Articles Archive for April 2010
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The graphics card is without doubt the star of any PC capable of gaming, but the options out there are vast. So it’s TechRadar to the rescue with our new and improved definitive guide to the top ten fastest and best commercial graphics cards on the planet.
The graphics card is the thoroughbred racehorse of your rig, but picking through the nags that are on offer out there is not for the faint hearted. In this guide though we’ll let you know what’s hot, what’s cool and what the fastest GPUs available are.
Skip to:
- Graphics card glossary
- The budget options
- 10 best graphics cards in the world today
- Benchmarks compared
World’s fastest graphics cards…
The key thing here is that you don’t always need to drop £500 on a new graphics card; the ubiquitous nature of console conversions in the games industry and the relative age of the current generation of consoles means that more often than not the latest PC games aren’t going to stretch the fastest GPUs to their limit.
To that end we’ve also put together a five card shortlist of the best budget graphics cards if you don’t feel like selling the kids to fuel your next gaming fix.
So how does your graphics card stand in our countdown, and is it time for an upgrade? Well, there’s only one way to find out…
There are a lot of terms and acronyms that get bandied around when talking about graphics cards, and not a lot of explanation to go along with them.
Before we delve into the meat of the feature let’s take a minute to clear things up a little.
GPU – This is the graphics processing unit, the chip at the heart of the graphics card. Many cards use the same GPU but partner it with different components and at different clockspeeds to produce slower or faster graphics cards.
GDDR – Graphics Double Data Rate memory is the specific kind of memory that is used on graphics cards.
ROPs – The Render Output unit comes into play during the final stages in the rendering process, bringing together the data from each of the memory buffers in the graphics card’s local memory. The more of them you have, the better off you are.
CUDA – The Compute Unified Device Architecture is a coding language Nvidia invented to allow parallel computing on its range of GPUs. From its 8 series upwards all its cards can use CUDA to speed up parallel processing applications, such as video encoding, in a faster way than your computer’s CPU.
PhysX – Originally an accelerator chip and software layer from the small company Ageia, Nvidia bought up PhysX and has now applied it to its GPUs, again from the 8 series forward. It allows for more advanced physics simulations, such as liquid or cloth, in games that have been coded with the PhysX software included.
Crossfire and SLI – These are the relevant multi-GPU configurations from both AMD and Nvidia. Both allow multiple graphics cards to be connected together to increase the rendering performance. Historically this has been fraught with driver issues and diminishing returns for the extra cards, but as the latest cards have been released we are getting closer to doubling the performance by adding in a second card.
PCB – The Printed Circuit Board is the physical board that graphics cards (and all other micro-electronics) have their components attached to. The boards are printed with conductive pathways between the relevant components instead of using physical wires.
DirectX – Microsoft’s DirectX is a collection of its own proprietary APIs (application programming interfaces) for dealing with multimedia tasks on its own operating systems. The Direct3D part is specifically to do with 3D graphics and utilises hardware acceleration if there is a GPU in place to take advantage of it.
Tesselation - This is one of the key buzzwords to come from Microsoft’s latest graphical API, DirectX 11. Essentially it is designed to add extra geometry to a simple polygon using displacement maps to tell the GPU where to raise and lower parts of the polygon as the graphics card computes the data. The idea being to add geometry to objects in a game world without significantly impairing performance and it is set to become a key battleground in the graphics war in the coming years.
As we’ve already discussed, the fastest graphics cards in the world aren’t the only graphics cards you need to think about.
With the fast-paced evolution of the GPU the lower-end cards of today are exponentially better than the budget cards of yesterday. Much of the sub-£100 end of the market is dominated by AMD and this represents a conscious effort on behalf of the Texan company.
Seeing the dominance of Nvidia at the high-end of the graphics market over the last couple of generations AMD decided to put its efforts into sleeker, lower-cost designs hoping that doubling up its cheaper GPUs into multi-GPU cards would deliver competitive cards at the high end.
This strategy has paid off for AMD who now sees its cards being competitive at all price ranges, though most especially at the low-end.
You’ve also got last generation’s cards dropping down in price to the point where they now represent a real bargain. We’ve picked five of the best budget graphics cards available today for your delectation and delight.
