The Best Nvidia Graphics Card For Gaming In 2025 (According To Users)

When building a PC, a fast CPU like the Ryzen 9 9950X3D will churn out tasks with ease, a high-capacity SSD will help boot Windows in seconds, and more RAM will ensure you never run out of room for multitasking. However, it is the GPU, or the Graphics Processing Unit, that has the biggest impact on gaming performance.

There is fierce competition in the current gaming GPU industry, with the two big players being Nvidia and AMD. Team Red has been killing it recently, especially with the Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card launch that turned into a crowd favorite. The rocky launch of the RTX 50 series cards, paired with enthusiasts complaining about marginal gains in raw performance without fancy AI upscaling or frame generation, also hasn't helped. Yet, owing to the reputation that the company has built over the past three decades, it's not surprising to see that Nvidia still holds a staggering 88% market share in the desktop GPU market, according to Jon Peddie Research.

If you're in the market looking to build or buy a gaming PC, the many options at your disposal might get overwhelming when shopping for a GPU. Though the easy answer would be to recommend the $2,000 RTX 5090, blowing an entire PC's budget on a graphics card is not something everyone wants to do. Instead, here's a look at what makes the previous generation RTX 4070 Ti Super still a worthy buy in 2025, according to users.

There's an Nvidia graphics card for every budget, and the RTX 4070 Ti Super fits in just perfectly in the upper mid-range of the spectrum. Launched in early 2024 at an MSRP of $799, the RTX 4070 Ti Super features 8,488 CUDA cores and, more importantly, 16GB of VRAM. Compared to the RTX 4070 Ti it replaced, the additional memory makes the Super variant highly capable of 1440p and even 4K gaming. This even puts it ahead of the newer RTX 5070, which only features 12GB of video memory, which is not ideal for 4K gaming.

In a comprehensive review carried out by Tom's Hardware, the RTX 4070 Ti Super outperforms the RTX 3080 by 34%, and handles most demanding AAA titles at 1440p Ultra while maintaining a smooth frame rate of 60fps or higher. In competitive shooters like "Counter Strike 2" or "Valorant," you can expect several hundred frames at high settings, although you might no longer be able to use lag as an excuse.

The regular RTX 4070 Super is also a great option for 1440p gaming, but the Ti branding on its elder sibling has made it an easy recommendation by several PC gamers and enthusiasts. The RTX 4070 Ti Super also features Nvidia's DLSS technology, which can add noticeable performance gains in certain titles. If you fancy ray tracing in games like "Control," you will appreciate how well most Nvidia RTX GPUs handle reflections without taking a massive toll on performance.

The RTX 4070 Ti Super is a great buy, but only if you manage to snag it at or around its advertised MSRP, which can be a great deal of pain to do so for any modern GPU. At $799, it isn't exactly a budget-friendly GPU, either. If you're looking for a mid-tier gaming PC powered by Nvidia, then the recently launched RTX 5060 Ti — the 16GB VRAM variant — seems promising with an MSRP of $550. This puts it way ahead of the RTX 4060 Ti, which only features 8GB of video memory.

At $549 again, the RTX 5070 is the same price as the RTX 5060 Ti, but features less VRAM at 12GB — so it's best to steer away from this GPU. Scouring through the used market to pick up older gems like the RTX 3080 at heavy discounts can also be a good option, or the only one for many, seeing as how next to impossible it has become to get hands on new graphics cards. With 10GB of VRAM, most users who currently own the RTX 3080 claim to enjoy relatively smooth gameplay at 1440p.

It might be a hard pill to swallow, but AMD has been killing it in the GPU space recently. As a long-term Nvidia user, I upgraded to the Radeon RX 9070 XT — a graphics card valued at $599 — that nearly matches the performance of an RTX 5070 Ti in both rasterization and ray tracing.