We are all sick of seeing GPU manufacturers releasing $300 and $400 8GB cards, but here are some alternatives you should opt for if you want to future-proof your gaming build for a couple of years.

If it were about the Alchemist GPUs, we would have advised you to avoid them completely, as immature drivers were a huge problem for these GPUs. But when it's the Battlemage cards, you can't ignore the impressive generational uplifts Intel offered while also fixing various issues with the graphics drivers. The Arc Battlemage lineup may not have high-end GPUs, but in the budget segment, you can't ignore the Arc B580, which trades blows with modern-gen budget cards from NVIDIA and AMD.

While it doesn't beat the RTX 5060, it does provide an advantage at 1440p resolution due to its higher VRAM capacity. Not to mention it is cheaper than the latter while it delivers big improvements over similarly priced 12 GB GPUs such as the GeForce RTX 3060. For less than $300, the Arc B580 is almost unbeatable for its price tag and an incredible deal at $249. Meanwhile, one should try to use the latest gen CPUs with the B580 since several generations older CPUs have been reported to cause performance regression.

Thankfully, 16 GB cards still exist on a budget. The RDNA 4 lineup has a few GPUs with 16 GB of memory, and if you want to have this much VRAM on your GPU without breaking the bank, then the RX 9060 XT 16 GB is the cheapest one from the current-gen lineups. Unfortunately, we won't be recommending the NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB for the lower-mid range category due to a big price gap, while the performance difference isn't huge.

The Radeon RX 9060 XT, based on the NAVI 44 die, appears to be much better in price-to-performance ratio and delivers slightly higher performance than the RX 7700 XT 12GB while having more VRAM. Launched at $349, this is a wonderful option for future-proofing your system and brings superior ray tracing performance to its predecessors.

For $500+, there are a few GPUs to consider when we go through the RDNA 4 and RTX 50 series stack. The prices aren't quite there yet, and the fastest you can get for under $600 is the GeForce RTX 5070 GPU . Sure, the Radeon RX 9070 is on par with the 5070 in rasterization, but there is a noteworthy difference in the Ray Tracing capabilities of both. This is why the GeForce RTX 5070 sells like hotcakes and is currently the best-selling GPU on Amazon, while the Radeon RX 9070 is mostly ignored.

With a fast 12 GB GDDR7 memory, excellent RT performance, DLSS 4, and MFG support, the RTX 5070 has everything you would want for modern gaming. We know it's easier to get confused between the RTX 5070 and the RX 9070 XT as the latter is faster and has more VRAM, but at the current prices, which usually tend to go over $700, it is somewhat out of the budget category. While the RTX 5070 isn't cheap either, it's easier to get it for around its MSRP than the RX 9070 XT at the moment.

* Note : The GPU recommendations are based on higher VRAM and may or may not bring higher performance in certain scenarios over their direct competitors.