Upgrade your gaming setup with one of the best graphics cards for 4k gaming, including the cheapest 4k graphics card. There’s no component more crucial to a gaming PC than a graphics card. It’s the heart of any system that favours frame rate and fidelity above all else, and that’s why it’s of the utmost importance to leave aside plenty of budget and choose wisely when it comes to your next upgrade.
You’ve got to ask yourself some questions when deciding on a new graphics card – such as “what resolution can my monitor run at?” and “do I really need an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti?”.
There are times when you will need an RTX 2080 Ti. If the goal for your PC is to deliver the very best 4K gaming experience that money can buy then this card’s many cores and 11GB video memory are best suited to deliver. But with a price tag of £1149 ($1199) most of us will have to be more parsimonious about our PC upgrades. That’s why we recommend looking further afield, including AMD’s Radeon lineup, to grab a great value card.
List of Best Graphic Card for 4K Gaming
Below, we have reviewed best graphics card for 4k gaming, which can be used for 4k movies and video editing.
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (Most powerful graphics card (a lot of) money can buy)
- Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super (The best 4K graphics card for reasonable money)
- AMD Radeon RX 5700 (The best 1440p graphics card)
- AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT (The best 1080p graphics card)
- Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super (The best under $250 GPU around)
- Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Super (cheapest 4k graphics card)
1. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (Most powerful graphics card (a lot of) money can buy)
Released back in 2018, the RTX 2080 Ti is still the fastest consumer graphics card that can stick into your PC. If you wanted to go all out you could squeeze Titan RTX in there for the full-fat TU102 GPU, but that will net you an even less of a performance return for the extra $1,300 you’d have to spend for the privilege.
One glance at the spec list and you can be sure the top RTX Turing card is ready for pretty much anything PC gaming can throw at it. Though even the RTX 2080Ti will struggle to nail 4K gaming with your graphics settings dialed up to max and ray tracing turned on. If you’re after the most powerful GPU especially for the burgeoning ray tracing ecosystem, this is the best graphic card around.
It’s just that it’s a really tough GPU to recommend when could buy a pretty decent prebuilt gaming PC for that much cash. The value proposition is pretty much non-existent, making the RTX 2080Ti the working definition of a money-no-object GPU.
Specifications:
- Cuda Cores:4,352
- Base Clock : 1,350MHZ
- Boost Clock: 1,545MHZ
- Memory: 11GBGDDR6
- TFLOPS: 13.4/
- Memory Clock: 14GT/S/
- Memory Bandwidth: 616GB/S
What’s Right
- Fastest Graphics Card Around
- Ray tracing and deep learning tech
- More developers moving to embrace ray tracing
2. Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super (The best 4K graphics card for reasonable money)
The RTX 2070 Super is the fourth tier Turing card in the current, incredibly packed Nvidia GPU stack, but for our money it’s the card we’d be happy recommending people building a 4K gaming PC. It’s a better version of the GTX 1080 Ti from the last generation, for less cash and with ray tracing potential.
It’s also incredibly close to the performance of the far more expensive RTX 2080. That makes it an entirely different card to the standard RTX 2070 and much better for it. The Super is basically an RTX 2080 Lite. But that name sounds stupid.‘Super’ is cooler.
The RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Super are both faster graphics cards, but unless you can find one for near the$500sticker price of theRTX2070SuperI couldn’t recommend them to anyone with a passing interest in their continued financial stability. And thefactthatthe RTX 2070 Super can nail impressive 4K gaming performance on high settings makes it a great-value high-end GPU, and one of our favourites.
Specifications:
- Cuda Cores: 2,560
- Base Clock : 1,605MH
- Boost Clock: 1,770MHZ
- Memory Clock: 14GT/S
- TFLOPS: 9.06
- Memory: 8GB GDDR6
- Memory Bandwidth: 448 GB/S
What’s Right
- Out performs a GTX 1080Ti for less money
- Almost RTX 2080 performance
- Impressive 4K gaming
3. AMD Radeon RX 5700 (The best 1440p graphics card)
We love AMD’s RX 5700. The Navi architecture, with its gaming-focused RDNA core, has delivered team Radeon a GPU generation that can genuinely compete with Nvidia’s graphics cards, and not just on a cost basis. That’s not happened in a long while, and the RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT now sit proud at the top of the GPU stack for AMD.
But, as is often the way with Radeon cards, it’s the lower-cost option which is the one we recommend. In truth it’s not far off the performance of the XT card out of the box. The four-core difference in RDNA core-count doesn’t make a lot of difference when it comes to gaming performance, it’s the GPU frequency that matters. But because of AMD’s artificial limits you need to unlock the RX 5700 with software to be able to run them at the same clock speeds.this card is also i5-12600K .
And then it performs just as well as its more expensive sibling at 1440p, making the RX 5700 one of the best graphics cards around right now.
