Best GPUs for F1 25 (2026): 5 Picks by Ray Tracing Tier

F1 25 has three different graphics requirements wearing one name. Fully maxed rasterization runs at high refresh on cards most players already own. Standard ray tracing moves the floor up to the upper midrange. Path tracing, the game's Ultra Max setting, needs an RTX 5080 class card just to hold 60 fps at 1080p with Quality upscaling.

So the useful question is not which card is fastest. It is which of those three modes you plan to leave switched on, because the answer changes what you should spend by a factor of four.

Our top pick: ASUS TUF RTX 5070 Ti OC

It is the lowest tier that holds 1440p Ultra High with ray tracing enabled and still leaves room for a high-refresh panel, which is where most F1 25 buyers land.

ASUS TUF Gaming NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16GB GDDR7 OC Edition Graphics Card, (PCIe 5.0, HDMI/DP 2.1, 3.125-Slot, Military-Grade Components, Protective PCB Coating), 3 Year Warranty

$1,289.99

Buy the ASUS TUF RTX 5070 Ti OC on Amazon

Quick picks

Specs at a glance

Benchmarks

Reviewer coverage of this title reports relative deltas more consistently than absolute frame rates across a full five-card field, so these charts are indexed rather than invented. Each one sets the losing card at 100 and shows the winner's margin in the same scenario.

How we picked

The framework here is the decision fork, not a ladder. Rasterization, standard ray tracing, and path tracing are three separate performance classes in this game, and a card that is generous for one is inadequate for the next. Every pick below is anchored to a specific mode and resolution rather than to a price bracket.

Sixteen gigabytes is the floor across the board. In this exact title at 1440p, the 16 GB version of the RX 9060 XT runs roughly 50 percent ahead of the 8 GB card carrying the same name, and the 1% lows separate by more than the averages do. Two cards sharing a model number and differing on memory are not the same product, and cross-shopping them on price is the most expensive mistake available in this category.

Frame generation is treated as a smoothness multiplier, not a performance level. It turns 60 into 120 and 90 into 180. It does not turn 30 into 120, and it adds 10 to 25 ms of system latency, so competitive league racers should leave it off and buy the native frames instead. Any recommendation resting on a frame-gen headline number is a weaker card with arithmetic attached.

Performance figures are cited from published reviewer testing rather than re-run here, and where no reviewer covers a specific card in this title, the guide says so instead of estimating. The same approach shaped our Forza Horizon 6 GPU guide and the wider sim racing picks.

Best Overall: ASUS TUF RTX 5070 Ti OC

This is the card that sits on the right side of the fork. Ray tracing on, 1440p, high refresh, no asterisks.

ASUS TUF Gaming NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16GB GDDR7 OC Edition Graphics Card, (PCIe 5.0, HDMI/DP 2.1, 3.125-Slot, Military-Grade Components, Protective PCB Coating), 3 Year Warranty

$1,289.99

Buy the ASUS TUF RTX 5070 Ti OC on Amazon

Specs

What it does well

F1 25 is one of the titles where Nvidia's ray tracing hardware advantage stops being academic. Switch the Ultra High preset on with ray tracing enabled at 1440p and the 5070 Ti pulls 20 to 24 percent clear of the RX 9070 XT, a card it loses to when the same settings run with effects off. Wet Spa at dusk, with reflections resolving properly on the racing line, is the scene this card was bought for.

The 16 GB pool matters more than the raw number suggests. Ray tracing and ray reconstruction both push memory hard, and this is the tier where an 8 GB card starts dropping textures instead of frames. DLSS 4 running the transformer model at Quality is close to free at 1440p, and it is the honest way to buy headroom rather than a way to paper over a card that cannot hold the resolution natively. Multi-Frame Gen stacks on top of that: from a native base in the high eighties it fills a 240 Hz panel during a single-player season, which is the one place the added latency costs you nothing.

What you give up

Turn ray tracing off and the verdict inverts. On the standard High rasterization preset at 1440p the 9070 XT leads by around 7 percent, which means a league racer who runs effects off is paying an Nvidia premium for a toggle they never touch. That is not a small caveat in a game where the competitive crowd runs low settings by choice.

Street pricing on this SKU has stayed well above its launch positioning, and the 3.125-slot cooler needs checking against compact mid-towers before you order. Path tracing is still not comfortable here at 1440p, so if Ultra Max is the reason you are shopping, this is not the tier.

