DDR5 prices are continuing to climb toward the sky, and the morale of PC builders is cratering along with them. What good is a shiny new Ryzen 7 9800X3D when a RAM kit to go with it costs almost as much or more than the CPU itself? If you're feeling DDR5 pricing pain this Black Friday season, you might be considering a GPU upgrade instead. But if you're contemplating a new graphics card, make sure that your monitor won't hold you back from the best gaming experience.
Now is a good time to grab a graphics card, as prices on many of the best GPUs, like AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT and Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, have finally fallen to MSRP or even below. And GPU price increases are likely on the horizon due to the AI data center gold rush that's consuming every available silicon wafer.
But throwing a powerful new GPU into your existing system won't necessarily improve your gaming experience all by itself. You'll want to make that upgrade without limiting a GPU's utilization or spending its performance potential on rendering wasted frames that don't get displayed.
How pairing a new GPU and a new monitor could be your best upgrade option
If you're rocking a five- to eight-year-old CPU and a 1080p monitor of a similar vintage, your CPU might not be able to keep up with the overhead of feeding a modern GPU at what is now considered a low resolution.
And even if you are suddenly seeing much higher frame rates in your performance monitoring overlay after an upgrade, you might not actually be enjoying a smoother, more responsive experience if you're still rocking a 60 Hz monitor.
Our recent RTX 5050 testing shows that, on average, upgrading to even a relatively affordable graphics card like an RTX 5060, Radeon RX 9060 XT, or RTX 5060 Ti will give you output frame rates well beyond what a 1080p60 display can fully show.
Hook up an RTX 5070, RX 9070, RX 9070 XT, or RTX 5070 Ti to that same monitor, and you're just rendering even more frames that never get properly displayed. And that's just with native rendering, not with upscaling.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors
The advent of the DLSS, FSR, and XeSS upscalers and framegen tech like Nvidia's Multi Frame Generation means that your monitor's native resolution and refresh rate are no longer hard caps on performance. You can now balance output frame rates and image quality at will. But if your display has a low resolution and refresh rate to start with, it greatly limits your degrees of freedom when balancing those factors.
... continue reading