NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

MSRP: $89.00

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 is a budget-class graphics card with 4GB of VRAM, best suited to 1080p gaming at sensible settings. To unlock its full performance and avoid a bottleneck, pair it with a Ryzen 5 or Intel Core i5, 32GB of DDR5 RAM and a Gen5 NVMe SSD — a weak CPU or slow storage will leave frames on the table.

Modern games lean heavily on ray tracing and high-resolution textures, so DLSS 4 and FSR frame generation are what keep frame rates smooth on the most demanding titles, and its 4GB of VRAM is best kept to 1080p and 1440p textures. For comfortable VR on a Meta Quest 3 or Valve Index you would want to step up to a faster graphics card.

With a 145W board power, give the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 a quality 80 Plus Gold power supply with real headroom, and make sure it won't bottleneck your processor with the free Bottleneck Calculator, or size your power supply with the PSU Calculator.