The best £150 graphics card
The pick of the bunch at this price has to be last generation’s Nvidia GeForce GTX 260. The version two of the GTX 260 is a die-shrink of the GT200 GPU from 65nm to 55nm, which meant Nvidia was able to produce a cheaper, cooler, lower-power edition.
It runs the same GT200b GPU as the superlative GeForce GTX 275, but with reduced clockspeeds across the board. This does make it slightly slower than that card, but against the £150 competition the overclocked GTX 260 has the lead in performance terms. It is purely a DX9/10 card though, with no ability to use the DX11 API.
The best £125 graphics card
This is a tough one to call as it really depends on how future-proof you want your gaming rig to be. With the spectre of massed DX11 titles on the horizon do you want to be lagging behind in your GPU’s feature-set?
Both the 1GB HD 4870 and HD 5770 are available for around the £125 price-point but offer different things.
The HD 4870 has a definite edge in DX10 games, but the HD 5770 has the added ability of being able to take advantage of all the goodness DX11 offers.
That said your actual gaming experience would be faster on the HD 4870 across the board as the added strain that DX11′s tessellation would put on the HD 5770 slows it down considerably.
The best £100 graphics card
At this price-point we get much the same duel as we had at the £125 mark. The Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 is the performance card being just a rebranded 9800GTX, in its time a £300 card and then the pinnacle of single-GPU cards.
There are also GTS 250 cards out there carrying a die-shrink of the 9800GTX’s G92 GPU, the G92b, giving it lower power and cooling requirements. It’s competition is the 1GB HD 5750, a DX11 part but unfortunately no performance king, especially at the higher resolutions.
The best £75 graphics card
Here there is no competition at all; it’s all about the ATI Radeon HD 5670 straight down the line. It’s not an incredible performer compared to the more expensive cards by any stretch of the imagination, but a card for this price that can run Far Cry 2, with all it’s DX10 finery, at 2,560×1,600, in double figure framerates, is nothing to be sniffed at.
The best £50 graphics card
At this pricepoint you’re not really looking at 3D gaming to any high degree, but the ATI Radeon HD 5450 will do the goods for your small form-factor media centre if you fancy a bit of World of Warcraft on your HD television. It’s a half-height, passively-cooled card that doesn’t have the raw grunt to throw pixels around at high resolutions but will do all you need in terms of encoding and decoding HD content in a lounge PC.
10. ATI Radeon HD 4890
AMD’s last-generation super-card still holding on to the top 10
- Price: £190
- GPU:\ RV790XT
- Manufacturing process: 55nm
- Memory:1,024MB GDDR5
Coming a lengthy nine months after the launch of its inaugural HD 48xx card, the HD 4870, the HD 4890 was much more than just an overclocked version of AMD’s fastest single-GPU card of the time.
And batting at number ten in our chart of the fastest graphics cards around, the revisions AMD made to the GPU at the heart of this card made it a much more competitive product in such a crowded marketplace.
The clockspeeds have been upped from the HD 4870, but only by a somewhat measly 13 per cent – from 750MHz to 850MHz – and the actual make up of the chip hasn’t changed much from the outside.
It still houses the HD 4870′s 800 stream processors, 40 texture units and 16 ROPs, but the chip itself has been reworked from the ground up to enable the higher clockspeeds and the other board components were tweaked too.
Combined with the constant evolution and maturation of AMD’s driver set, this has all lead to the HD 4890 still being a relevant card today.
Indeed all the work AMD put in to create a card competitive with Nvidia’s fastest single-GPU card paid off, shown by the HD 4890 being almost on a par with the monolithic GTX 285.
There are a host of overclocked versions which close the gap even more, and if you can palate the thought of jumping into a Crossfire setup adding a second HD 4890 isn’t a bad option given those mature drivers.
Still, you always have to be wary of multi-GPU configurations if you’re going to be playing the latest gaming releases – if there is a driver problem you could be waiting a couple of months for an effective fix to be put in action.
