cards.

It's the graphics card that does the serious work when it comes to rendering your games, and the more effects and higher resolutions you throw at it, the more is asked of that graphics card.

It's important to pick your graphics card so that it works well with your display, or displays. There's no point, for instance, trying to power a 30-inch screen with the likes of a GeForce GTS 450.

By the same notion, running a standard 20-inch screen with the likes of an AMD Radeon HD 6990 won't begin to tap into the card's power.

As a quick rule of thumb, whatever you spent on your screen, you're going to want to spend a similar amount to power it. Roughly.

The question is, which one of the many graphics cards out there should you actually spend your hard earned cash on? Here TechRadar highlights the top 15 cards worth considering. We cover the notable cards from the last generation, the best all-rounders for most PC gamers and the £550 monsters that can handle multi-screen outputs.

In this guide we'll let you know what's hot, what's cool and what are the fastest GPUs available right now and worthy of your time.

Best of all, because we're now enjoying the second generation of DirectX 11 hardware, every card we look at here is capable of rendering the latest, funkiest DirectX 11 games.

So how does your graphics card stand in our countdown, and is it time for an upgrade?

Graphics card glossary

There are a lot of terms and acronyms that get bandied around when talking about graphics cards, and not a lot of explanation to go along with them.

Before we delve into the meat of the feature let's take a minute to clear things up a little.

GPU – This is the graphics processing unit, the chip at the heart of the graphics card. Many cards use the same GPU but partner it with different components and at different clockspeeds to produce slower or faster graphics cards.

GDDR – Graphics Double Data Rate memory is the specific kind of memory that is used on graphics cards.

ROPs – The Render Output unit comes into play during the final stages in the rendering process, bringing together the data from each of the memory buffers in the graphics card's local memory. The more of them you have, the better off you are.

CUDA – Compute Unified Device Architecture is a coding language Nvidia invented to allow parallel computing on its range of GPUs. From its 8 series upwards all its cards can use CUDA to speed up parallel processing applications, such as video encoding, faster than your computer's CPU.

PhysX – Originally an accelerator chip and software layer from the small company Ageia, Nvidia bought up PhysX and has now applied it to its GPUs, again from the 8 series forward. It allows for more advanced physics simulations, such as liquid or cloth, in games that have been coded with the PhysX software included.

Crossfire and SLI – These are the relevant multi-GPU configurations from both AMD and Nvidia. Both allow multiple graphics cards to be connected together to increase the rendering performance. Historically this has been fraught with driver issues and diminishing returns for the extra cards, but as the latest cards have been released we are getting closer to doubling the performance by adding in a second card.

PCB – The Printed Circuit Board is the physical board that graphics cards (and all other micro-electronics) have their components attached to. The boards are printed with conductive pathways between the relevant components instead of using physical wires.

DirectX – Microsoft's DirectX is a collection of its own proprietary APIs (application programming interfaces) for dealing with multimedia tasks on its own operating systems. The Direct3D part is specifically to do with 3D graphics and utilises hardware acceleration if there is a GPU in place to take advantage of it.

Tesselation – This is one of the key buzzwords to come from Microsoft's latest graphical API, DirectX 11. It's designed to add extra geometry to a simple polygon, using displacement maps to tell the GPU where to raise and lower parts of the polygon as the graphics card computes the data. The idea is to add geometry to objects in a game world without significantly impairing performance. It's set to become a key battleground in the graphics war in the coming years.

The best budget graphics cards

Getting great gaming performance doesn't have to involve breaking the bank. Here are the best budget graphics cards.

5. AMD Radeon HD 7750 - £80

The AMD Radeon HD 7750 launched at the right side of £80, making it an altogether friendlier proposal than the AMD Radeon 7970 which goes for around £440. These new-gen AMD cards boast some excellent power efficiency by shutting off all but one core when your system enters power save mode.

But what's this HD 7750 missing out on to hit that price point? The HD 7750 is quicker than its big Nvidia rival, the GTX 550 Ti, and its predecessor, the HD 5770 - but not the HD 6770. General performance is limited primarily by a slender 128-bit frame buffer, however the die-shrink down from 45nm to 28nm and increase in transistor count that comes with it gives this Southern Islands card a definite edge in tessellation-heavy tasks. You can also eke out some modest improvements through overclocking, with big core and memory clock increases running smoothly and without crashes - we had ours cranked up to 900 MHz on the core clock from the 800 MHz stock setting without any glitching or hangs.

