For budget level, RX 460, 470, or GTX 1050 Ti. They're both pretty power efficient and good in all games.

An RX 480 8GB or GTX 1060 6GB (never the 3gb model) would be for better performance in newer titles.

The problem with current GPUs is that either they are affordable, but probably won't offer a good performance for games that will be released in the future(GTX 1060, RX 480), or there are rather expensive GPUs that will still offer a good performance for the future game(GTX 1070 and 1080). In addition, some of them have their own problems(bad memory in 1070, 480 taking more power from PCI-E that the port can withstand). That's why I suggest the OP to wait.

For example, if you have seen benchmarks for NVidia GTX 1060 6GB or RX 480, you can see that they can run AC: Syndicate in 60 fps. That is an year old game.

If the OP really wants to buy something right now, then I would not go for less than GTX 1060 6GB or RX 480 8 GB if I were them. Some of the cheaper cards can't run new games in Full HD at 60 fps(for examlpe, RX 460 and Witcher 3).

Hi Retro60s

It is an interesting question you pose and one I have thought about my self.

The first thing you want to think about is why do you want to upgrade. I will not put words into your mouth here: you need to say what games you are playing and what kind of improvement you are looking for.

The actual truth here is that hardware is far in advance of most games that are produced today and if you are on a budget, unless you are getting serious performance issues and I would doubt it, I simply would not bother investing in the latest and greatest unless you want to pay a premium for bells and whistles. Wait for the time you need a system overhaul.

I don't wont to confuse you too much but I have an older generation cpu with an older generation GPU and much to my amazement, I was able to run witcher 3 on medium.

Seriously, think twice about keeping your hardware "up there", there is very little out there that will push it.

For example, look at the power users even on these forums suggesting and even purchasing over 8 GB ram. There are next to no games that will ever utilise that, ever. Hardware has been ahead of the software curve for what 10, 15 years now?

Of course, I hold back now as I play older games, but the witcher 3 was a real eye opener for me.

You do not get the extra RAM for the games. You get it for all the other stuff you don't wish to close before running the game.
Not to mention that RAMdrives are lovely stuff to use.

Maybe true, that's not the way I have ever done it though. If I want to run a game at max, any max, I certainly wont be running stuff in the back.

You raise a good point about the Ram-drives though. A paradox even.

Thanks everyone for all your replies, I really appreciate all the info you have been able to provide. To be clear, I'm not really looking at future proofing my computer, I still have quite the backlog already and two young kids to keep me occupied, just interested in giving it a bit of a boost on the cheap. At the moment I am playing No Man's sky (I like it, easy to dip in and out of) and while it runs it tends to stutter a bit, and not play smoothly. The only other games I am interested in playing at the moment is Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Dishonored 2 and Fallout 4 if upgrading would enable me to play these. A beast of a machine isn't really high on my priorities, as I have little free time to sit for gaming, just looking at options to prolong the life of my computer a bit.

So for a lower price range a GTX1050Ti would be good investment? I'm not interested in ultra HD or anything like that, just smooth running games that look okay.

If you don't want to spend a ton of money, and want to stick with Nvidia, the 1050ti seems to have a good cost/value ratio. Certainly seems to be a popular GPU -- looks like it's replaced the 750ti as most popular low/mid-range gaming card.

You'll probably be satisfied with it, if you only play at Full HD, and don't mind turning down a few settings in performance-heavy games.

Yup, for is price is a good card and consumes very few power so should easily run with every PSU out there and not be tooo loud.