2016 Best GPU

The CPU may be the brain of your PC, but when it comes to gaming, the graphics card is the beating heart that pumps pixels out of your obelisk of a tower and into your monitor. A graphics card consists of dedicated video memory and a graphics processing unit (GPU) that handles all sorts of calculations, like mapping textures and rendering millions of polygons. Simply put, the graphics card is the most vital component of your gaming PC. And these are the ones worthy of your next PC, whether it's a savvy middle-of-the-road build, a budget rig, or a 4K monster.

Nvidia has now launched their GTX 1080, GTX 1070, and GTX 1060; AMD followed suit with their launch of Polaris 10 and the RX 480, and the RX 470 and 460 are due out in August. All of these cards are theoretically available at retail...except many keep going out of stock due to the high demand and insufficient supply. Things will settle down over the coming weeks, and at some point we'll actually see the cards selling at or below MSRP. Hopefully that happens sooner rather than later, and the custom cards will in general be desirable over the Founders Edition and reference models, since they typically include better cooling and/or lower prices.

With all the next generation cards arriving, the result has been a freefall in GPU prices. GTX 980 Ti can now be found for as little as $403/£395 AR (after mail-in rebate), around $200/£150 lower than in April, and other cards are showing similar drops. However, AMD and Nvidia appear to be ceasing production on many of their 28nm GPUs, which means inventory of previous generation parts is likely to dry up. Short-term, we expect to see some decent sales to clear out inventory, after which prices may start to creep back up on the older parts (assuming you can find them). Whatever card you're looking at, it will definitely pay off to check prices before pulling the trigger.

Update 7/28/2016: In light of pricing and availability, we've modified our picks slightly. Simply put, until the RX 480 is available at close to AMD's recommended pricing of $200-$240, it's a hard card to recommend; the GTX 1060 seems to be doing slightly better, with a few cards showing up at Newegg for under $300, but we're still hoping to see more $250 models.