4. AMD Radeon HD 6670 - £59

It's all very well talking about £600 graphics cards that need PC cases the size of Andre the Giant to house them, and a mini Arc reactor to keep them powered, but how many of us are actually going to drop a month's wages on such a pixel-pushing behemoth? More likely you're going to be looking at a maximum outlay of around £150-£200.

And currently there's a lot of graphics processing power available all the way down the price spectrum too. AMD though has come in, GPUs-blazing, at a sub-£100 price point with a DirectX 11 graphics card, the Radeon HD 6670.

At under £70, it's a decent compromise between price and performance, and if you're really on a tight budget you'll still be able to game at your 22-inch panel's native res, albeit with a few graphical niceties dialled down.

As ever in this tightly compressed graphics card market there's a more powerful alternative, but it's a few pounds away. For less than a tenner you're looking at XFX's single-slot Radeon HD 5770 (http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/pc-components/graphics-cards/xfx-radeon-hd-5770-926213/review), and that's rather close to being a bone fide gaming GPU.

3. Nvidia GeForce GTS 450 - £81

The Nvidia GeForce GTS 450 is in serious gamers' graphics card territory, without hitting the big prices.

Nvidia doesn't have a great lineup in the budget segment of cards, and anything lower than this here GeForce GTS 450 isn't really worth a look for those with any passing interest in frame rates. This venerable card does have some gaming chops to offer, and for the £81 cost it's a tough card to argue against.

Immediately you can feel the step up in performance terms with this gaming-oriented card. With DiRT 3 and Far Cry 2 we saw the card hit 32fps and 52fps respectively, and that's with 4x AA running at very playable speeds. You could drop this into any system and be hitting gaming speeds across most modern titles at the modest 1680 x 1050 resolution. Should you not mind taking the performance hit, this card will also give you access to PhysX extras in game and 3D Vision, if you so wish.

2. AMD Radeon HD 6850 - £118

To be honest we were rather unforgiving of the HD 6850, at launch it was pricing itself almost out of the market.

It was going toe-to-toe with Nvidia's 1GB GTX 460 which, at the time, just about had it pipped in performance terms. It was also a little pricier than the GTX 460, coming in around the £160 mark.

Again though time has been kind to the HD 6850. The price has dropped a huge amount, indeed AMD recently announced a further price-drop bringing the card down to less than £120, which for a spec like this is a serious bargain.

AMD's constant driver updates too have meant that performance has increased over time as well. The Barts Pro GPU core at the heart of the HD 6850 is a reworking of the Cypress Pro that made the HD 5850 such an impressive card back in the day. It doesn't have the huge number of Radeon Cores the HD 5850 had, but still maintains the ROPs count of 32.

1. AMD Radeon HD 5770 - £100

For budget-conscious gamers, the HD 5770 should be a serious consideration. Have a scout around the online retailers, and you'll see that examples can be had for less than £100 now.

Offering competent performance at the mainstream 22-inch resolution of 1680 x 1050, it also comes with the promise of cool-running, quiet operation – a trademark of AMD's last-gen design philosophy.

However, try to crank the shinier graphical elements – such as Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering – too high, and the card starts to run out of grunt.

AMD's EyeFinity technology, which enables multi-screen scaling, is a very real option with the 5770, although we wouldn't recommend the 5770 for multi-screen gaming; it just doesn't have the throughput for gaming at huge resolutions.

The really interesting thing about the HD 5770 is what its price represents. At these low prices, our thoughts turn to CrossFire setups. For under £200, you can net yourself a twin-card setup that offers kick-ass performance at mid-range resolutions.

If you're content with that 22-inch monitor and want zingy performance on a budget, this CF setup is probably the cheapest way to achieve it... Oh, and did we mention the 5770 is DX11 capable? Yum.

Best mid-range graphics cards

These mid-range graphics cards represent the sensible money for most PC gamers – combining great raw performance with a price tag that won't make you pass out.

If you're looking to power a screen with a native resolution of 1680 x 1050 or 1920 x 1080, then you really don't need to get anything more powerful than this. At least given the current slew of games.

These cards also hold an ace up their sleeve if you have an SLI or CrossFire motherboard in your rig, because they enable you to boost the performance of your machine by adding in a second card as your needs progress.

5. Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti - £128

Originally designed to replace the GTS 450, the GTX 550 Ti has recently found itself being pushed out of the frame by the Radeon HD 6790 (which we're looking at next). Yes, it's a next-generation graphics card, but is that alone enough to make it relevant? Not really.

