This is a table of all Nvidia graphics cards currently worth considering (IMHO), along with the maximum price you should aim to pay for them. The main objective here is to find the best possible graphics card at the lowest price.

The criteria for selection is that they must be capable of playing modern AAA titles at reasonable framerates and quality settings at 1080p, or 720p at a push, where "reasonable" is at least 30fps at medium quality settings (i.e. console gaming standard). Obviously higher is better, but of course also more expensive.

The table is sorted (roughly) in ascending order of GPU performance (there's a huge variance in benchmark results), is based on a combination of ShadowTech's GPU Tier list 2017, from the Linus Tech Tips forum, and Steven Walton's comprehensive GPU benchmarks on Titanfall 2, and includes older-generation cards, as far back as the GTX 660. Anything below that is probably not very useful for modern titles, including the current-generation GT 1030, which I've only included as a baseline reference. I've also excluded everything above the GTX 1060 3GB, as the 6GB model is very poor value for money (anything up to 50% higher price, but only 5% faster performance), and everything else is just far too expensive (including the second-hand prices for the GTX 980 Ti).

If you can afford exotic cards like the £700/$800 GTX 1080 Ti, then you really don't need this list anyway, as its main purpose is to highlight the fact that second-hand, older-generation cards are often faster than current-generation cards, but at a fraction of the price.

This is also why I've excluded all Radeon cards, as their prices are (still) ridiculously high due to bitmining (for example, the cheapest RX 580 I could find was still more expensive than the most expensive GTX 1060), a problem that has also affected Nvidia cards to a lesser extent, and had a knock-on effect on the second-hand market, producing a bizarre situation where some second-hand cards are actually selling for more than you would pay, for those exact same cards, brand new. If that situation ever changes, and anyone wants to submit table entries for Radeon cards of corresponding price/performance, then please do so in the comments section below. Be sure to include links to currently active UK retail/auction pages for verification (posting URLs requires registration).

Prices for new, current-generation cards are based on the cheapest prices found by PCPartPicker, and prices for second-hand, older-generation cards have been extrapolated according to their speed relative to adjacent cards in the hierarchy.

Note that this is therefore not realistically representative of actual second-hand prices, especially in the current, insane bitmining climate, but rather indicative of what the price ought to be according to each card's relative capabilities (or in other words it's their intrinsic value). I've therefore included a real-world price based on typical closing bid values on eBay, which may be higher or lower than the guide price.

All prices are in UK pounds sterling. If anyone wants to submit a corresponding table for US dollars or any other currency, please do so in the comments section below.

[Table values current as of 12^th July 2018]

Update 15^th Jan 2018: All current-generation GPUs are now unattainable due to either being out of stock or obscenely expensive, supposedly due to yet another cryptocurrency boom. As such I'm scratching all new cards from the table indefinitely, until their prices drop to something more reasonable, if ever.

Update 12^th July 2018: I basically gave up any hope of ever being able to afford a graphics card months ago, and so stopped tracking prices, until today when I was surprised to discover that they do seem to have stabilised (although they're still obscenely overpriced). Unfortunately it's a day late and a dollar short, because I've long since abandoned the PC as a gaming platform entirely, and moved wholesale to games consoles instead, which offer support for modern games at a tiny fraction of the price. Sorry, but I just can't afford PC prices, even if that means I lose a few fps.

Update 9^th November 2018: It seems Nvidia has now completely abandoned the mass market with its stupidly expensive RTX range, which not only has a worse price to performance ratio than its own previous generation cards (which were already overpriced anyway), is way beyond the budget of most gamers, and has zero titles that even utilise this highly dubious RTX technology (the thing that supposedly justifies the outrageous price), but the final insult is that RTX is apparently DOA due to severe hardware design flaws, while at the same time previous generation cards gradually stop production and disappear into the ether, leaving PC gamers with nothing.

At this point it's impossible to recommend the PC as a platform for games, even if you're obscenely rich, as the only retail hardware out there is basically junk, and for the rest of us even second hand prices are a joke.