What constitutes a "budget" graphics card? I'd argue that it's anything that costs less than £250/$250. Although—as evidenced by the, uhh, constructive feedback on the Nvidia GTX 1060 and AMD RX 480 reviews—not everyone agrees. Fortunately, both AMD and Nvidia have updated their range of sub-£250 graphics cards in recent months, with their more efficient Polaris and Pascal architectures promising better performance without the need for extravagant cooling and power requirements. The cheapest card of the lot, AMD's RX 460, costs a mere £112/$110.

At this end of the market, where the cheapest cards don't even require an external power connector to function, the target is good quality 1080p gaming above 30FPS, or high frame rates for e-sports players at 720p. These are those modest goals that all the graphics cards on test hit, but what's surprising is just how much performance you get for such a small outlay. No, the RX 470, RX 460, GTX 1050 Ti, and GTX 1050 won't blow your socks off in the same way a GTX 1080 will, but they are all excellent, affordable cards that fill a niche and price point.

The question is, which of these budget wonders offers the most bang for your buck?

Baby Polaris and Pascal

AMD's budget offerings are the RX 470 and RX 460. Both are based on its 14nm FinFET Polaris architecture, which debuted in the excellent RX 480, but they use quite different GPUs. The RX 470 features the same Polaris 10 GPU as the RX 480 with a handful of Compute Units (CUs) disabled, leaving 2,048 stream processors and 128 texture units. Core clocks and memory clocks are both down too, although some of the more astute manufacturers have made up for this deficiency with mild factory overclocks. The RGB LED-laden Asus Strix Gaming card on test, for example, features a small 50MHz overclock on the core (this was dialled back to stock speeds for the benchmarks).

RX 480 RX 470 RX 460 GTX 1060 GTX 1050 Ti GTX 1050 Shader Cores 2,304 2,048 896 1,280 768 640 Texture Units 144 128 56 80 48 40 ROPs 32 32 16 48 32 32 Core Clock 1,120MHz 926MHz 1,090MHz 1,506MHz 1,290MHz 1,354MHz Boost Clock 1,266MHz 1,206MHz 1,200MHz 1,708MHz 1,392MHz 1,455MHz Memory Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit 128-bit 192-bit 128-bit 128-bit Memory Speed 8GHz 6.6GHz 7GHz 7GHz 7GHz 7GHz Memory Bandwidth 256GB/s 211.2GB/s 112GB/s 192GB/s 112GB/s 112GB/s Memory Size 8GB GDDR5 4GB GDDR5 4GB GDDR5 6GB GDDR5 4GB GDDR5 2GB GDDR5 TDP 150W 120W 75W 120W 75W 75W Price £230/$240 £180/$180 £114/$130 £240/$250 £140/$140 £112/$110

The RX 460 uses the much smaller Polaris 11 GPU, which is also used in many of AMD's laptop graphics cards. It doesn't require 6-pin PCIe power, making it a good upgrade for off-the-shelf systems from the likes of Dell and HP. As such, there's a big gap in specs between the RX 460 and the RX 470. Aside from the obvious reduction in CUs, the memory bus is halved to 128-bits with a 7000MHz clock speed, resulting in just 112GB/s of bandwidth (2GB or 4GB versions are available). That's not a huge problem given the smaller GPU, but games with larger textures that need to be shuffled in and out of memory will suffer.

That said, the RX 460 has all the benefits of Polaris, including delta colour compression, more efficient geometry processing, and support for HDR video and FreeSync. For a full rundown of AMD's Polaris tech, check out our RX 480 review.

Meanwhile, Nvidia has the GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 1050. Both are based on the GP107 GPU and share the same number of CUDA cores and ROPs, as well as the same 128-bit memory bus. The difference lies in clocks speeds and memory, with the 1050 Ti coming in around 100MHz faster on the core clock, and with 4GB of memory instead of 2GB. Neither require 6-pin PCIe power, with the 1050 Ti sporting an impressive 75W TDP. As an upgrade, they're a much easier sell than the RX 470 for computer novices, although some models of the GTX 1050 Ti have been equipped with additional 6-pin power connectors by partners, so double check before buying.

The GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 1050 also get the full benefit of the Pascal architecture, including Fast Sync, HDR, and G-Sync with a compatible monitor. For a full rundown of the tech behind Pascal, check out the GTX 1080 review.

Ins and outs

Since neither AMD or Nvidia offers a reference version of their budget cards, specific features and outputs will vary depending on the manufacturer. At the very minimum you can expect a single HDMI 2.0b output on every card, along with DisplayPort 1.4. The latter enables 4K at 120Hz and 8K at 60Hz, and while you certainly won't be gaming at that resolution, media types and content creators may find it useful.

On the AMD side, both cards on test are Asus Strix versions. They command a small premium of around £10-£15 over more humdrum versions, but for that you get Asus' surprisingly quiet twin-fan heat-pipe cooling solution, as well as its full configurable Aura RGB lighting system. Unlike on more expensive cards, however, the latter takes the form of a small light-up logo on the top of the card. There's no bling-heavy light show here (fortunately). There's one HDMI port, one DisplayPort, and one DVI port on the RX 460, while the RX 470 gains an additional DVI port (an extra HDMI or DisplayPort port would have been better).

For Nvidia, we've opted for two MSI cards. Both feature just a single fan to keep them cool, along with HDMI, DisplayPort, and DVI outputs. They're short cards too, notably so when placed against the AMD cards, making them particularly suitable for cramped mini-ITX systems. The lack of a forth display output means you're limited to three displays with these cards—not a problem for most, but those looking to create a wall of Twitter windows (or, more usefully, live stock reports) should look elsewhere.

Side-by-side the Asus cards look more expensive—they're constructed with far more heft and style than MSI's. But that said, given these cards are likely to go into standard systems without case windows and that MSI boards have proved just as reliable as Asus in the past, it's not a deal breaker.

Listing image by Mark Walton