As with the Radeon HD 6790, The Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti suffers comparison with the slower, but more-affordable GTS 450 and the faster, and only a bit more pricey GeForce GTX 460. Indeed it's testament to the GTX 460 that it still manages to define this end of the market.

If you've got a 20-inch or 22-inch screen, then the GTX 550 Ti is briefly worth considering, because it will produce playable frame rates at 1680 x 1050 at reasonable settings.

Unfortunately, unless there's a bizarre disease that specifically targets the GTX 460 and removes it from the world, we'd recommend hunting down that older card every time.

4. Asus EAH 6770 DC - £118

Asus has released the highest-clocked passively-cooled graphics card around in this, the Asus EAH 6770 DC.

And it's whisper quiet too.

There was a time, not too long ago, when if you wanted to build a silent or very quiet PC you knew you were going to have to sacrifice any notion of serious gameplay to get the quietness needed for the system you were building.

Well, helping to kick that idea out of touch, Asus has introduced the EAH6770 DC SL/2DI/1GD5. A really snappy name to remember that mouthful is. The card combines AMD's HD6770 core with, it must be said, a pretty massive passive heatsink and cooling array.

It's created a passive card that makes a pretty good fist of playing today's demanding games even at high resolutions.

Although size-wise it's not a card for the more compact of PC cases.

3. AMD Radeon HD 7850 - £190

The HD 7850 pretty much finalises AMD's current plans for the Southern Islands line up, bar the crazy-expensive dual-GPU New Zealand card which is likely waiting on Nvidia's new cards.

The AMD Radeon HD 7850 is also the card that's arguably got the most chance of being successful out of this family. At the price it looks likely to retail at, the sub-£200 mark, it could well be the highest-selling of AMD's mid-range cards.

The fact AMD has filled out these lower-caste cards with all the same features as their higher-end brethren is refreshing, as is the fact that we'll get all the HD 7850 goodness in such small footprints as 7.8-inches.

Again, it's the same Graphics Core Next story – the overclocking headroom is immense. The OC path is the only way to get the most out of these cards

2. Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti - £154

The GTX 560 Ti is essentially the direct replacement for the awesome GTX 460.

Though that's not actually how it's running. The performance of the GTX 560 Ti actually means it's retiring the GTX 470 with the GTX 570 effectively retiring the GTX 480 and the GTX 580 just standing on it's own. In competition terms the GTX 560 Ti is being pitched directly against AMD's sub-£200 Radeon HD 6870, but is also touted by Nvidia as something that can also take on AMD's Cayman-powered Radeon HD 6950.

The GTX 560 Ti hits Nvidia's marketing claims of 30% better performance over the GTX 460 and isn't asking any more for it than it did for the previous generation.

The impressive overclocking capabilities of the card are also worth special mention, especially considering the card is recommended to come in below the £200 mark.

1. AMD Radeon HD 6950 - £210

Every few years a graphics card is released that sums up that generation better than any other. We're talking about the likes of the 8800GT and the budget-focused Radeon X1950 Pro. Cards that transcend their immediate markets and time frames and stand up for years to come as being bang on the money.

The AMD Radeon HD 6950 defines the market. Cheaper cards look up to it for its raw power, while the top-end cards are mindful of the sheer value it offers and are rightly fearful of what can be achieved when two are cajoled together in CrossFire.

The Radeon HD 6950 isn't a subtle reworking of the first generation of DX11 graphics in the same way that Barts is, but rather a complete reworking of the inner logic of AMD's graphics chips. And it's an incredible card for it.

The performance is incredible, at console-breaking 1080p resolutions, and in DX11 games it punches well above its weight. If you're looking for a no-nonsense card that will last you until DX12 rolls out, and don't plan on running insanely high resolutions, this is the card for you.

Those with the stomach for it will discover that they can turn their £200 Radeon HD 6950 into a fully fledged 6970 with a BIOS flash as well. Here's a card that both AMD and Nvidia are going to be hard pushed to beat any time soon. It's simply incredible.

The top graphics cards in the world today

The following five cards represent the pinnacle of modern graphics performance. These are cards that are beyond the sweet spot of what's needed in order to enjoy the latest games at reasonable resolutions.

The following cards are essentially here to fill the niches in gamers' requirements that the likes of the AMD Radeon HD 6950 can't satisfy. Here we're talking about outputting to 27-inch and 30-inch panels that have a native resolution of 2560 x 1600. Or multiple screen displays made up of three or more 22-inch or 24-inch panels.

This end of the market is complicated somewhat by the advances made in SLI and CrossFire. These twin-graphics card pairing technologies now genuinely provide the performance improvements over single cards that you would hope for – 90-95% is often the norm.

