Glossary › PC Hardware › GPU
What is a GPU? (Graphics Card)
GPU stands for Graphics Processing Unit — the component that renders everything you see on screen, and the single most important part for gaming and AI performance.
How it works
Unlike a CPU’s few powerful cores, a GPU has thousands of small cores working in parallel — perfect for drawing millions of pixels per frame, or crunching AI calculations. It comes with its own memory called VRAM, and NVIDIA’s RTX cards add dedicated hardware for ray tracing and AI features like DLSS.
What to look for when buying
Popular tiers in our builds: RTX 2060 / RX 6600 XT for 1080p esports, RTX 3060 Ti / 3070 for high-refresh 1080p and 1440p, and RTX 4070 Ti Super / 5070 for 1440p–4K and AI workloads. A tested used GPU offers the same performance as new at roughly half the price. Also check its power draw (TGP) against your PSU, and don’t compare cards by TFLOPS across generations.
Compare every RTX card
Not sure how an older card stacks up against a new one? Our RTX GPU comparison ranks every desktop RTX card from the RTX 2060 to the RTX 5080 on one simple raw power score, with full specs.
Related terms
VRAMDLSSRay TracingTGPBottleneckCUDAFPS