The best graphics cards are a gamer’s best friend and essential for smooth, crisp gaming. But a graphics card does more than just draw your in-game world to the screen. It’s also used for things like ray tracing, graphics production, and even mining cryptocurrency.
In the past, graphics processing units (GPUs) were primarily used to accelerate real-time 3D rendering applications. However, with the advent of programmable GPUs, these devices have become more than just gaming accelerators, opening up an entire new realm of possibilities.
While a computer can run games well enough without a dedicated GPU, the added power offered by these devices allows for smoother and more realistic visuals. And as displays have grown in resolution and frame rates have increased, the need for more graphical horsepower has only risen.
A gaming GPU is essentially a processor that specializes in manipulating graphic data, which is what’s sent to the monitor from the CPU. The general purpose CPU (central processing unit) can do this work as well, but it’s much slower than a GPU.
If you want to play at 1440p or higher, then a high-end GPU is required. Fortunately, Nvidia’s latest cards offer a host of features that help to achieve this goal. AI upscaling for example, can offer a hefty performance boost in some games with minimal visual caveats. The latest cards from AMD, including the 8GB RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 4090 Super, also offer similar capabilities. Graphics cards