Top 5 Best NVIDIA Graphics Cards in 2025

The best graphics cards and GPUs are the pixel-pushing engines of any gaming PC, with everything else coming in second. Even the best gaming CPUs will struggle to perform without a powerful GPU. No single graphics card will be ideal for everyone, so we’ve included options for every budget and mindset below. Whether you want the fastest graphics card, the best value, or the best card at a given price, we’ve got you covered.

Unlike our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, which ranks all cards based solely on performance, our list of the best graphics cards considers the entire package. Current GPU pricing, performance, features, efficiency, and availability are all important considerations, but their weighting becomes more subjective. Given all of these considerations, these are the best graphics cards currently available.

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Last update on 2025-03-27 / Affiliate links/images from Amazon.

Top 5 Best NVIDIA Graphics Cards in 2025

1.Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super

Last update on 2025-03-27 / Affiliate links/images from Amazon.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super Founders Edition is without a doubt one of the sexiest graphics cards I’ve seen in quite some time. The all-black shroud, fans, and trim give it a very sleek look. It may not have the flash of RGB bedazzled third-party cards, but it is easily the most appealing card in Nvidia’s lineup.

Other than the Super branding, this card is identical to the original RTX 4070, so it has all of the same advantages and disadvantages. It is smaller than its larger siblings, making it much more manageable in a wider range of cases.

The cooling solution is also fairly good and has plenty of power for cooling. Its 16-pin connector means that if you don’t have an ATX 3.0 power supply, you’ll need to use a two-8-pin-to-one-16-pin adapter, which might make cable management a bit of a hassle.

When it comes to the RTX 4070 Super, there is a lot to appreciate here. For the same price as the RTX 4070, you’re getting a far more SMs (56 to the RTX 4070’s 46, a 21% increase), so that also means that you’re getting a hefty upgrade in terms of CUDA cores (7,168 to 5,888), ray tracing cores (56 to 46), and tensor cores (224 to 184) over the original RTX 4070. 

You’re also getting a slightly higher base clock rate of 1,980MHz , which is about 3% faster than the base RTX 4070. For that, the RTX 4070 Super also has a 220W TGP, which unfortunately means that you’re not going to get any RTX 4070 Super cards with an 8-pin connector like you can with the RTX 4070.

Aside from that, there isn’t much difference in specifications between the RTX 4070 Super and the RTX 4070, which unfortunately includes the 12GB GDDR6X VRAM configuration. Mind you, this is plenty for 1440p gaming, but if you have one of the best 4K monitors, you’ll have to make some settings compromises if you want to game seriously at 4K.

This is a dual-slot card that is the same size as the RTX 4070 Founders Edition and uses the same cooling solution, so it will run slightly hotter due to the increased power flowing into the card, but not noticeably so.In terms of performance, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super is about as solid a graphics card as you’ll find in the midrange, offering fantastic gaming performance, while outshining the competition in non-gaming tasks like content creation and compute-heavy workloads.

2.AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE

Last update on 2025-03-27 / Affiliate links/images from Amazon.

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE was first released in China in July 2023, and according to reports, the card would be exclusive to that region.

Following the launch of the RTX Super series of GPUs last month, AMD has decided to surprise everyone by launching the RX 7900 GRE globally this week, and it appears poised to upend the midrange GPU market in a big way.

To be clear, the card that is being released globally is the same card that has already been available to Chinese consumers, so it has been extensively benchmarked for months, with much of that data freely available online for anyone to view.

This has undoubtedly fueled much of the global interest in the RX 7900 GRE since its initial release in July, and I fully expect this card to sell out quickly because it is without a doubt one of the best midrange graphics cards available.

In terms of raw synthetic performance, the RX 7900 GRE follows the familiar AMD-Nvidia pattern, with the Radeon card outperforming the GeForce card in pure rasterization, but the ray-tracing performance gap between the RX 7900 GRE and the RTX 4070 Super isn’t as wide as it might have been last generation.

Furthermore, when it comes to gaming, Nvidia’s advantage in native ray tracing is surpassed by the RX 7900 GRE once upscaling is introduced, which is unavoidable whenever ray tracing exceeds 1080p.

The RX 7900 GRE is a much more capable creative card than I expected, as long as you don’t use CUDA. However, for graphic designers, photographers, and video editors, this is a surprisingly powerful GPU for a lot less money than its competitors.