A pair of cheaper cards in SLI can outperform the following cards too, which means the requirement of having a supporting motherboard is generally the only thing holding you back.

5. Nvidia GeForce GTX 570 - £280

Value for money may seem like a strange metric to pull out of the hat at this end of the graphics market, but the GTX 570 does a decent turn at making your investment feel prudent rather than simply excessive.

Essentially a replacement for the soon to be retired GTX 480, here's a card that does everything that Nvidia's last-generation top dog did, but without the problems that card suffered from when it shipped.

The cooler is quiet and more efficient, and the raw power on offer from this sub-£300 card is stunning. This is a slightly cut down version of the GTX 580, losing one Streaming Multiprocessor (or 32 CUDA cores, to put it another way) and 8 ROPs.

The GTX 570's core operates at 732MHz as opposed to the GTX 580's 772MHz, while the 1,280MB of GGDR5 memory speeds along at 950MHz, as opposed to the GTX 580's 1,002MHz.

For the money, there isn't a lot out there that can touch the GTX 570 in terms of pure performance, apart from possibly a pair of GTX 460s in SLI – but such a configuration requires an SLI motherboard.

4. AMD Radeon HD 7970 - £450

AMD blinked first and opted to release its brand new graphics card architecture before Nvidia did. It was a brave move by AMD though. Bringing out a radically different graphics design spec, compared with its previous vector processors, in the same year as it brought us a brand new CPU architecture.

It may well be one of the fastest single-GPU cards around at the moment, but there is still little justification for the price. There are very few of us out there running a monitor capable of the eye-watering resolutions of 2560x1600 so realistically a 1920x1080 resolution is going to be more likely.

And at that resolution the excellent £365 Nvidia GTX 580 is all the card you're going to need. The overclocking potential of the AMD Radeon HD 7970 is incredible.

Topping 1,100MHz is a huge overclock and makes it almost comparable to the previous generation of dual-GPU cards.

3. Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 - £395

Created as the spiritual successor to the much-maligned GTX 480 (http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/pc-components/graphics-cards/nvidia-geforce-gtx-480-679629/review), Nvidia took the problems it had with its first DX11 graphics card and corrected them with the GTX 580.

This means you get a full-fat core boasting 512 CUDA cores and 48 ROPS, not one that has been cut down to achieve better yields. And all running at a healthy 772MHz with a 1,002MHz memory bus for the 1,384MB of GDDR5 memory.

Not everyone needs the power of a GTX 580 – only those with serious screens to power. This is a market targeted by the twin-GPU Goliaths that are the AMD Radeon HD 6990 and Nvidia's own GeForce GTX 590.

The GTX 580 still has the nod, however, because those cards have had to be throttled back to fit on a single card, while here you know nothing is being constrained. This is still the most sensible option for anyone looking for unfettered speed from a single GPU.

2. AMD Radeon HD 7950

AMD is really putting the pressure on Nvidia now with its second release of the new AMD HD 7000 graphics card generation, the AMD Radeon HD 7950. We've been pushing the Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 as the go-to gamer's card since it was released, but the HD 7950 has that beat and for a good chunk of cash less than the Nvidia card.

And that's just at stock speeds. When you start overclocking this card the difference in performance increases hugely.The AMD HD 7950 could also be a massive hit for the CrossFire crew too, as for £700 you'll find yourself with an insanely quick graphics setup.

And for £300 less than an equivalent HD 7970 array. The AMD Radeon HD 7950 is one hell of an impressive pixel-pusher, and Nvidia is going to have to work incredibly hard with its Kepler cards to best this excellent card.

1. Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 - £410

It may have been a long while coming but the Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 is on the way to balance up the next-generation graphics market.

AMD launched its Radeon HD 7970 in December so it's a bit of gap that Nvidia has to make up with its latest top-end GPU.

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 is its latest £400-odd, top-of-the-line card and is now the fastest graphics card in the world. We all kind of knew that would be the case, after all Nvidia has played the waiting game with AMD, letting the competition draw first and release its entire slew of HD 7000 graphics cards.

That meant Nvidia could see how the competition was performing and ensure its engineers finalised the GTX 680 specs and set the clocks to ensure the requisite 10% performance improvement.

As it turns out this Kepler-based Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 is far more than just another big, power-hungry graphics card, relying on pure grunt alone to give it the edge.

This is actually a far more elegant card than people might give it credit for.

It's not the power-crazed GPU behemoths we're used to from Nvidia, but it's still got the performance chops and some neat extra tricks.