hey PC world fans Adam here with GPU expert Brad charkas yeah and we have a
weekly podcast called the full nerd that you can tune into by subscribing here on
youtube or wherever you can get your podcasts but during the show we filled a
lot of questions and one of them that we get a lot is what's the best GPU if
you're gaming at 4k that's actually a great question because 4k monitors and
4k gaming in general has really come down in price and recent years 4k gaming
used to just cost an arm and a leg you'd have to get the highest heed graphics
card to even think to start to be able to play at 4k resolution and even then
you'd have to make visual compromises that's no longer the case you can find
4k monitors going first cheapest two or three hundred bucks sometimes which is
great if you're looking to get a more affordable graphics card back and kind
of power those you might need to dial some things down to high maybe some of
the more strenuous settings down the medium but you can get it working pretty
good you'd want to look at some of the higher-end
options that are also good for or 1440p so Oh Radeon rx 5700 XT which is $400
from AMD there's also the $500 GeForce r-tx 2070 super the XT is almost
as fast as the RT X 2070 super but the 2070 super has a ray tracing so if
that's a concern to you it's worth considering like I said you're gonna
have to sacrifice some of the visual quality but if you think the ticket
settings you know you can get a lot of games running at 4k 60 with high dose
details but if you really want to take as much advantage of a 4k 60 monitor as
possible if you want to have everything running on Ultra or close to it there's
always gonna be some games you have to turn down a little bit extra the only
real option because AMD doesn't play up in this pace the XT is most powerful
card would be the NVIDIA GeForce r-tx 2080 Super which costs $700 okay
that's still a pretty penny mm-hmm it's only about 12% faster than 2070 Super
but that extra 12% makes a big difference when it comes to
being able to you know move a graphic setting from high to ultra or it get you
from 50 frames per second to 60 frames per second it doesn't sound like much
it's costing you an extra three hundred dollars two hundred fifty dollars but it
gets you much better for k6d gaming experience okay well what about some of
these newer 4k monitors that are enabling high refresh rate and HDR and
gsync and all that sort of fun stuff yeah those are pretty cool we start
seeing those come now over the past year so I actually have a distinct HDR
monitor at home it's joke a hundred forty-four Hertz
HDR you know 10-bit color they're gorgeous
and you can still use something like the twenty eighty super with that um that
being said you would still only get about 60 frames per second depending on
the game so if you really want to take the most advantage of it and you've
already invested a thousand plus maybe two thousand dollars on a really nice
high-end monitor like that the real option that you want to go get
is the $1,200 RTX 20 80 TI from Nvidia okay 1200 bucks
is a lot to spend on the graphics card it'll burn a hole in your wallet
it'll also melt your face it's by far the fastest thing I've ever come close
to testing it'll get you well over 60 frames per second and the vast majority
of games uh even with ultra graphics settings which is sudden that was
unbelievable just a couple of years ago yeah
you won't max out the monitor in most games if you're playing modern games if
you have all the visuals cranked even with the 2080 TI you probably won't hit
144 Hertz but you'll get the most that you can out of it well is an option to
maybe stack those cards up and add a dual GPU set up to in order to achieve
those high frame rates it is an option but you do not want to do it so uh that
used to be my go-to advise in recent years though the industry has really
moved away from multi GPU support you need the driver to work to be able to
get that running even if you have a driver that says hey you know we support
sli we support crossfire and everyone be crossfire at this level the game needs
to support it and more and more games just aren't even bothering these days
that's a bummer even AMD and NVIDIA are dialing it back
Nvidia will only support cross SL so multi-gpu setups in two card
configurations they used to go up to four and AMD officially killed crossfire
so the new Radeon 5700 XT I mention the beginning you can't crossfire that
whatsoever so you got to kind of get the best single card Liam can for your money
at this point yep that's the go-to advice that's the golden advice for the
last five or six years or so and it's it's gonna continue to remain that way
well is it an option to maybe maybe find a really good deal on last generations
high-end card the 1080 TI that card would be pretty good for 4k 60 gaming it
would be akin to like the 2070 super a little bit faster than the 2070 super
okay so you would be able to play at 4k 60 with some graphics you know you got
that one back um the thing is I'm not against use PC parts it depends on the
type of part that it is though if you're buying something like I used a processor
there's not much risk cuz it's just a piece of metal that sits there um
graphics cards have a lot of moving parts and they are super easy to
overclock the snot out of so I think there's a lot of inherent risk in buying
used in graphics card ins a lot of people swear by it before I dropped
several hundred dollars on some I want to be there is little risk as possible
and I think it's just real risky to buy use graphics card especially something
like that if you can find one for 250 $300 something like cheap like that good
- yeah share with me but even still I I would rather buy something like the
$400 Radeon rx 4700 XT and even get a little bit less gaming performance out
of it then I would have spend to spend $400 on use two gtx 980ti
well and and also if you're gonna spend this amount of money you know and you're
gaming at 4k you probably want to get ray tracing the r-tx course right I mean
the it plays the best in these higher card configurations so it depends what
you're talking about because if you're looking at 4k 60 and your options you're
starting options could be the Radeon 5700 XT and that's only 400 bucks
it comes real close to the 2070 super not quite as fast but real close for
$100 less the 2070 super obviously gives you rate raising capabilities and all of
these high-end cards give you a chastened capabilities so there are from
Nvidia and that's and videos pushing that real money in general if you really
believe in rate racing and you think it's gonna take off you want to get as
much performance and rate racing as possible the more expensive the card you
buy the faster it'll go in everything including race race they have more
dedicated hardware for racing that makes sense
all right well the last question I got asked just because I got to ask is it
should anyone ever buy the RT X Titan that's available no never not no not
nobody not never no gamer gamer not a gamer yeah ok we should if you're doing
data center stuff and you want to spend $3,000 on something that has more memory
but very little extra gaming performance compared to the 2080 ti then it might
make sense for that but gamers should not never oh hey it looks nice though
right pretty well thank you for answering this question and like I said
you can ask questions all day long on the full nerd join our discord you know
subscribe to us on YouTube and and where ever you listen to podcasts and we'll
try to answer as much as we can so before I go I do want to mention that
you have an awesome article on PC worldcom that you're continually
updating correct yes several times a month best guides the best graphics
cards for gaming specifically awesome all I'll link to it in the comments down
below and thank you Brad for taking the time to answer this question yeah
negotiate it and thank you for being there we'll see you later