Who it's for

The 1440p racer with a 165 Hz or 240 Hz panel who wants ray-traced reflections switched on, and who also runs Blender, Premiere, or anything else that leans on CUDA. If your rig does double duty, this is the pick that stops being a compromise.

Best Value: Sapphire Pulse RX 9070 XT

If your F1 25 settings screen has ray tracing set to off and it is going to stay there, this is the better card.

Sapphire 11348-03-20G Pulse AMD Radeon™ RX 9070 XT Gaming Graphics Card with 16GB GDDR6, AMD RDNA 4

$789.99

Buy the Sapphire Pulse RX 9070 XT on Amazon

Specs

What it does well

The Pulse wins the mode most F1 players spend their evenings in. On the High rasterization preset at 1440p it leads the RTX 5070 Ti by roughly 7 percent, and it does that while carrying the same 16 GB of memory at a lower street price. League racing rewards frame consistency and input latency over reflections, and this card delivers both at a tier below what the Nvidia equivalent costs.

FSR 4 has closed enough of the gap to count as a real buying lever on RDNA 4. Quality mode at 1440p holds up in motion, which is the only test that matters at 300 km/h. The Pulse cooler is also the practical one here at 2.5 slots and a shade over 12 inches, so it drops into cases the wider Nvidia partner cards fight with.

What you give up

The moment ray tracing goes on, this card loses and it loses badly. The same 1440p comparison that has it ahead on raster puts it 20 to 24 percent behind once Ultra High ray tracing is enabled. Path tracing is not a conversation. If there is any chance you want to see F1 25 at its visual ceiling, buy the other side of the fork.

There is no CUDA here, so GPU-accelerated creative work runs slower or not at all. RDNA 4 stock has also been thin since launch, which means the price you see varies more week to week than the Nvidia stack does.

Who it's for

The league racer or hotlapper on a pure gaming build, running 1440p at 144 Hz or above with effects turned down for consistency. Also the buyer who wants 16 GB without paying the Nvidia tax and knows they will never switch ray tracing on.

Best Premium: ASUS TUF RTX 5080 OC

The only pick here where Ultra Max is a setting you can leave enabled rather than a screenshot mode.

ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX™ 5080 16GB GDDR7 OC Edition Graphics Card

$1,691.88$1,899.99

Buy the ASUS TUF RTX 5080 OC on Amazon

Specs

What it does well

Codemasters names the RTX 5080 and the RTX 4080 Super as the cards needed to hold 60 fps at 1080p with path tracing and Quality upscaling. That is the published requirement, not an enthusiast benchmark, and it tells you exactly how expensive this rendering mode is. Path tracing costs roughly two to three times the load of standard ray tracing in this engine.

At 1440p with DLSS Quality and ray reconstruction, the 5080 is the realistic floor for a path-traced race weekend. Step down to standard ray tracing and it opens up 4K Ultra High comfortably, with MFG making 4K 120 reachable on a high-refresh 4K panel. For a buyer whose monitor is already 4K, this is the tier where the game stops asking you to choose.

What you give up

The gap between this card and the 5090 above it is wide, and the pricing does not reflect that gap. You are paying a large premium over the 5070 Ti for one rendering mode, in a game where the camera is moving fast enough that a lot of the path-traced detail never registers. Be honest with yourself about whether you will leave it on after the first three races.

Physically it is a lot of card. At 3.6 slots and 13 inches, buyers have flagged fitment problems in mid-towers that swallowed the previous generation without complaint. Measure before you order, and budget for a case with real clearance if yours is tight.

Who it's for

The 4K racer who wants Ultra High with ray tracing at native resolution, and the buyer who specifically wants to see what path tracing does to a night race and accepts what that costs.

Best Budget: ASRock Challenger RX 9060 XT 16GB

The cheapest card here that still ships 16 GB, which is the line that matters in this game.

ASRock Radeon RX 9060 XT Challenger 16GB OC, RDNA 4, 3290MHz Boost, 16GB GDDR6 128-bit, PCIe 5.0, Dual Fans, 0dB Silent, LED Indicator, DisplayPort 2.1a, HDMI 2.1b

$469.99

Buy the ASRock Challenger RX 9060 XT 16GB on Amazon

Specs

What it does well

F1 25 maxed on rasterization is not a demanding game. This card clears 1080p Ultra High without drama and handles 1440p once FSR 4 Quality is on, which covers the majority of buyers who are shopping for this title in the first place. Two slots, dual fan, zero-RPM at idle, and it fits in essentially anything.

