(Image credit: Future)

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.

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.

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

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?

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.

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