Matt Safford John Burek The Best Graphics Cards for 4K Gaming You'll need a powerful graphics card (or two) to run cutting-edge PC games at 4K resolution. These 10 cards are the top performers we've tested for pixel-packed gaming. How to Buy the Best 4K Graphics Card Thanks to such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and even YouTube, it's finally getting easier to find actual (also referred to as 'Ultra HD') video content. But as awesome as 4K video looks, if you're aiming to immerse yourself in a pixel-dense world, it's hard to beat playing cutting-edge in 4K.

Consoles like the Microsoft Xbox One and Sony PlayStation 4 can't handle 4K gaming, a task left to the more premium. The only other real 4K-capable console, of sorts, at the time of this writing was the Android TV-powered. It can run some Android games at 4K, as well as stream PC games from your home gaming PC at 4K (and even over the Internet if you have a fast connection). How to change user name for word for mac. But really, if you want to play brand-new AAA games at 4K with the best visuals, you'll need a equipped with a very powerful graphics card—especially if you want in-game eye candy dialed all the way up. After all, if you're investing in a or a for gaming, you want things to look as good as they can. Running games at 4K resolution but dialing down the detail and effects settings in your games is working at cross-purposes.

May 31, 2017 - Let's go over the five best Hackintosh graphics cards. If you prefer AMD Radeon for your graphics, TonyMacX86 does an excellent job of. The best graphics card is usually not the fastest graphics card – this honor should belong to Titan V, or at least GTX 1080 Ti. Similarly, the best graphics cards are not the cheapest option, although models like the Radeon RX 560 and GTX 1050 have huge price/performance ratios, but graphics performance is still a factor to be reckoned with.

So the card you buy matters—a lot. 4K Gaming: High-End Cards and Dual-GPU At the moment, to deliver smooth frame rates at high settings at 4K (that's 3,840-by-2,160 resolution, for the record) with the most-demanding games, you'll need to opt for one of the most powerful consumer-grade graphics cards available. These days, those cards include Nvidia's 'Pascal'-architecture, the one-step-down, or one of the many custom-cooled and/or overclocked models based on the GTX 1080 or GTX 1080 Ti graphics processor (GPU). Also in play: Cards based on. But those cards don't come cheap, generally starting at above $700 for the Ti models, with the most basic versions of the GTX 1080 models now selling for around $500, and the Radeon RX Vega 64's pricing well above its $499 launch price.

(The cryptocurrency mining craze of the last year or two has put card prices all over the map, though they have begun to stabilize in mid-2018.) The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is the card you'll want to opt for, though, if you want butter-smooth frame rates at or above 60 frames per second (fps), rather than 30fps. Alternatively, you could pick up two GeForce GTX 1080 cards and use them in an SLI arrangement. In some games, that setup should deliver significantly better gaming performance than a single GTX 1080 Ti card. Note, though, that if you do go this route, multi-graphics setups can introduce side issues. Most games don't ship on launch day with the optimizations to take advantage of multiple-card graphics, and some games never deliver multi-graphics support at all. So, if you're the kind of enthusiast PC gamer who likes to jump on games on the day they're released, multi-GPU options aren't ideal solutions.

Also, you might run across issues with frame timing, in which onscreen game frames don't get delivered exactly in sync, resulting in a subpar experience. For this reason, we recommend buying the best single card for the performance level you're after, whenever possible.

Not long ago, the current-generation was the most powerful consumer-accessible gaming card you could buy, and so also the best 4K gaming option for those without budget constraints. (Nvidia's suggested price is $1,200, and it sometimes sells for more.) But the launch of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti knocked the Titan X out of contention for gaming purposes, because the GTX 1080 Ti is based around the same GPU, performs overall a little better (though about the same at 4K), and costs much less. Unless you have a specific non-gaming reason to shell out for the performance of a Titan X (say, for rendering or scientific work, with some 4K gaming on the side), this card makes little value sense at this point. To be clear, though, it's still one of the most powerful cards you can buy for 4K gaming. 4K Gaming Cards: 'Budget' Options If your budget can't quite bear laying out $500 or more for a graphics card, you can find some less-expensive options that can handle 4K gaming at lower settings. You won't get the absolute best visuals possible, but 4K gaming is technically attainable with these cards. If you don't mind running games closer to medium detail settings at 4K, but you still want to experience the pixel-dense glory of games running at 3,840-by-2,160 resolution, last-generation cards such as the GeForce GTX 980 Ti and AMD's Radeon R9 Fury X and are also capable options.