Check out more of the year's best tech in our PC Gamer Hardware Awards 2025 coverage.
I always love a new GPU year. When a whole new generation of graphics cards is going to drop, it energises the entire PC gaming hardware industry; people are going to upgrade, new laptops will arrive, and companies will refresh their entire PC lineups. It's big. Which is why it was a real shame that the launches of both AMD and Nvidia GPUs this year were such a nightmare. Issues with drivers, hardware, and above all, pricing and availability made it hard to enjoy the thrill of new gaming tech.
So, in a mess of a launch, who gets the nominations for the best graphics card of 2025? Well, thankfully the rest of the year took care of the failures of launch time, with all the new GPUs becoming far more affordable and far closer to MSRP (in some cases even below!), and now widely available, too.
Just in time for the RAMpocalypse to strike and push prices up on anything that has any little bit of memory inside it. Hint: that means everything.
Whatever, the graphics cards of 2025 still represent the best of AMD and Nvidia's respective architectures, and if you want the finest GPUs, these are they. And it's been great to see AMD actually taking the fight to Nvidia properly, being aggressive on both pricing and specs, and finally competitive on both ray tracing and, with the new FSR Redstone update, their new machine learning based upscaling technology.
The Radeon RX 9070 XT isn't making a play for the top of the stack, ultra-enthusiast segment, but the whole RX 9000-series shows AMD focusing on where most gamers spend their cash, in the mid-range.
That's most evident in the Radeon RX 9060 XT, which followed it. That's the most affordable card if you really need 16 GB VRAM, and delivers impressive 1440p gaming performance for the money.
Then we have the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, again not the top of the GPU stack, but an impressively performant graphics card that can really take an overclock and then almost make an RTX 5080 look silly.
Best graphics card 2025: the nominees
The winner of the Best Graphics Card 2025 PC Gamer Hardware Award will be announced on New Year's Eve. Which one would you want to take home?
