What's the state of budget GPUs in 2024?

Summary

• The recent Nvidia xx60 GPUs have disappointed budget gamers with lackluster performance and high price tags.
• Intel Arc GPUs have improved since their awful debut, though they're far from perfect.
• AMD continues to dominate the budget GPU market, but the RX 7000 GPUs have marginally better performance than their last-gen counterparts.

Gaming can be an expensive hobby, especially if you’re into playing photorealistic titles at maximum settings and larger-than-life resolutions. But with the chip shortage still continuing in 2024, it's clear that the price of gaming components will continue to skyrocket this year.

While the soaring cost of SSDs, RAM kits, and other components isn’t a good omen for budget gamers, the situation is far worse on the GPU side of things. With graphics cards requiring over half of your PC-building budget, you'd expect the affordable GPU category to be full of worthwhile options. Sadly, the reality is quite different, and it's pretty difficult to call any current-gen GPU "budget-friendly."

Nvidia has dropped the ball with its xx60 GPUs

It’s like Team Green has stopped caring about budget gamers

For the longest time, Nvidia’s budget GPU tier has looked something like this: The now-defunct xx30 GPUs lie at the bottom of the barrel, with their only raison-d'etre being their ability to send video output to your monitor. Next, you have the xx50 GPUs, which have the bare minimum firepower to run lightweight games.

The xx60 series is where things start looking better. Despite costing far less than their mid-range xx70 and xx80 counterparts, GPUs ending with the number “60” provided solid performance for budget gaming, making them great hits in the PC building community. Yes, I said "provided," because Team Green absolutely botched the Ada Lovelace xx60 GPUs.

While the RTX 3060 gathered a lot of flak for its lackluster price-to-performance ratio, the RTX 4060 was when the situation turned from bad to worse. For starters, the 4060 only has 8GB VRAM, which is nowhere near enough for a $300 GPU. Not only that, the memory bandwidth and bus width are also lower than its predecessor's, making the RTX 4060 akin to an RTX 4050 that’s built on a different die. The base RTX 4060 Ti isn’t any better either, and the 16GB VRAM variant is far too expensive with its $500 price tag. As such, you should only plan to use Nvidia GPUs in a budget build if they’re heavily discounted or if you need decent ray-tracing support from your graphics card.

Intel Arc has gotten significantly better since its release

The drivers still need some work, though

When Intel announced its budget-oriented Arc family, the PC community was quite excited to see another contestant step into the fray. However, when it debuted in Q1 2022, Intel's first-generation Alchemist series was relentlessly bashed for its poor drivers, which led to hilarious glitches and terrible performance Since then, Team Blue has gone above and beyond to fix its driver issues, and most of the games that suffered from the broken drivers are now "playable."

If we’re just going by the price and technical specs, I’d say the Arc A750 and A770 are definitely high up on the list of the best budget gaming GPUs. The former is available for as low as $200, while the more powerful A770 (well, at least compared to the other Arc GPUs) can be bought for $300. The best part? It has 16GB of VRAM!

That said, I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that Intel’s GPU drivers have fully matured. There’s still a lot of stuff to be done on the optimization side of things, and the Arc series' performance is not up to the mark even in 2024.

Nevertheless, AMD still holds the budget GPU crown

Not that beating Nvidia and Intel is much of an achievement, mind you

Finally, we’re left with Team Red’s offerings. For the last two generations, AMD has consistently beaten Nvidia in the entry-level and budget GPU categories, with the RX 6000 graphics cards still being solid purchases (at discounted prices) in 2024. Nevertheless, the budget GPUs from the RX 7000 family have similar issues to their RTX 4000 series counterparts: the generational increase in performance that we were so used to in the past has declined tremendously in the latest GPUs.

When it launched for $270 last year, the RX 7600 wasn’t worth much, especially when you could get the last-gen RX 6600 and 6700 for more affordable prices. In 2024, it’s not really worth sticking to the base 7600 because the RX 7600 XT has more VRAM. That said, the elder sibling has its own flaws, namely a mind-boggling 190W TDP and a disappointingly small gain in clock speeds over the last generation.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d probably buy the RX 7600 XT if I wanted something affordable for a budget PC. But the fact that the RX 7600 XT costs $330 and still couldn’t provide the performance you’d expect from a 190W power-guzzling GPU leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

Budget GPUs: It’s pretty much a shrinking market at this point

Intel’s Battlemage is the only beacon of salvation for budget gamers

Unlike high-end gaming, where the answer is always Nvidia’s biggest, baddest, and most expensive consumer graphics card, the budget gaming GPU landscape is a lot more convoluted. If you’re planning to use Team Green’s latest frame-generation technology or want superior ray-tracing capabilities, then the RTX 4060 is clearly the way to go. That said, you shouldn’t expect a lot of future-proofing from an 8GB VRAM card, and the only price range where a 4060 makes sense is around the $280 mark.

As for AMD, the RX 7600 XT provides quite a lot of VRAM for a $330 GPU, though it falls flat on the power efficiency front. If you can find a last-gen RX 6600 or 6600 XT for under $200, then there’s no reason to go for the newer “budget” Radeon GPUs. With rumors about AMD pulling out from the high-end GPU market making the rounds, perhaps the company will start making great budget GPUs like it used to in the past.

Meanwhile, Intel’s Alchemist family has shown us what Team Blue is capable of when it gets serious. But since the Arc drivers still aren’t battle-ready just yet, it’ll take a while for Intel to meet its rivals on a level playing field. If Intel’s upcoming Battlemage manages to avoid the pitfalls that crippled the Alchemist GPUs, we might finally see some decent budget graphics cards in the future.