KITGURU SHORTLISTS: THE BEST GRAPHICS CARD OF 2024

There's no two ways about it - the Nvidia RTX 4090 is a mightily impressive graphics card, offering a stunning generational uplift over the RTX 3090 and RTX 3090 Ti. It's also a a new performance per Watt champion, offering overall efficiency that is head and shoulders above the competition. Just be prepared to pay handsomely for the privilege!

After the announcement at CES just last week, today we have put Nvidia's new RTX 4070 Super graphics card through its paces. I have to say it is exactly what I expected - and thankfully, that is a good thing indeed. Essentially, Nvidia has taken the existing RTX 4070, bumped up the core count by about 22% but kept the same £580 price point. The end result is a pretty decent graphics card that is well-placed to fend off the competition.

As impressed as we were with AMD's reference RX 7800 XT, the PowerColor RX 7800 XT Hellhound has improved on the MBA design quite significantly and is well worth looking at if you're in the market for one of these new graphics cards. Thermal performance is 13-16C lower with the Hellhound - depending which BIOS mode you opt for - while noise levels are also cut down to near-inaudible levels.

No doubt about it, the RTX 4070 is a fast graphics card. At 1440p, we saw frame rates hit up to 190FPS in Resident Evil Village using Max settings, and even in our most demanding title - A Plague Tale: Requiem - we're still getting a locked 60FPS using Ultra settings. The RTX 4070 can also dabble in 4K gaming, but just like the 4070 Ti, its relatively narrow 192-bit memory interface, and resulting 504 GB/s memory bandwidth, means performance does fall off slightly at the higher resolution.

There's no doubt that the RX 7900 XT has become a substantially more attractive proposition as the months since its launch have passed. At the original £900 asking price, it was a pretty lame duck, but now on sale for £740 - and I've seen it as low as £700 - it is a much more competitive battle against the RTX 4070 Ti.