Overall, the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE isn’t so powerful that it completely knocks out Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Super, but it’s hitting Nvidia’s newest GPU a lot harder than I think Nvidia was expecting so soon after launch. Unfortunately, this does put the only-slightly-cheaper-but-not-as-good AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT in a bit of an awkward position, but for gamers looking to get the best performance for their money, more options are better in this case.

3.Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070

Last update on 2025-03-27 / Affiliate links/images from Amazon.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super is a graphics card that has a lot of expectations surrounding it since its announcement at CES 2024, and if you haven’t upgraded your graphics card in a minute and have been waiting for a sign, this release is what you’ve been looking for, whether you buy it or go with a competing card from AMD or Intel.

In terms of what you get for the same money, you will get significantly more SMs for more processing power, as well as a slightly higher base clock speed. Unfortunately, we’re still stuck with only 12GB GDDR6X VRAM, which limits this card’s 4K potential. If you want the best 4K graphics card, you might have to wait until January to see what the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super have to offer.

If you want the best 1440p graphics card on the market in terms of raw performance, look no further. With upgraded specs, DLSS 3 with Frame Generation, Nvidia Reflex, and a slew of other features packed into this card, you’ll be playing the best PC games at high settings on the best 1440p monitors for years to come.

Nonetheless, Nvidia does not have a clear advantage here. For starters, the Nvidia RTX 4070 Super more than the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT with which it competes directly. And, while the RTX 4070 Super outperforms the best AMD midrange graphics card on a variety of levels, gaming isn’t one of them, unless you rely heavily on ray tracing.

Even in places where you factor in DLSS, without frame generation, Nvidia lags behind the RX 7800 XT overall when it comes to gaming. And once AMD releases its own frame generation tech for FSR in the coming weeks, the advantage Nvidia gets from DLSS 3 with Frame Generation will likewise tighten up. On this point, gamers are going to have some harder questions to ask themselves than anyone else, and the price of the RX 7800 XT alone might be more than enough to tip the scales for them.

Still, it’s hard to argue that Nvidia hasn’t delivered an absolutely phenomenal card with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super, and for midrange users out there who want fantastic gaming as well as content creation features and raw performance, this is almost certainly going to be at the top of the list when making your choice about a new upgrade.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super Founders Edition is without a doubt one of the sexiest graphics cards I’ve seen in quite some time. The all-black shroud, fans, and trim give it a very sleek look. It may not have the flash of RGB bedazzled third-party cards, but it is easily the most appealing card in Nvidia’s lineup.

Other than the Super branding, this card is identical to the original RTX 4070, so it has all of the same advantages and disadvantages.Its smaller than its larger siblings, so its much more manageable in a wider variety of cases, but it is still heavy enough that some kind of GPU support is going to be needed if you don’t have a vertical card adapter for your case.

4.Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090

Last update on 2025-03-27 / Affiliate links/images from Amazon.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 is finally here, and there’s no doubt that it lives up to many of Nvidia’s lofty promises ahead of its release, delivering stunning gen-on-gen performance improvements that are more akin to a revolution than an advance.

That said, you won’t see four times the performance increases here, and only in some cases will you see a twofold increase in performance over the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, let alone the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, but a 50% to 70% increase in synthetic and gaming performance should be expected across the board, with very few exceptions where the GPU runs too far ahead of the CPU.

On the gaming front, this is the first graphics card to deliver fully native 4K ray-traced gaming performance at a playable framerate without the use of DLSS, demonstrating the maturity of Nvidia’s third-generation ray tracing cores.

Even more incredible, Nvidia’s new DLSS 3 shows even more promise, with significantly faster framerates than the already revolutionary DLSS 2.0. And, while we didn’t test DLSS 3 as extensively as we did the RTX 4090’s native hardware (for reasons we’ll explain later), based on what we’ve seen, Nvidia’s new technology is likely an even more significant advancement than the hardware.

On trhe downside, the card does require even more power than its predecessor, and when paired with something like the Intel Core i9-12900K, you’re going to be pulling close to 700W of power between these two components alone. Worse still, this additional power draw requires some very strategic cable management to practically use, and for a lot of builders, this is going to be a hard card to show off in a case with a bundle of PCIe cables in the way.

The price has also increased over its predecessor, though given its incredible performance and the price of the previous graphics card champ, the RTX 3090 Ti, the RTX 4090 offers for more performance for the price than any other card on the market other than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. So even though the Nvidia RTX 4090 is a very expensive card, what you are getting for the price makes it a very compelling value proposition if you can afford it.

