The 3 Best Graphics Cards for Gaming of 2025

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AMD’s RX 9070 XT offers the best value for players seeking high settings and great performance at 1440p, and it can even handle 4K gaming with a little nudging.

Recommended configuration

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT can capably handle just about every modern game at high settings at 1440p with frame rates above 60 fps, and with some tweaking it even provides a consistently good 4K experience. The XFX Swift AMD Radeon RX 9070XT is attractively designed, with quiet fans, and it’s routinely around 15% cheaper than cards based on the RX 9070 XT’s most immediate competitor from Nvidia, the RTX 5070 Ti. However, the RX 9070 XT struggles with cutting-edge path tracing in games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, so if you’re hoping to get closer to the top tier of graphics tech, a card based on the RTX 5070 Ti is a better option, even if it costs more.

The RX 9070 XT produces great 1440p (and 4K) performance. Even at higher settings, the RX 9070 XT cruised through our benchmarks, providing excellent performance in almost every game we tested. Across our benchmarks, it traded the lead with the more expensive Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti, often in surprising ways. In the games we tested, the RX 9070 XT also provided good performance at 4K, with visual settings and performance well ahead of that of current-generation consoles, and once again in this regard it often bested the usually more expensive RTX 5070 Ti. The RX 9070 XT should give you a great experience in current video games for years to come.

It features more advanced upscaling features than in previous-generation AMD GPUs. Modern games increasingly rely on machine-learning-based algorithms and processes to reach higher resolutions (a process called upscaling) and more consistent frame rates. Previous generations of AMD GPUs fell behind Nvidia’s offerings in this respect, but with FSR 4.0, the RX 9070 XT provides a great-looking upscaler that closes most of the gap. This addition removes one of our biggest reservations in recommending an AMD GPU. I’d like to see the feature fully supported in more games, but everything I’ve seen so far is encouraging.

You can usually buy one (for a lot less than the competition). Although supply has fluctuated significantly since the XFX Swift AMD Radeon RX 9070XT launched in March (as has the price), the RX 9070 XT’s availability has become much more reliable at this writing. In addition, the price has finally reached an equilibrium point — for now — settling somewhere between 10% and 15% less than the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Gaming OC 16G and MSI 5070 Ti 16G Gaming Trio OC Plus models we tested. If you’re hoping to keep costs under control, a price difference of $120 to $150 can make a big difference. However, you can occasionally find the RTX 5070 Ti models we tested for prices much closer to that of the XFX Swift AMD Radeon RX 9070XT, at which point they’re equally good options.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

AMD’s software support still isn’t as good as Nvidia’s. While FSR4 is a much-needed step in the right direction, we’re not seeing it in as many games as we are Nvidia’s equivalent upscaling tool, DLSS. Additionally, AMD still can’t quite compete with Nvidia in providing other bonus features and software support like Nvidia Broadcast and Nvidia’s Twitch-streaming tools. And historically AMD’s driver support has been slower than Nvidia’s, though 2025 has shown Nvidia to have its own problems in that regard.

Path tracing is off-limits. While the Radeon RX 9070 XT has mostly caught up with Nvidia’s GPUs in in more typical ray tracing scenarios, AMD can’t compete at the bleeding edge of graphics tech: path tracing. Path tracing is a more technically accurate implementation of ray tracing, but it’s also much more systemically demanding — so much so that almost every card we tested struggled or even failed outright in our benchmarks using the low path tracing settings in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. While we could get the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Gaming OC 16G to an acceptable level of performance using a combination of upscaling and 1440p resolution, the XFX Swift AMD Radeon RX 9070XT just couldn’t hack it. The situation could improve over time as AMD works with developers to better optimize its drivers. For now, however, if you want to live on the cutting edge, you’ll have to look elsewhere (and spend more money).

It’s more expensive than it was when it launched, and it can occasionally be hard to find. When the RX 9070 XT launched in March, AMD set a target price for vendors of $600. Once initial shipments of those GPUs sold out, prices increased precipitously. At this writing, they have largely settled: Our pick, the XFX Swift AMD Radeon RX 9070XT, typically sells for around $850. That’s still much less than many models based on the RTX 5070 Ti, but we don’t love it. However, we’ve started to see other RX 9070 XT models sell for much less, so you may want to shop around a bit to see what options are available to you.

You may encounter instability. In my testing with the RX 9070 XT (and its cheaper counterpart, the Radeon 9070), I experienced persistent system crashes and driver unresponsiveness while benchmarking Monster Hunter Wilds and AMD’s own driver stress test. I resolved the issue — which is similar to those reported by multiple people across Reddit and other PC-gaming communities — by resetting my PC’s DDR5-6000 to “stock” settings in my motherboard’s UEFI settings page. In another product category, this kind of thing might be a dealbreaker, but unfortunately, in PC gaming, it’s a not altogether unfamiliar cost of doing business; for example, Nvidia’s current drivers cause consistent crashing in Monster Hunter Wilds.

Coil whine could be an issue. I noted relatively minor but clearly present coil whine across three different 9070 models. Although it didn’t affect performance or present any other issues, if you’re especially sensitive to that kind of noise, you might want to go with a card based on the RTX 5070 Ti instead, even if it’s more expensive.