BUDGET TO MID-RANGE GPUs

It's all about the money, money, money. And the performance, of course

- Andy Edser

You'd be forgiven for thinking that buying a GPU on a budget was a near-impossible task these days.

But while retailer prices are still higher than we'd like, it's possible to pick up a brand new 1080p and 1440p graphics-cruncher from the likes of Nvidia, AMD, and Intel for sensible cash.

From the surprisingly affordable Intel Arc B580 to the mid-range-munching AMD Radeon RX 9070, there's some serious competition in the reasonably-priced GPU market right now. So, if cash is king, these are your current options for keeping your bank balance frosty and your gaming PC bang up-to-date.

GeForce RTX 5060 NVIDIA £269

Budget, but at what cost?

Nvidia's budget GPU has, on paper at least, a fair bit going for it. With a £269 MSRP, it slots in neatly into the bottom stack of team green's current lineup as the most affordable, if perhaps not the most exciting option available.

The little Nvidia card uses the GB206 Blackwell variant with 3,840 CUDA cores - a 30% increase over the previous RTX 4060 - and sure enough, the RTX 5060 handily outperforms the previous model. Although not always by as much as you might expect.

It's still capable of a reasonable turn of speed, mind.

The Metro Exodus Enhanced benchmark running at 1440p Ultra results in a 63 fps average, 13 frames more than the RTX 4060. That being said, it gets its lunch eaten by the £315 AMD RX 9060 XT across our benchmarking suite, making the Nvidia card difficult to recommend when prices remain even between the two. Its 8GB of VRAM also feels a little tight in 2025 - even if it's just about good enough for 1080p and 1440p gaming as things stand.