In the end, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 is definitely an enthusiast graphics card in terms of price and performance, since the level of power on offer here is really overkill for the vast majority of people who will even consider buying it. That said, if you are that enthusiast – or if you are a creative or a researcher who can actually demonstrate a need for this much power – there’s isn’t much else to say but to buy this card. 

5.AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX

Last update on 2025-03-27 / Affiliate links/images from Amazon.

AMD has just released the first two new graphics cards in its cutting-edge Radeon 7000 series, beginning with the flagship Radeon RX 7900 XTX. AMD’s approach to this release differs significantly from how its main competitor, Nvidia, positioned its GeForce RTX 40-series cards, which were released in October 2022. Instead of aiming for the moon and releasing a GPU that competes for dominance as the single fastest card money can buy, AMD intends to win over gamers by simply providing a better value. Though the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX has some limitations, if you’ve been looking for a powerful graphics card that can compete with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 at a lower cost, this is the card for you.

The Radeon RX 7900 XTX and its launch counterpart, the Radeon RX 7900 XT, are notable for being not only the first entries in AMD’s new Radeon 7000 series of graphics cards, but also the first GPUs to use AMD’s RDNA 3 microarchitecture.

This new approach is distinct in its use of “chiplets.” We will explain: Traditionally, processors and graphics cards were designed as single large chips, known as “monolithic” designs. Chiplets are the opposite, consisting of multiple smaller chips packaged together as a single component. Monolithic chip designs have a performance advantage, but chiplets compensate for this with scalability and cost savings.

In RDNA 3 GPUs, AMD utilizes two separate types of chips to construct graphics cards. The larger of the two chips used is referred to by AMD as a Graphics Compute Die (GCD). The GCD contains most of the functional hardware, including the shader cores, TMUs, ROPs, ray-tracing cores, display controllers, and media engines. Most of the GPU’s cache, including the Infinity Cache and the memory controllers, are held separately in what AMD refers to as Memory Cache Dies (MCDs).

So far, we’ve seen cards that use a single GCD and multiple MCDs. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX has six MCDs, each with two 32-bit memory controllers and 16MB of Infinity Cache, for a total of 96MB of Infinity cache and a 384-bit memory interface. The MCDs then connect to the GCD via ultra-fast interconnects capable of handling up to 5.3TB/s of bandwidth.

By separating these components, AMD can use different fabrication processes for each. The GCD, which is the more important of the two, is made with a 5nm TSMC process and measures 330mm2. The MCDs were built using a 6nm TSMC process and each measure 37mm2, for a total of 222mm2. The total area of all MCDs and GCDs is 552mm2, with 57.7 billion transistors.

How we test the best graphics cards

To determine pure graphics card performance, all other bottlenecks should be eliminated to the greatest extent possible. Our 2024 graphics card testbed includes a Core i9-13900K CPU, an MSI Z790 MEG Ace DDR5 motherboard, 32GB of G.Skill DDR5-6600 CL34 memory, and a Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G 4TB SSD, as well as a be quiet! 80 Plus Titanium power supply and a Cooler Master CPU cooler.

We test across the three most common gaming resolutions, 1080p, 1440p, and 4K, using ‘medium’ and ‘ultra’ settings at 1080p and ‘ultra’ at 4K. Where possible, we use ‘reference’ cards for all of these tests, like Nvidia’s Founders Edition models and AMD’s reference designs. Most midrange and lower GPUs do not have reference models, however, and in some cases we only have factory overclocked cards for testing. We do our best to select cards that are close to the reference specs in such cases.

Best graphics cards performance results

Our updated test suite of games consists of 19 titles — we’ve added Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Diablo IV, and The Last of Us, Part 1. Two of those have DXR enabled (Avatar and Diablo), and three are AMD-promoted (AC Mirage, Avatar, and The Last of Us). We also enabled Quality mode upscaling in Avatar and Diablo, as a different view of things (performance scales similarly on all GPUs thanks to upscaling, though image quality is lower with FSR2 than with XeSS or DLSS).

The data in the following charts is from testing conducted during the past several months. Only the fastest cards are tested at 1440p and 4K, but we do our best to test everything at 1080p medium and ultra. For each resolution and setting, the first chart shows the geometric mean (i.e. equal weighting) for all 19 games. The second chart shows performance in the 11 rasterization games, and the third chart focuses in on ray tracing performance in eight games. Then we have the 19 individual game charts, for those who like to see all the data.