The memory configuration is the whole reason it is here rather than a cheaper sibling. Testing in this exact title at 1440p puts the 16 GB version around 50 percent ahead of the 8 GB card on average frames, with the 1% lows separated by even more than that. That is not a texture-quality footnote, it is the difference between a card that holds up and one that stutters.

What you give up

Ray tracing at 1440p is a compromise on this card rather than a setting you switch on and forget. The 128-bit memory bus limits how far it scales as resolution climbs, so 4K is out of scope regardless of what the VRAM number suggests.

Path tracing does not meaningfully exist here. If the reason you are reading a GPU guide for a racing game is that you saw a path-traced Monaco screenshot, this card will not get you there and no amount of upscaling changes that.

Who it's for

The 1080p racer on a first build, or the entry-1440p buyer who wants the game maxed on raster and has no interest in ray-traced puddles. Pair it with a 144 Hz 1080p panel and the money goes further than it would on a bigger card.

Editor's Pick: MSI Ventus 3X RTX 5060 Ti 16G

The mainstream Nvidia option, and the one to buy if your races end up on a stream.

msi Gaming RTX 5060 Ti 16G Ventus 3X OC Graphics Card (16GB GDDR7, 128-bit, Extreme Performance: 2617 MHz, DisplayPort x 3 2.1a, HDMI 2.1b, NVIDIA Blackwell Architecture)

$749.99

Buy the MSI Ventus 3X RTX 5060 Ti 16G on Amazon

Specs

What it does well

At native 1440p Ultra High this card runs about 9 percent ahead of the RX 9060 XT 16GB, and its 1% lows stay ahead even in the scenarios where the averages converge. Turn Quality upscaling on and the two land level on average frames, which tells you the gap is real but narrow. DLSS 4 with MFG is the cheapest route in this lineup to a number that fills a high-refresh panel.

NVENC AV1 is the reason this sits at Editor's Pick rather than further down. If you stream league races to Twitch or YouTube, the encoder takes the load off the CPU in a way the AMD card does not match, and that changes the calculus for a card at this tier.

What you give up

It costs more than the 9060 XT for a lead that evaporates the moment upscaling comes on, and both cards share the same 128-bit bus constraint. If you do not stream and you do not care about DLSS specifically, the AMD card is the better use of the money.

Ray tracing at 1440p still needs upscaling to feel good here. This is a 1080p-first card that reaches into 1440p rather than a native 1440p card, and buying it as the latter leads to disappointment.

Who it's for

The buyer who wants the Nvidia feature stack at the mainstream tier, streams or records races, and plays at 1080p or 1440p with upscaling on.

Is path tracing worth it in a racing game?

Path tracing in F1 25 is the most visually complete version of the game and the least practical one. It carries roughly two to three times the cost of standard ray tracing, and the published requirement to hold 60 fps at 1080p with Quality upscaling is an RTX 5080 or an RTX 4080 Super. For 1440p you are into the top of the stack even with ray reconstruction helping.

The honest counterpoint is what a racing camera does with all that detail. You are moving at speed, the mirrors are small, and the reflections that path tracing renders correctly flash past in a fraction of a second. In a slow-paced single-player game the mode changes how the world feels. Here it changes how the replays look.

Which is a real reason to want it, just not the same reason as buying frames. If you race a season, capture replays, and enjoy the presentation side of the sport, the premium pick earns its keep. If you race a league on Tuesday nights, spend the difference on a faster panel and leave Ultra Max for the screenshots.

Bottom line

If you play at 1440p with ray tracing on, buy the ASUS TUF RTX 5070 Ti OC. If you race leagues with effects off, the Sapphire Pulse RX 9070 XT is faster for less. If your monitor is 4K or you want path tracing at all, the ASUS TUF RTX 5080 OC is the entry point and there is no cheaper route. On a first build at 1080p, the ASRock Challenger RX 9060 XT 16GB maxes the game on raster. Stream your races and the MSI Ventus 3X RTX 5060 Ti 16G is the one to take. Whatever you pick, take the 16 GB version.

FAQ