It's the end of the year, so of course thoughts are going to start moving on towards the future, to what's coming down the pipe for the next go around the local shining celestial body. But we are also at the end of one whole generation of graphics cards and have just seen the very first GPU drop from the next generation.
That's a new budget graphics card from Intel, the Arc B580, and it forms the vanguard of the Battlemage range of GPUs, with the higher-spec cards set to drop in 2025.
Which is just going to add to the melange of graphics processing units we are looking forward to getting our hands on over the next 12 months. As well as Intel being set to release a slew of new GPUs, there will also be AMD launching its new RDNA 4 cards, and arguably the biggest releases of 2025 will be the next-generation RTX 50-series GPUs from the current market leader, Nvidia.
New graphics cards are the catalysts PC builders—both professional and us homebrew hobbyists—need to start considering putting together a whole new PC. I can see these new cards having a huge impact on people deciding that they've been putting off a new PC or rig upgrade for far too long and throwing themselves into chasing down the best new cards for their budgets.
That's fine if your budget is $1,000+ because I'm sure there are going to be a host of fresh opportunities for you to spend that money burning a hole in your pocket right now—I expect Nvidia will have at least two new cards in that price tier. But for those of us with less extravagant tastes, or fiscal holdings, the budget end of the market is going to be of greatest interest to us.
So, what is the budget GPU world going to look like in 2025?
Let's start with the latest graphics card to grace our test benches, that Intel Arc B580. This is the first Battlemage GPU, following on from the ill-fated Alchemist range which launched in 2022, and is set to be joined by at least two more Intel GPUs in 2025.
With new GPUs lining up at CES 2025 from the other two GPU makers, we can expect to see new high-end cards from both. Though AMD is expected to be more focused on the lower-end of the market than Nvidia, yet is still unlikely to release another genuine budget card straight away.
The RDNA 4 cards aren't expected to be wholly different from what's on the market at the moment, but what we might see is something with the performance of the RX 7700 XT brought down into something like the $300 mark the RX 7600 XT is inhabiting right now. But we could be waiting until the middle of the year for that to arrive if we take AMD's historical budget GPU release tendencies into account. The RX 7600 released some six months after the first RDNA 3 cards arrived, after all.
And what of the big guns of Jen-Hsun and crew? Nvidia is all set to release new Blackwell graphics cards at CES in January with the expectation being that we'll see RTX 50-series cards starting to launch that same month.
Normally I'd assume that would be an RTX 5090, with maybe the RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 following a monthly cadence thereafter, but the rumours are suggesting a more accelerated program than we've seen from the green team in the past. Some folk are suggesting that an RTX 5060 will be on the shelves come March 2025, which would be surprisingly early for a new budget Nvidia card.
But just how budget might it be? This is the question, because a lot of the noises have been about whether Nvidia might start hiking prices again this generation. With the RTX 4060 launching at $299, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect an RTX 5060 could release with a $350 - $400 price tag. But it's nearly Christmas, so I'm in a positive mood, and there's a part of me that fels like Nvidia might have learned its lesson from hiking GPU prices too much last generation.
So, maybe March might see a $300 RTX 5060 launch with performance that's getting closer to an RTX 4060 Ti or, heaven forbid, an RTX 4070 (so long as you count some sort of next-gen upscaling into the performance picture).
But with a suite of new budget GPUs from Intel, Nvidia, and finally AMD, all being available to build new gaming PCs around througout 2025, it's shaping up to be a potentialy very good year for us to upgrade our rigs.
