Here's my current build, used for general work as well as some 1080p gaming. There's one part that's probably sticking out like a sore thumb: My old faithful GTX 770.

I originally built my first gaming PC back in 2013 when the 770 was the big dog on the market. Shockingly, it has held up well over the last decade, still happily cruising along for the mostly CPU-bound gaming in 1080p (Stellaris, Elite: Dangerous, lots of emulating classic RPGs) that I occupy myself with. I set out in 2021 to rebuild my rig, upgrading everything down to the case except for that old gal. Short of selling my kidney on the black market, finding a GPU to complete my rig wasn't possible during the massive GPU shortage at the time, so I plugged the 770 in as a placeholder since it was at least better than integrated graphics. The GPU shortage marched on for a bit. I got married. And started a business. And had a kid. Time for gaming was (and mostly still is) nonexistent and I watched from the sidelines as GPU generations continued to march on.

However, I'm finally determined to maximize the little free time that I have for video games by upping my game to 1440p. I'm not looking for blazing framerates (not a big FPS guy, although I dabble) or throwing all of the sliders to max, but I'm certainly ready to put my decade-old, 2 gb VRAM companion out to a well-earned retirement. The big question: Do I just slap in a new GPU, and if so what would be my best option, or were my 2021 updates to the rest of the rig insufficient to keep up with a current-gen GPU?

General info:

US based, access to Microcenter. Budget is flexible, willing to go to about $2k for a new build (including monitor) if that's what people are suggesting, but I'd strongly prefer to only replace the GPU if that's viable.