 With Black Friday coming up, it's the time of year to spend your hard-earned money on gaming upgrades. Manufacturers know this well, and the last quarter of the year is typically so chock full of new products and promotions that it can become impossible to keep track of them all. So with all the different options out there, how do you figure out which car delivers the best value for your dollar? Well, you could spend a few days compiling the mother of all benchmarking data spreadsheets, or you could just watch this video because we kind of did all the work for you. Just like TunnelBear does all the work of setting up a VPN for you. To try TunnelBear for free go to tunnelbear.com slash LTT. We've got that linked below. If you don't feel like watching the rest of this, honestly, that's fine. We've got recommendations for 1080p, 1440p, and 4k 60fps gaming linked in the description below. If you want to learn about how we got to those conclusions, then watch on. Just like last year, we need to start by defining value. So we're going to start by defining value. So we're going to start by defining value. So we're going to start by defining value. So we're going to start by defining value. So we're going to start by defining value. Value is not determined by price alone, but by how much performance you get for that price. So we might recommend expensive cards that you wouldn't consider affordable and still be able to call them a great value. Next, we need to ensure that for every recommendation in this guide, the real-world performance that you'll get will actually be enough for the resolution you want to run your games at. If we just looked at value by itself, we could end up telling you to go buy a $7 El Cheapo graphics card that gets 2 frames per second. That would be fantastic FPS per dollar, but a terrible gaming experience. So what would be the friggin point? On that subject, we are going to be focusing then on three main categories of gamer. All that high detail settings, 1080p, 1440p, and 4K, which is why you actually won't then see any budget card recommendations. They weren't able to meet our minimum performance requirements, regardless of how great of a value they were. So our methodology for finding the best values out there was pretty similar to last year. Now, due to how cards' clock speeds are determined these days, with heavy emphasis on automatic tuning that's done through GPU boost, we will not be focusing on the minimal performance deltas that might exist between Vendor A's GTX 1080 and Vendor M's GTX 1080. Because even a factory overclocked 1080 GPU on the fancy gigantic card is going to end up a lot closer to a normal Founder's Edition 1080 than it will to a, like, 1080 Ti, something with a completely different GPU. And this general rule is true throughout both AMD and Nvidia's lineups. As for which GPUs we looked at, we limited ourselves to ones that are actually available for purchase, brand new, directly from a large reputable seller. So we picked the three lowest price models of each one from Amazon and Newegg, then averaged them so that we could be confident that you can actually go buy something at about the pricing we're using in our value calculations. We specifically left out used hardware, and the reason for that is because while an older-gen card can often be an excellent value and deliver decent performance at the same time, it won't be covered by warranty in all but a few cases, and not everyone's comfortable with that, and we've actually run into situations before where we've gone and recommended some secondhand hardware only to see the demand, and therefore pricing, shoot up shortly after we publish our video. Okay, with me so far, now let's talk about our performance metrics. Obviously, testing over 40 cards at three resolutions in a wide enough variety of games to give solid recommendations wasn't going to be feasible. So instead of trying to find the actual frames per second of every card in every game, like last year, we used one card that was very likely to show up on performance charts at all three of these resolutions from reputable sites like GOOVER3D and PC Perspective, and then we logged the relative performance of any of our cards that we could find compared to that reference. Then we used that relative performance to extrapolate what the expected FPS might be. Now, in some cases, we had to extrapolate from an extrapolation, and then everything got a little fuzzy for a while, and I think at some point we were visited by the spreadsheet fairy? But anyway, the point is, it is imperfect. We know. Thanks to the amount of data we collected, including benchmarks from FPS, RTS, and RPG games, we're confident that after applying a common sense filter, like we ignored products outright that will obviously thermal throttle, we've got a pretty clear picture of which cards will perform consistently better and which ones will perform consistently worse. So at 1080p, there are only really a couple of choices. For Team Red, the RX 570 and 580 were far and away the best. Their little brother, the RX 560, did manage similar FPS per dollar numbers, but it wasn't able to consistently deliver a high quality 1080p experience. As for Team Green, I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but if all you want is 1080p, you can actually save a few bucks. The 1060 3G is less powerful and has less video memory, which hurts at higher resolutions compared to AMD's offerings, but it met our performance bar, and on average, we were able to find it for $40 to $50 less. Moving up to 1440p, the RX 570 and 580 once again deliver, along with the 1060 3G, the highest FPS per dollar by a significant margin. Unfortunately for Team Green, their offering just doesn't have enough raw power for us to recommend it here. Now, with that said, we aren't saying that higher-end cards are a bad idea at this resolution. The GTX 1070 and 1070 Ti are our recommendations if you want much higher frame rates and fewer stutters, and you're willing to pay a bit of a premium for it. Finally, for the ballers among you, if you want a game at 4K at high details, 60 FPS, there's really only one choice, the GTX 1080 Ti. Anything else other than a Titan XP, though its FPS per dollar would be obviously worse, since it performs about the same as a 1080 Ti, would require you to turn down your in-game settings, turn down your resolution, or turn down both in order to reach 60 FPS. Obviously, there are other factors to consider when you buy a graphics card, like Nvidia's excellent ShadowPlay game recording software that obviously isn't supported on AMD cards, or Polaris's efficiency for cryptocurrency mining if you want to make a couple bucks with your gaming rig when you're not busy gaming on it. And then, as to individual cards, well, the design of the board and cooler, the length of the warranty, and any game bundles should also weigh into your decision. But, as I've said before, to narrow your search, you can find in the description of the video three solid choices for each resolution. Happy shopping. And, if you guys are looking for a recommendation for shaving supplies and other bathroom supplies, you'll also find a link down there for that. Dollar Shave Club. It is now the best time ever to try out Dollar Shave Club. They make it easy to upgrade your shave and your bathroom, and you don't have to set foot in a store in order to get high-quality shaving and grooming products. They deliver them straight to your door. For a limited time, Dollar Shave Club is basically giving away their Sh**t Shower Shave Starter Set to new members for five bucks. It includes their Executive Razor and three trial-sized versions of their most popular products to help you stay fresh and clean. So, you'll get their Shave Butter, their Body Wash, and their One Wipe Charlie's Butt Wipes. After the first box, replacement cartridges for your Executive Razor are just a few bucks a month, and this offer is exclusively available at dollarshaveclub.com slash Linus. So, go check it out below. So, thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. I've kind of already said that a couple of times, but you guys get the point. Also linked down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum.