Graphics cards, and how to buy the right amount of one

A graphics card draws a frame. How much work that takes depends on how many pixels are in the frame, and how many frames per second you want. Those two numbers are properties of your monitor, not of the card — which is why buying a card without knowing them is guesswork.

Then multiply by frame rate. A 144Hz monitor at 1440p is asking for roughly four times the work of a 60Hz monitor at 1080p. That is the entire reason cards span ₹20,000 to ₹2,50,000.

Below is average frame rate across a basket of recent games at maximum settings, rendered natively — no upscaling, no frame generation. Switch resolution and watch the whole chart collapse.

The collapse is the useful part. At 1080p every card on this chart clears 60 frames per second and most clear 100 — the differences are real but they are differences between “smooth” and “smoother”. At 4K the bottom half of the chart falls below 30, which is not playable, and only the top few clear 60.

This is why the honest answer to “is this card good” is always a question in return. An RTX 4060 is an excellent 1080p card and a poor 4K one, and both statements describe the same hardware.

Both vendors use a scheme that is readable once you know it, and both have a character that quietly moves a card a tier.

One further trap specific to laptops: a “laptop RTX 4070” and a desktop RTX 4070 are different chips with different power budgets, and the laptop version is substantially slower. Worse, two laptops with the same card can differ by thirty per cent depending on the power the manufacturer allows it — the same chassis problem that affects laptop processors.

A graphics card has its own memory, and it holds the textures and geometry for the frame being drawn. Unlike processor speed, having slightly too little is not slightly worse — it is dramatically worse, because the card starts fetching data across the much slower connection to the rest of the computer.

The symptom is distinctive and worth recognising: an average frame rate that looks fine, with sudden severe stutters, and textures that visibly load in late. That is memory exhaustion, not a slow card.

Modern cards can render at a lower resolution and reconstruct the image to your monitor's resolution — NVIDIA calls it DLSS, AMD calls it FSR, Intel calls it XeSS. A separate feature, frame generation, invents intermediate frames between rendered ones.

Upscaling is genuinely good. At the higher quality settings the reconstructed image is often indistinguishable from native at normal viewing distance, and it can add forty per cent to your frame rate. It is not a compromise you should feel bad about using; it is one of the more useful things to happen to graphics in a decade.

Frame generation is different and deserves more scepticism. The invented frames make motion look smoother but carry no new information about what you are doing, so input latency does not improve and can worsen slightly. Going from 30 to 60 “frames” this way still feels like 30 to your hands. It works best when the base frame rate is already decent — turning 60 into 120 — and worst where you would most want help.

This is the table the rest of the article exists to produce. Find your monitor; buy the card next to it.

If your monitor is not on this list — if it is a 60Hz office panel you have had for six years — then the monitor is the upgrade, not the card. A 1440p high-refresh screen transforms how a game feels far more than one tier of graphics card does, and it improves everything else you do with the computer at the same time. Ours are ranked on motion handling and panel quality in gaming monitors, with the colour-critical ones in monitors.