Equipping your system with any high-end GPU will boost your total PC bill by a few hundred dollars. Beyond adding extra power to your gaming experience, some graphics cards can power up to four displays, though few gamers go beyond two or three (and even then only rarely). In the long run, a better reason to opt for high-end graphics is to power 4K gaming and virtual reality (VR) experiences. Monitors with 4K resolution (3,840 by 2,160 pixels) and the displays built into the latest VR headsets have much higher pixel counts than a "simple" 1080p HD monitor. You'll need a decidedly high-end graphics card to drive a 4K display at the highest quality settings. If you mean to play games on a 4K panel with detail settings cranked up, you'll want to look at one of Nvidia's highest-end cards suited for 4K play, with the RTX 3080, RTX 4080, and RTX 4090 easily the best picks. Selecting a graphics card for VR is a different set of considerations, and not quite as demanding as 4K play on recent AAA games. VR headsets have their own graphics requirements. Generally, a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti or a Radeon RX 5600 XT/RX 6700 (or higher, in either case) should suffice as the floor for VR. Naturally, more demanding VR games will benefit from superior GPUs. Look at the recommended minimum GPU specs for your specific VR headset and exceed it by at least a small margin to guarantee smooth performance. Now, VR and 4K gaming are unquestionably high-end matters (the latter even more so than the former). You can still get a rich gaming experience for thousands of bucks less by choosing a desktop with a single but robust middle-tier video card (an RTX 3060 or 4060, for example) and gaming at 1080p or 1440p; 2,560 by 1,440 pixels is an increasingly popular native resolution for gaming monitors. If you're less concerned about turning up all the eye candy found in games—anti-aliasing and esoteric lighting effects, for example—then today's less-powerful graphics cards and GPUs will still give you plenty of 1080p oomph for much less money.