Read: ATI Radeon HD 4890 review
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9. Nvidia GeForce GTX 275
The GTX 275 has all of the Nvidia power but at a fraction of the cost
- Price:£176
- GPU:GT200b
- Manufacturing process: 55nm
- Memory:896MB GDDR5
Coming closely on the heels of the HD 4890 is Nvidia’s brilliant GTX 275. Why is it brilliant? Well, from a business point of view it isn’t all that, but from a consumer’s it was every bit as important a release as the 8800GT was back in its day.
Barely three month prior Nvidia had released its refresh of the GTX 280, the GTX 285. It was a die-shrink from the 65nm manufacturing process to the new 55nm process, meaning smaller chips, less power draw and hence could be higher clocked leading to improved performance.
The GTX 285 was, and still is, a well performing card. The problem was that it was significantly more expensive than the GTX 275, which wouldn’t have been a problem if it was also significantly faster.
Unfortunately it wasn’t. The GTX 275 is so close to the performance of the GTX 285 that on its release Nvidia practically retired its own fastest single-GPU card in one stroke. There simply was no point spending the extra cash on a GTX 285 when the GTX 275 could do practically everything the GTX 285 could do for a fraction of the price.
It’s got the same basic GPU core and only very slightly lower clock, shader and memory speeds. You lose four ROPs, just over 100MB of DRAM and a smaller memory bus, but in real-world terms that makes so little difference as to be barely noticeable.
There is very little between this and AMD’s 4890 making the bottom two in our fastest GPU countdown for the most part completely interchangeable.
We’ve placed the GTX 275 higher simply because it represents far better value for money and performs a shade faster in more of our tests.
There’s also the added bonus of the PhysX and CUDA capabilities of the Nvidia family of graphics cards, allowing you to utilise some of the extra gaming features PhysX gives you and the GPU computing features of the CUDA programming language.
Read: Nvidia GeForce GTX 275 review
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8. Nvidia GeForce GTX 285
Still a very speedy card, but less relevant these days
- Price: £240
- GPU:GT200b
- Manufacturing process:55nm
- Memory: 1,024MB GDDR3
This, the GTX 285, was Nvidia’s fastest single-GPU card right up to the launch of the GTX 480 last month.
It was the six-month refresh and die-shrink of Nvidia’s thoroughly impressive, and mightily successful GTX 280 card. The GT200b GPU beating at its heart packed in the same 1.4bn transistors in a chip that was actually over 100mm sq smaller, which is why it was able to ramp up the clockspeeds of this lightning fast DX10 card to such an extent.
The move from 65nm manufacturing process to 55nm then was a far smoother ride than the move from 55nm to 40nm has proven to be with the scarcity, lower-than-expected performance and price of the latest Nvidia graphics cards.
This die-shrink also meant that it was far less power-hungry than the outgoing GTX 280, with a maximum power draw of 183W against it’s older brother’s 236W.
The win-win situation of more performance for less power made the GTX 285 one of the most desireable graphics cards of its time and the fact that it can still keep up with the most recent GPUs proves that it’s still got a lot going for it.
At this price it’s a little prohibitive to new buyers looking at the other cards in the market around the same price point. There is a significant jump in performance moving up to just a HD 5850, which is only another £10 at today’s prices, and that is a card that will be as happy playing around in DX11 as it is in the venerable surrounds of DX10.
The problem though is that GTX 275 shaped fly in the ointment. On the release of that card a little less than three months later, Nvidia practically retired its most powerful single-GPU card of the time.
The GTX 275 as we’ve shown is a gnat’s hair away from the GTX 285 in performance terms and is significantly cheaper. It was a shame for the GTX 285 that Nvidia effectively boxed it so quickly, though for us consumers it was a godsend.
Read: Nvidia GeForce GTX 285 review
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7. ATI Radeon HD 5850
The first affordable performance DX11 card is a cracker
- Price:£250
- GPU: Cypress PRO
- Manufacturing process: 40nm
- Memory:1,024MB GDDR5
AMD’s HD 5850 represented the first vaguely affordable, performance DX11 card, and despite being a way down the list of fastest graphics cards, in some ways it still is.
As the first DX11 cards on the market the HD 5850 and HD 5870 had a price premium attached to them as Nvidia’s response was some way off at the time.
