If you're a PC gamer, you'd better pray to whatever divine being or beings you believe in that your current graphics card doesn't give up the ghost. While there are still graphics cards on the market to buy, pricing for current-generation NVIDIA GPUs has gone through the roof as supply has become incredibly constrained by both high GDDR7 memory prices and also an apparent deficit of the needed discrete GPU dies.

This month has seen the impact of long-rumored price hikes from NVIDIA's side, as prices on the very GPUs that enthusiasts buy the most have risen by as much as 41%, with the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB leading the price increase charge. The GeForce RTX 5070 has actually surpassed its Titanium Edition brother in terms of markup over MSRP, and the mainstream GeForce RTX 5060 is looking downright absurd at $470 US. Of course, nobody can contest the GeForce RTX 5090, which is now going for 2.35 times its original suggested retail price as prices continue to climb.

It's important to note at this point that median prices are not street prices, and it's still possible to find some of these GPUs for less money than listed above. We've been GPU shopping this morning, and things are pretty dire, but there are still some GPUs that are only "painfully expensive", not quite "this is patently ridiculous"-tier, especially if you're willing to step outside of the NVIDIA CUDA ecosystem because you want to do something besides AI with your GPU (imagine that).

The singular GeForce RTX GPU that we can responsibly recommend today is this PNY GeForce RTX 5060 8GB card. it's expensive, at some $60 over MSRP, but it's still relatively affordable. More importantly, it's cheaper than than the closest competing AMD solution, which is the Radeon RX 9060 XT. We've included both here; while it's a little painful to recommend 8GB cards in 2026, you gotta take what you can get. Both of these GPUs will offer excellent performance at 1080p, and even at 1440p if you manage your game settings to control VRAM usage.

If you're really on a tight budget, though, it's impossible to beat the value of Intel's Arc B-series "Battlemage" GPUs. The key here is that they not only offer solid performance in both pure raster and ray-tracing workloads, but they come with more video RAM than similarly-priced GPUs. The Arc B580 nips at the heels of the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, while the B570 is a solid RTX 4060 competitor with an extra 2GB of RAM. These cards have excellent driver support in both Windows and also Linux now, at least as long as you're willing to run a bleeding edge kernel.

If you're after something with more punch, there's really nothing to recommend but Radeons. All of these cards will absolutely demolish any competitively priced GeForce GPUs right now, so while they're significantly above their own MSRPs, they're still a lot cheaper than anything in this performance segment from NVIDIA. We've included two Radeon RX 9070 XT cards as the ASRock board looks like it may sell out soon. Indeed, we've already heard that AMD may be raising GPU prices soon, too, so you may want to get while the getting's... decent, anyway.

The DIY market is in a bad state, and our hearts go out to anyone who is having to buy hardware in this market. The unfortunate truth is that if you need parts now, you need them, and you're going to have pay whatever you can to get whatever you need. Hopefully things improve next year, because there's a whole lot of hardware that's supposed to launch around CES 2027, and it's going to really spoil the excitement of new chips if there's no RAM or GPUs to pair them with.