How Much Should I Spend on a Graphics Card for Gaming?

howtogeek.com:

Purchasing a flashy new graphics card is exciting, but with so many factors to look at, excitement can easily turn into frustration. Today we'll help figure out which card to buy based on your unique scenario and budget.

Take a Look at Your Current Hardware

Your first task before buying a new graphics card is to assess your current hardware. Assuming you have a modern gaming computer or are planning to build one, graphics card compatibility is pretty much a non-factor. You need to have a power supply with enough wattage and sufficient physical space for the card to fit in, but that's about it.

The real question here is whether your new graphics card will create a bottleneck in your system. In simple terms, a bottleneck is an imbalance between the power of your computer components (mainly the graphics card, processor, and RAM). If you put an RTX 4080 into a 10-year-old system with an old Intel Core i3 CPU, the CPU will hold the graphics card back, and you'll get significantly worse performance.

One way to check for a bottleneck is to use a bottleneck calculator. Put in the graphics card you're planning to buy and your CPU model, and it'll return a bottleneck percentage. Ideally, you want a bottleneck of 20% or less. While calculators aren't an accurate representation of real-world performance, they can give you an acceptible estimate. Keep in mind that bottleneck percentage varies from game to game, and a GPU bottleneck is favored over a CPU bottleneck, as the in-game performance will be smoother.

How Much Does Monitor Resolution Matter?

The resolution you play at significantly impacts graphics card performance. A 4K display has four times as many pixels as a 1080p display, which means you need a beefier graphics card make the most of the pixels you have available. Rendering games at native 4K or 1440p is demanding, and you need a mid to high-end graphics card if you want 60 FPS at ultra settings in triple-A games.

But what if you don't need to run games natively