Prices have come down and what was once a £300 card is now a more reasonable £250. You should expect prices to fall off even further with Nvidia’s Fermi cards relatively close to availability, hopefully dropping this card closer to the £200 mark.
In performance terms it is still quite a way off the numbers posted by the DX11 glory-boys, the HD 5870, HD 5970 and GTX 480, GTX 470 partnerships.
Still, it is capable of topping the 30fps mark at the highest settings at the eye-bleeding resolution of 2,560×1,600, the native res of 30-inch panels.
It’s also far smaller than any of the faster cards in this list, making it a much better bet for small form-factor PCs that still want to pack one hell of a punch.
A word of warning though; if you’ve been distracted by the £200 HD 5830 as a viable alternative to the HD 5850 it’s time to think again.
That card is one of the biggest irrelevances in today’s graphics market and represents little value for the money you’re saving over the HD 5850. The HD 5830 doesn’t make an impact on the fastest graphics cards list, failing to compete as it does against the much cheaper last generation of cards. Steer clear.
A pair of HD 5850s in Crossfire setup also is worth a look if you’re after some multi-GPU action for your rig.
Or indeed if you can’t afford any of the top three right now, but want the option of adding a second card later. The HD 5970 is essentially a couple of overclocked HD 5850 GPUs strapped to a single PCB and therefore you should get close to that awesome card’s performance with a pair of these.
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6. AMD Radeon HD 4870 x2
A single-card, multi-GPU graphics card done the right way
- Price: £325
- GPU: R700
- Manufacturing process: 55nm
- Memory: 2 x 1,024MB GDDR5
The HD 4870 X2 is another of the last generation of graphics cards that has clung onto its place in the top ten performing graphics cards thanks to its ground-breaking design.
For years both ATI and Nvidia had been trying to create a multi-GPU card that combined two graphics processors in one single card design. And both had failed quite impressively until the HD 4870 X2 hit the market proving that it coule be done and done right.
Nvidia had its fingers burnt with the terrifically under-performing, and woefully unsupported, GeForce 7950 GX2 and AMD had a tough time with its inaugural multi-GPU card, the HD 3870 X2.
Just one generation later though and the HD 4870 X2 showed just how its done. The fact that it is still competitive in performance terms with the current generation of DirectX 11 cards is proof of just that.
Obviously the card isn’t able to cope with the rigours of DX11, and the tessellated goodness that entails, but for general graphical performance it’s got it where it counts.
The difficulty is that at this price you are always going to want to push for the newer card with a modicum of future-proofing. Anyone purchasing this card for over £300 now is making a grave error, but if you’ve already got one purring away in your rig it’s worth knowing that what was once the pinnacle of graphical performance is still not that far off the top almost two years down the line.
And in the fast paced evolution of computing that’s an aeon.
The real problem with the twin-GPU HD 4870 X2, pricing aside, is the heat that the two graphics chips produce. In the vanilla flavour the stock cooler is capable enough to keep things running smoothly, if a little warm.
Many of the overclocked versions though are unfortunately stuck with that same stock cooler leading to issues further down the line. We had an overclocked version in a rig of ours and barely three months later it was regularly falling over because one core was seriously over-heating, leading to permanent damage to the card.
So it’s still a quick card, but beware of the cooling.
Read: ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 review
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5. ATI Radeon HD 5870
The first DX11 card that hit the market is still right up there with the big boys
- Price: £320
- GPU: Cypress XT
- Manufacturing process: 40nm
- Memory: 1,024MB GDDR5
ATI’s HD 5870 is the card that kicked off the whole DirectX 11 bandwagon, and sits comfortably at number five in our list of the fastest graphics cards in the world.
Just a couple of weeks ago it would have been far higher, but the recent launch of Nvidia’s GTX 470 and GTX 480 has relegated it down the list.
Still, it’s well over half a year old now, and in graphical terms that makes it an old hand. The bonus of that is that AMD has had time to fully mature its driver set through its usual monthly driver updates.
That means it’s about as stable a DX11 card as you’re going to find, with the value-added extra of also being rock-solid when set up in a Crossfire configuration. With two HD 5870s connected together you’ll find it a far more powerful graphical setup than even the super HD 5970.
