You do not need a 20-card shortlist. You need a card that fits your monitor, has enough memory for the next couple of years, and is not wildly over its launch price. In mid-November 2026 that last part is the difficult one.
This is a buying guide, not a lab review. Forge PC has not bench-tested these cards ourselves. The advice below is based on official specifications, independently published testing from outlets such as Tom's Hardware and TechSpot, and the cheapest new UK street prices we could verify on 12 November 2026. Those prices move, so treat every figure as approximate and check the retailer before you buy.
The short version
If you play at 1440p and want the most card for the money, start with AMD's Radeon RX 9070. If you want more 4K headroom, the RX 9070 XT is the usual step up, and on 12 November the cheapest one in the UK was within about £5 of the cheapest 12GB RTX 5070. Buy an RTX 5070 Ti only if you specifically want NVIDIA's DLSS features on a 16GB card and can accept a much higher street price. For 1080p or a careful 1440p build, prefer a 16GB RX 9060 XT over 8GB mid-range cards if the extra memory still fits the budget. Skip the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 unless money is no object.
How the market looks in November 2026
The current generation is NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 50-series (Blackwell), AMD's Radeon RX 9000-series (RDNA 4) and Intel's Arc B-series (Battlemage). Last-generation cards have largely disappeared from new UK listings: on 12 November SpecPrice's UK tracker showed no new RTX 40-series cards at all, and the RX 7600 was the only RX 7000-series model still listed new. That is why a March 2026 “buy an RTX 4070” recommendation is no longer useful.
NVIDIA's US launch prices were $549 for an RTX 5070, $749 for an RTX 5070 Ti, $999 for an RTX 5080 and $1,999 for an RTX 5090, but UK street prices sit well above those launch figures. TechSpot's Q4 2026 update, published on 2 November, found that graphics card prices across the ten countries it tracks (the UK included) had risen about 35 per cent in three months, and that 16GB Radeon cards were still closer to a fair price than the equivalent GeForce models.
Approximate lowest new UK prices on 12 November 2026, from SpecPrice's tracker (updated 11:53 GMT that day):
Card | Memory | Approx. lowest UK price |
|---|
Intel Arc B580 | 12GB | £306 |
GeForce RTX 5050 | 8GB GDDR6 | £350 |
GeForce RTX 5060 | 8GB GDDR7 | £425 |
Radeon RX 9060 XT 8GB | 8GB GDDR6 | £450 |
Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB | 16GB GDDR6 | £580 |
GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB | 16GB GDDR7 | £660 |
Radeon RX 9070 | 16GB GDDR6 | £732 |
GeForce RTX 5070 | 12GB GDDR7 | £815 |
Radeon RX 9070 XT | 16GB GDDR6 | £820 |
GeForce RTX 5070 Ti | 16GB GDDR7 | £1,215 |
GeForce RTX 5080 | 16GB GDDR7 | £1,500 |
GeForce RTX 5090 | 32GB GDDR7 | £7,000 |
These are the cheapest new listings that day, not an average of every partner card. Premium coolers cost more. SpecPrice skips listings that shops mark as pre-order, which is why a cheaper RTX 5070 Ti you may see on a retailer page (Scan had one at £1,179.98 marked "Due 20th Nov" on 12 November) is not in the table.
What you are actually buying
Official NVIDIA figures for Founders Edition or reference designs are a useful baseline, because partner cards only deviate so far. An RTX 5060 has 3,840 CUDA cores, 8GB of GDDR7 and a 145W total graphics power. The 5060 Ti (8GB or 16GB) rises to 4,608 cores and 180W. The RTX 5070 is a 6,144-core, 12GB, 250W card; the 5070 Ti is 8,960 cores, 16GB GDDR7 and 300W. The 5080 is 10,752 cores and 360W; the 5090 is 21,760 cores, 32GB GDDR7 and 575W. Official minimum system PSUs run from 550W on the 5060 to 1,000W on the 5090. NVIDIA lists DLSS 5 support for every RTX 50-series card, including 3D-Guided Neural Rendering, Super Resolution, Frame Generation, Dynamic Multi Frame Generation and Ray Reconstruction. Game support still varies title by title. The 5070 Ti and 5080 have two ninth-generation NVENC encoders; the 5090 has three.
On the AMD side, the official Radeon RX 9070 has 56 compute units (3,584 stream processors), 16GB of GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus, 64MB of Infinity Cache, a 220W typical board power and a 650W minimum PSU recommendation. The RX 9070 XT steps up to 64 compute units (4,096 stream processors) and 304W, still with 16GB and 64MB of Infinity Cache. The RX 9060 XT is sold in 8GB and 16GB versions. The RX 9070 GRE is a 12GB, 48-compute-unit card that AMD launched globally on 2 June 2026 at a suggested $549. SpecPrice's tracker did not list it in the UK on 12 November, so it is not in our table.
We would not treat manufacturer FPS slides as buying evidence. Use independent testing for that.
