Best Budget Graphics Card 2021
The top GPUs for budget-conscious PC builds
- Last Updated May 26, 2021
Today, we’re going to cover five of our top picks for best budget GPU. With the release of the RTX Super cards and the falling prices of the RX 500-Series, the sub-$300 market for GPUs has never been better.
As long as you’re willing to spend a little more than $100, you’re bound to get a graphics card that offers a strong 1080p gaming experience, and if you’re able to push your budget more, you can even start playing 1440p, VR, and 4K games!
Note: if you are looking for graphics cards on a strict budget, perhaps you should check out our $100 or $200 graphics card buyer guides.
Products at a Glance
How We Picked
If you want the best graphics card for the money, you’re in the right place. We’re going to walk you through your options in this price range, and help you pick the best one for you. If you aren’t too familiar with graphics cards and PC gaming, don’t worry– we’ve also included a buying guide at the bottom of the article to help you understand key terms and the modern GPU hierarchy.
When looking for the best budget graphics card, there are a number of different factors to take into account. Of course, there will be compromises but we believe that if you want the most of a budget graphics card, focusing on VRAM, cooling and clock speed will provide the top performance. That’s how we selected the cards in this list. Additionally, we’ve given out some awards for some of our picks, which should help you narrow down your selection if you have a specific trait in mind.
With all that out of the way, though…let’s look at our contenders for best budget GPU!
Best Budget Graphics Card 2021
The GTX 1050 Ti may not have the best value on the market, but it’s definitely better than any sub-$100 GPU. Compare the RX 550, RX 560, or GT 1030 and you’ll see why this is essentially the least amount of money you should be spending on a graphics card. A further comparison to the RX 570, however, reveals this card’s key weakness: value.
While this is still the GPU we’d recommend– and it should suffice perfectly fine for 1080p gaming, especially for older titles– its performance-per-dollar simply does not stack up to the RX 570. By shopping around, you’ll get a fairly dramatic boost in performance.
If you aren’t a particularly serious gamer and just need a graphics card for media purposes– or you intend on replacing your GPU very very soon– then the GTX 1050 Ti is great. If you only care about paying a low price, then this is the best budget GPU that we can recommend.
The RX 570 XXX Edition is our pick for best value GPU. In terms of performance-per-dollar, this card really can’t be beaten. You’re looking at a sub-$130 GPU that really packs a punch,
If you want to improve that VRAM, for little bit more money, you can also opt for the 8GB version of the RX 570 that’s available on Amazon. This gives you double the memory capacity alongside a clock speed boost for not that much money at all.
Now, let’s talk about the RX 570 XXX Edition in general. Typically, you’ll see superb performance in 1080p titles at maximum settings. All but the most intensive VR games should be playable as well, with SteamVR resolution scaling being an option for when this card isn’t enough. 1440p is where this card will start looking weaker, especially when compared to the RX 580 XXX Edition, in modern games at high settings.
In essence, this is pretty much just a 1080p and entry-level VR gaming card. With extensive tweaking, 1440p is possible as well but is mostly recommended against at this level of performance. Even with the 8GB version of this card, it simply isn’t built to push games at such a high resolution – at least, not with correspondingly high framerates and settings.
AMD’s series of GPUs have been criminally overlooked by a large portion of the gaming userbase, and the XFX RX 5500 XT Thicc II Pro is a great example of a card that should be a lot more popular than it is.
Right now you can buy this RX 5500 XT card for under $200, and that is vastly impressive when you consider what you are investing in. 8gb of DDR6 RAM, combined with a boost clocked at 1845MHz means that this card is well equipped to deal with a plethora of games both old and new, and put out power that is compatible to the 2070 series from Nvidia.
In fact, to find a GPU capable of outperforming this card from a competitor you are going to have to look to the likes of the 2070 Super – but why would you? For a marginal increase in performance, you will be paying upwards of $300 more, and the 5500 XT Thicc II is more than capable of providing you with satisfactory gaming at its price point.
You will be able to expect stable 60 FPS gameplay at a 1080p resolution, with that kind of performance readily available on titles like Monster Hunter World, The Witcher 3, and Gears 5. However, this does come with a trade-off.
The cards software can be a little tricky to install, and the drivers for the card can give you more problems than they are worth, with internet forums full of different bugs reported from unstable driver updates. If you can look past that though, and understand how to update your drivers safely and regularly then you shouldn’t have any problems, making this the best bang for your buck GPU on the market today.
The best overall budget GPU to buy today is the GTX 1660 Super.
Like the GTX 1660 before it, the GTX 1660 Super is Nvidia’s true budget GPU king. In benchmarks, this card beats the GTX 1660 and RX 580 8GB by quite a fair margin but doesn’t quite catch up to the GTX 1660 Ti. This means the card is perfectly-equipped for modern AAA games at 1080p and maximum settings, as well as higher-end VR games and a number of games at 1440p and high settings. This card generally retails at about $240, too, which means it’s more expensive than the RX 580 but you’re getting much more overall performance.
The GTX 1660 soundly defeats the RX 580 in this price range. Without any reasonable doubt, it’s the best value offering that Nvidia has to offer, and it offers most of the 1660 Ti’s performance at a much better price point.
Unlike other Turing GPUs, though, this card does not offer Nvidia RTX features. At least, not with any semblance of good performance. Even at low settings, enabling ray-tracing in games like Metro Exodus or Battlefield V will drop your frame rates, which may be an intentional ploy by Nvidia to push sales of RTX 1660 Ti GPUs.
While we’ve praised the GTX 1660 Super as the best value Nvidia GPU, the GTX 1660 Ti is a different story. This card is priced closer to $300 and doesn’t offer a proportionate boost in performance to either the RX 580 or the GTX 1660 Super. If you’re willing to spend just $50 or so more, you could get the RTX 2060 instead, which would serve as a much more powerful and future-proof GPU.
At that point, though, you’ll have spent over $300 on your GPU– not exactly “budget” by most standards– and if that jump isn’t enough for you, the GTX 1660 Ti may just be the right compromise for you.
The GTX 1660 Ti has great performance in 1440p and VR games. 1080p gaming isn’t even a question with this card, especially with the GDDR6 memory in tow. No question: you’ll be able to blast through modern games at 1440p with this GPU, and may even be able to push some as high as 1800p.
If your GPU budget has a hard limit at no higher than $300, then this is the best card for you. The Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti may not offer the best performance-per-dollar, but it is still the best graphics card under $300.
Things To Consider
Our Verdict
While we’ve selected a bunch of budget GPUs for this buying guide which are all stellar in their own right, we think that the best overall budget GPU has to be the GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1660 Super. This is due to the fact that this card will more than cope with today’s AAA titles at 1080p while also doing a reasonable job of supporting VR and 1440p. Usually coming in well under the $300 mark, it’s also pretty decent value too, especially considering it beats out the 570. Overall, with the 1660 Super, while it’s not the absolute cheapest GPU, it certainly backs up its slightly higher price point with the performance it churns out and well worth the money.