Specifications:
- RDNA Cores: 2,304
- Base Clock : : 1,465MH
- Boost Clock: 1,725MHZ
- Memory: 8GB GDDR6
- TFLOPS: 7.95
- Memory Clock: 14 GT/S
- Memory Bandwidth: 448 GB/S
What’s Right
- Affordable 1440p performance
- Nearly as good as the RX 5700 X
- Easy to unlock full power
What’s Wrong
- No ray tracing support
4. AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT (The best 1080p graphics card)
This is exactly what AMD set out to create: the best graphics card for 1080p gaming. Though its final form isn’t exactly what the red team set out to create. A last-minute firmware update bumped up the clock speed and memory performance of most RX 5600 XT cards, and not all GPUs received the upgrade to both clock speed and memory performance. It’s worth checking the downloads section for any card you’re looking at to see if it’s had the BIOS update to 14Gbps before you spend your money.
But with the update the RX 5600 XT is incredibly close to the performance of the RTX 2060, making it more of a tricky decision as to which card to go for. That’s made harder when factory-overclocked versions of both GPUs are on sale for prices well north of $300, which then gets you into RX 5700 territory.
When you can pick up an RX 5600 XT for its original, sub-$300 price tag, however, it becomes the go-to for 1080p gaming without compromise.
Specifications:
- RDNA Cores: 2,304
- Base Clock : : 1,375 MHZ
- Boost Clock: 1,560-1,750MHZ
- Memory: 6GB GDDR6
- TFLOPS: 8.07
- Memory Clock: 12 – 14 GT/S
- Memory Bandwidth: H: 288 – 336GB/
What’s Right
- The ‘ultimate’ 1080p graphics card
- Great base price
- Can reach RTX 2060-level performance
5. Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super (The best under $250 GPU around)
The Nvidia GTX 1660 Super was a preemptive strike against AMD’s RX 5500 XT and effectively killed it dead. For only a little more cash (sometimes there’s nothing between them) the upgraded GTX 1660 easily tops it in gaming performance. It also highlights just how much memory really matters in this middle order of the best graphics cards.
The GTX 1660 Super is one of four 16-series cards to use the same TU116 GPU, and does indeed use the exact same chip as the original GTX 1660. The only difference is that it’s been paired up with GDDR6 memory as opposed to GDDR5. That makes it quicker than the standard card and, because it’s using the higher performance 14Gbps VRAM, it can perform at practically the same level as the more expensive GTX 1660 Ti despite having less actual GPU logic inside its chip.
Which means that as well as knocking out the RX 5500 XT, it also committed a little light fratricide on its GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti brethren too.GTX 1660 is also supported by Ryzen 7 5800X and this is also perfect for photoshop.
Specifications
- CUDA Cores: 1,408
- Base Clock : 1,530MHZ
- Boost Clock: 1,785MHZ
- Memory Clock: 14 GT/S
- TFLOPS: 5
- Memory: 6GB GDDR6
- Memory Bandwidth: 336GB/S
What’s Right
- Excellent 1080p gaming performance
- Cheaper than RX 5600 XT
- High-performance VRAM
6. Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Super (The best cheap graphics card)
Nvidia’s GTX 1650 Super is the best value graphics card on the market today. Often for less than $200 you’re looking at a graphics card able to deliver impressive 1080p frame rates at even the highest in-game settings.
As has become a familiar refrain with regards to Nvidia’s deployment of the Super series of GPU updates, the GTX 1650 Super is more a GTX 1660 Lite than it is a GTX 1650. It uses the same TU116 GPU as the rest of the GTX 1660 cards, but there are already three of them and it’s confusing enough sorting between those as it is. With the switch in GPUs the GTX 1650 Super has more cores than the straight GTX 1650.
That all makes it a far superior card to its GTX 1650 brethren and mighty close to the GTX 1660 Super and 1660 Ti on the Turing performance totem pole. Despite the fact its ultra-competitive original $160 price tag can sometimes be tricky to find, its pricing still makes the competing AMD RX 5500 XT look expensive.
Specifications
- CUDA Cores: : 1,280
- Base Clock : : 1,530MHZ
- Boost Clock: 1,725MHZ
- Memory: 4GB GDDR6
- TFLOPS: 4.42
- Memory Clock: 12 GT/S
- Memory Bandwidth: 192GB/S
What’s Right
- Best value GPU around today
- Impressive 1080p gaming performance
- Superb performance per dollar
Graphic Card for 4K Gaming Black Friday 2021
We have created a list of the most discounted cheap and best Graphic Card for 4K Gaming Black Friday deals and Graphic Card for 4K Gaming Cyber Monday deals for this year’s holiday season 2021.
Buy Now or Wait the Next Generation
Sometimes the big question isn’t which graphics card you should buy, it’s when. We fall into the buy it now camp. There’s almost always new graphics card only half a year away, and they are often tipped to deliver quadruple the performance for a quarter of the price. That kind of generational jump never happens, though, and neither do timely release dates in line with rumors, all the while you could’ve been enjoying a new card without any buyer’s remorse.
The only exception to the rule is when there really is a new graphics card launch in the imminent future. We tend to receive official confirmation only moments prior to a graphics card’s release, but once we do it’s best to hold off and wait a bit longer to pick up the new silicon hot off the wafer.
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