Our picks by budget and resolution
Best overall value: Radeon RX 9070, from around £732. Tom's Hardware's GPU hierarchy (last updated 24 June 2026) calls the RX 9070 the 1440p raster value champ among current cards. Officially you get 16GB of memory and a modest 220W board power, which is easier on a mid-range PSU than the 9070 XT or the 300W RTX 5070 Ti. If your monitor is 1440p and you are not committed to NVIDIA's upscaling stack, this is the card we would look at first.
Best 4K-leaning value: Radeon RX 9070 XT, from around £820. The same Tom's Hardware hierarchy calls this the cheapest way into native 4K 60fps gaming, and says the RX 9070 and RTX 5070 are also strong options if you are willing to enable some upscaling. In the UK the cheapest 9070 XT and the cheapest RTX 5070 were within a few pounds of each other on 12 November. TechSpot's November pricing piece cites its own recent 52-game benchmark, in which the 9070 XT was about 25 per cent faster than the RTX 5070 on average, and the AMD card has 16GB against the 5070's 12GB. That is a strong case for the XT if the prices stay this close.
If you want DLSS and can pay for it: GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, from around £1,215. Officially this is a 16GB GDDR7, 300W card with two NVENC encoders and the same DLSS 5 feature set as the rest of the RTX 50 range. Tom's Hardware's best graphics cards guide (last updated 2 October 2026) names it the best high-end graphics card, largely because of those software features. The till is the problem: it was about £400 more than the cheapest RX 9070 XT on the day we checked. If a listing near the old launch price ever appears, reconsider; at more than £1,200 it is a luxury, not a default.
Best 16GB card on a tighter budget: Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB, from around £580. This was the cheapest current-generation way we found in the UK to get 16GB of VRAM. TechSpot's 2 November update said it was still substantially cheaper than the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB in every region it tracked, by between 20 and 40 per cent. Prefer this over the 8GB 9060 XT or the 8GB RTX 5060 if you can stretch, because 8GB is the specification most likely to age badly.
1080p or a tight upgrade: GeForce RTX 5060 or RX 9060 XT 8GB, from around £425–£450. Tom's Hardware's hierarchy says these two "duke it out" for the best performance per dollar at 1080p. BGR, citing that hierarchy, reports the 8GB 9060 XT ahead of the RTX 5060 in 1440p raster testing, while the NVIDIA card has the DLSS and frame-generation features. Neither has a comfortable amount of memory for long 1440p use. An RTX 5050 at about £350 undercuts them, but it is an 8GB GDDR6 part we would only consider for lighter 1080p use.
Budget alternative: Intel Arc B580, from around £306. Twelve gigabytes at this price is interesting on paper. Availability has been patchy. TechSpot's November update put the UK's B580 price well out of line with other countries, seemingly because of supply issues, and SpecPrice found only one UK shop listing it on 12 November. Treat it as an "if you can actually find one" pick. Tom's Hardware also says it would not go out of its way to buy an Arc card for gaming in 2026, so weigh that before choosing it over a slightly dearer Radeon card.
High-end, with a warning: RTX 5080 and RTX 5090. At about £1,500 and £7,000 on 12 November, neither looks like good value. TechSpot also reported severely constrained 5090 supply, and said the 5090's effective disappearance from the gaming market has pushed 5080 prices up. We would not plan a new build around either card unless you have a specific need and a serious PSU already in the budget.
NVIDIA or AMD — and a few traps
It is not “which brand is faster” so much as which compromise you prefer. NVIDIA still has the most mature upscaling and frame-generation stack, plus familiar creator tools such as NVENC, and you are paying for it. If you mainly care about rasterised frame rates and memory capacity, independent coverage through the autumn has been consistent that Radeon is the more sensible spend. You will be using FSR, HYPR-RX and Fluid Motion Frames rather than DLSS, which is fine in supported games and less ideal if a title you care about is NVIDIA-only in its upscaling path.
Match the PSU to the official minimum, then add headroom if you have a power-hungry CPU. NVIDIA recommends a PCIe CEM 5.1-compliant power supply for RTX 50-series cards, so a modern ATX 3.1 unit with a proper 12V-2x6 cable is the clean way to feed them; if you use an adapter, seat it fully and avoid tight bends at the card. Check case clearance on the exact model, and slow down for the 8GB versus 16GB split in 5060 Ti and 9060 XT titles. Do not assume a cheap new RTX 4060 is still on sale. SpecPrice found no new RTX 40-series listings in the UK on 12 November.
Our verdict
Choose the RX 9070 if you game at 1440p and want 16GB without a GeForce premium. Choose the RX 9070 XT if you want more 4K headroom and the UK price stays close to the RTX 5070. Choose an RX 9060 XT 16GB if you need a cheaper 16GB card. Choose an RTX 5070 Ti if DLSS and the NVIDIA software stack matter more than the price gap. Avoid the 5080 and 5090 at current UK street prices unless you have a clear reason.
In this market, memory capacity and the price you actually pay matter more than the brand on the box.
