The Best Cheap Graphics Cards (2024) tested

Finding the best cheap graphics cards that offers satisfactory gaming performance without draining your wallet can be quite challenging. High-end GPUs like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 get a lot of respect, but they also cost a lot. Even cheaper choices like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 can be quite pricey, coming close to the $600/£600 mark. Many people may not be able to pay for this, especially in these times.

But if you keep your standards in check and keep up with the latest upscaling technologies, like DLSS from Nvidia and FSR from AMD, you can find good graphics cards at reasonable prices. These technologies make it possible to improve the quality of graphics without hurting speed. But not all graphics cards support these improvements, and even if they do, not all of them are worth considering. So, it can be hard to find a graphics card that meets your gaming wants and fits your budget.

Best Cheap Graphics Cards Comparison Table

AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT

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The AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT is one of the Best Cheap Graphics Cards you can buy. It might not be able to perform as well at 1440p as the RX 5700 XT, but at 1080p, you can easily get good frame rates on the highest settings for your best games.

It does have ray tracing, but even at 1080p, ray tracing will kill the speed of any graphics card. Thanks to AMD’s hardware-driven Radeon Super Resolution, you should now be able to get decent frame rates at 1080p even with ray tracing turned on, and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution built into many games will give you even better performance.

GeForce RTX 3050

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The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 is one of the Best Cheap Graphics Cards few Nvidia graphics cards from the Ampere era that could be called cheap. For what it is, it’s a good choice for 1080p games. It also has a lot of features that AMD cards don’t have, like machine learning-enabled Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology and tensor cores that let you not only play games at fast frame rates but also handle creative tasks that even the best AMD graphics cards will have trouble with.

Still, it’s pricey for an Nvidia xx50-series card, since the GTX 1050 and GTX 1650 cost almost half as much when they came out. But that’s how the industry is right now, and graphics card prices are going up, so this is probably the lowest price you’ll ever pay for a card with this kind of speed and these kinds of advanced features.

ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 3050

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If you can deal with the high TDP output, the RTX 3050 is a great deal. It’s considered one of the best graphics cards for the money because it works well even though it’s cheap. Nvidia is known for making good cards, but they often cost a lot. When it comes to the 3050, things are different.

The base clock speed of the RTX 3050 is 1552 MHz, and the boost clock speed can go up to 1777 MHz. It also has 8GB of GDDR6 memory and 20 cores for tracing rays. It’s not a fast car, but it can keep up with some of the best GPUs on the market, and the fact that it has 20 ray-tracing cores means that games will be a lot better on it.

Intel Arc A750

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Intel may be better known for its CPUs than its GPUs, but the Arc A750 from last year proved that cheap cards can be very good. At only $250, the A750 is one of the best cheap graphics cards on the market. However, driver support isn’t quite as good as it could be. Intel is trying to fix the driver problems that plague the Arc platform, but despite these issues, the A750 is still a good choice.

The top-of-the-line A770 is also a well-rounded card, but it costs more. With the A750, you can get about 90% of the performance of the top card at a lower price. It has 28 Xe cores, 448 XMX engines, 8GB of DDR6 VRAM, and a Xe HPG microarchitecture.

XFX Radeon RX 6500 XT

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If you don’t quite have $200 to spend, the XFX Radeon RX 6500 XT is probably the next Best Cheap Graphics Cards for you to consider purchasing. The Radeon RX 6500 XT is not the best graphics processing unit (GPU) in the world, and it even performs worse in benchmarks than cards from prior generations, such as the RX 5500 XT.

This is mostly as a result of the fact that it comes with a smaller VRAM capacity (only 4GB of GDDR6 VRAM), which makes it less suitable for gaming. On the other hand, the RX 5500 XT is notoriously tough to track down, while the RX 6500 XT is easily accessible. Therefore, even while it’s possible that 4GB of VRAM is below par, it’s still the greatest option available at this price point.

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