Welcome back! It’s time to look at the best graphics cards to buy in October 2024, including the best graphics card for Amazon Prime Day and early Black Friday sales. We’ll cover every budget level, from the best graphics card under $200 all the way up to the best 1440p and 4K graphics cards in 2024. We’ll also look at upcoming graphics card launches and sales so you can get the best value GPU in 2024.
Let’s start off by playing everyone’s favorite game: should you buy now or should you wait? Well, obviously, the first thing we have to talk about this month is Amazon Prime Day and the early Black Friday sales coming down the pike. Amazon Prime Day is October 8th and 9th, but really, those sales start from other retailers like Newegg the day before and often continue after Prime Day is officially over. In fact, early Black Friday sales continue to get earlier and earlier every year, often pushing into late October. Looking at last year’s deals, many graphics card deals were almost as good in October as they were for Black Friday. So at this point, if you see what you want, feel free to buy it. And remember, AMD tends to offer much higher discounts for sales on their Radeon graphics cards, while Nvidia really doesn’t.
Let’s take a quick look at current generation graphics card prices. Note, these prices were pulled from just before Amazon Prime Day, so check for current pricing and availability in your region. Starting off with Nvidia GeForce graphics cards: prices for graphics cards at the higher end, like the RTX 4090, 4080 Super, and 4070 Ti Super, spiked up a bit, led by the RTX 4090, which has reportedly stopped production. Moving down, we see the RTX 4070 Super pricing still at its most expensive recently, with no other pricing changes for the rest of the stack, including the RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB and RTX 4060. Previous generation RTX 3060 12 GB GPUs were up slightly and have also reportedly ended production, while the RTX 3050 8 GB graphics card sank to its lowest-ever price.
Moving over to the AMD Radeon side, prices for AMD’s Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs dropped to their lowest-ever pricing on the RX 7900 XTX 24 GB and RX 7900 XT 20 GB graphics cards. Another notable change is the lower mid-range RX 7700 XT 12 GB graphics card, which might already be experiencing sales price cuts down to an extremely good, in fact, lowest-ever $349—and that’s for the three-fan PowerColor model. Otherwise, no major changes for AMD graphics cards, but we anticipate significant movement on these GPUs, particularly around the RX 7800 XT, 7900 GRE, and higher-end GPUs, as AMD wants to clear them out ahead of their next-generation launch.
On the Intel side, prices have oddly gone up, though this might just be due to the little game that retailers pull ahead of sales, where they raise prices for about three weeks so that price trackers show a “huge sale” when they drop prices during the actual sale.
With current GPU prices edging back down to match their lowest levels, should you buy now or wait for a new graphics card? For next-gen launches, we’re still expecting the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 in early 2025, but leaked specs on the RTX 5080 seem very disappointing—it’s really more like a 70-class card. I expect Nvidia to charge a lot for their new cards, with no date on an RTX 5070 or 5060 in sight. On the AMD side, all leaks now point to an early 2025 launch for the RX 8000 series, which will be mid-range to budget-only, with the high-end being canceled. However, they’re expected to bring RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT performance to a lower price point.
For Intel’s Battlemage, launch rumors are conflicting between either this fall or next year, but early testing of Lunar Lake laptops using the new Xe2 Battlemage GPU cores looks impressive.
Looking at current game bundles offered with GPUs: Intel’s bundle expired last month, and there currently isn’t one for Intel GPUs. AMD extended its bundle, offering both Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 and Unknown9: Awakening games to anyone buying an RX 7600 XT or higher GPU or a Ryzen 7700 or 9700X or higher CPU by November 2nd. Together, those games sell for about $110 on Steam. Nvidia extended its game bundle with a purchase of an RTX 4070 or higher value graphics card if you buy it by October 10th. Remember, to get the bundles, you actually have to buy the qualifying GPU from a participating retailer.
