While most people are satisfied with 1080p gaming, 1440p gaming is emerging as the next sweet spot that gives you the ideal experience without proving to be too expensive. Given the higher resolution, you not only need graphics cards with more horsepower but also with larger video buffer. With that in mind, we’ve narrowed down the list of recommendations to four graphics cards that will fit the bill at different price points.
At the top of the stack of AMD Radeon Polaris GPUs is the Radeon RX 590. While the Rx 590 does come at a certain price premium over the RX 580, it is also tweaked to hit the absolute power limits of the GPU. It’s essentially the cream of the crop from the previous-gen Polaris family. Being a card from the previous generation, the RX 590 costs much less than the current-gen graphics cards without differing in performance by a wide margin. Since this is a GIGABYTE WindForce card it features the custom WindForce cooling system which is designed to keep the thermals low even with the high factory overclock.
The new MSI RX 580 Armor is meticulously crafted to offer superior heat dissipation using premium material. It runs as cool as it looks. Underneath the swanky looking exterior there lies a large heat sink with high-performance composite heat pipes. MSI graphics cards like all NVIDIA graphics cards work with the MSI Afterburner software which is a feature-rich tool to overlock and customise the fan profiles. Speaking of customizability, you can even customise the backplate of the graphics card with your game name. It has a strong, stamped aluminium backplate which is the colour of the theme of your white graphic card. With 8 GB of VRAM, the MSI RX 580 Armor is more than capable of running games at 1440p resolution.
NVIDIA has a lot more cards in the mid-range segment these days after the Super variants also made their way into the market. The simple advantage here is that not only are the NVIDIA cards capable of running games at 1440p but there’s also the added advantage of turning on RTX in supported games. There are very few titles with RTX support but they certainly take things up a notch. The GALAX RTX 2060 EX has a DisplayPort 1.4, Dual-Link DVI-D and HDMI 2.0b. It supports Microsoft DirectX 12 API, OpenGL 4.6 and Vulkan API. It only comes with 6 GB of VRAM as compared to the other cards which have 8 GB of VRAM but it compensates for this by using faster memory chips.
If you are on a really constrained budget and don’t mind switching off a few features in the graphics settings then the GTX 1660 Ti is a great graphics card to go with. Being a GTX card, it does not have the support for hardware-accelerated ray-tracing but you can still enable the feature if you don’t mind a noticeable drop in the frame rate. Ideally, you’re better off leaving it switched off. ZOTAC offers the highest warranty period which makes it a much better value proposition.