The worry for the HD 5870 is the fact that as such an early DX11 part it is simply not going to be able to compete with the Nvidia big boys when it comes to the burgeoning use of tessellation in PC gaming.
The Nvidia cards were delayed partly to ensure they could cope with the demands of tessellation with the chips being fully designed with that in mind. The architecture of AMD’s Cypress GPU, the chip powering all the HD 58xx cards, has only one tessellation engine where the Nvidia cards have up to 15 (one in each of the shader microprocessors).
It’s not apples for apples as they work in very different ways, that said though Nvidia’s performance in the tessellation-heavy Heaven 2.0 benchmark puts its cards far in advance of the HD 5870.
The other concern is the price of the card itself. It was an expensive ol’ graphics card when it first came out and it still is seven months down the line. With the GTX 470 being priced directly in competition with this card though you should expect AMD to slash the prices of both the HD 5870 and the HD 5850 once Nvidia is able to actually get its cards in stores and available for purchase.
It may only be fifth in the top ten performance graphics cards line up, but it’s out their in the wild and doing the business, just keep an eye out for the price drop and you could be in for a bargain.
Read: ATI Radeon HD 5870 review
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4. Nvidia GeForce GTX 295
- Price: £420
- GPU: GT200b
- Manufacturing process: 55nm
- Memory: 2 x 896MB GDDR5
Still pumping out the pixels with the best of them, Nvidia’s venerable GTX 295 is sitting pretty at number four in our top ten GPUs. This was Nvidia’s last multi-GPU card and has ruled the roost for a long time, it was only AMD’s latest dual-GPU card, the HD 5970, that managed to best it in performance terms.
The GTX 295 has just about got the edge in performance terms over the HD 5870, thanks to those twin GT200b GPUs humming away in that sinister-looking, monolithic casing.
These chips mean that the card can still play with the big boys even when the resolutions reach the eye-popping heights of 2,560×1,600.
The downside of this last generation graphics card though is that it simply cannot stand the pace when you factor in DirectX 11 performance. There are still relatively few real DX11 titles out there to take advantage of the hardware though, so the GTX 295 can hold its head up high for a while yet.
The stumbling block remains that the price hasn’t dropped in a long while, and it is unlikely now to ever do so.
You may be able to pick one of these up second hand for the price of a brand new HD 5870, but anyone with any sense must surely pick the AMD card over this. The HD 5870 is only just shy in terms of raw performance and can cope with the all the tessellated goodness that DirectX 11 offers.
So, while it’s still got the performance where it counts, the GTX 295′s days are well and truly numbered, and we wouldn’t recommend this as a purchase to anyone looking to upgrade.
As a hint to the future though, and if Nvidia can come to terms with the incredible heat produced by even a single GTX 480, we could well see Nvidia looking to the multi-GPU solution to [spoiler alert] give it back the lead in the graphics war.
Read: Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 review
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3. Nvidia GeForce GTX 470
The GTX 47 is finally here, but was it worth the wait?
- Price: £320
- GPU: GF100
- Manufacturing process: 40nm
- Memory: 1,280MB GDDR5
Not so hot on the heels of Nvidia’s first DX11 graphics cards comes the GeForce GTX 470, an even more cut down version of the GF100 GPU the green company is rightfully proud of.
Given the nigh-on £500 pricetag of its big brother this represents the most affordable Fermi card out there. There is a GTX 460 reportedly coming out in June, which will be another cut down GF100, before the real mainstream parts really start rolling out mid-summer.
For now though the GTX 470 is the third fastest graphics card in the world and that has come as quite a surprise, not least to us here at TechRadar.
The innumerable delays to its launch and the incredible scarcity of cards meant that before we managed to cadge our very own card we held out little hope for it. Sure it shared the same price point as ATI’s HD 5870, but if it was so shy then it surely didn’t have the brass cojones to best it.
Well, luckily for Nvidia it does. Just. At the lower end of the resolution spectrum, at the native 22-inch resolution of 1,680×1,050, the card is a fair way ahead of the HD 5870, but when things get cranked up the performance isn’t quite so good.
Indeed in our World in Conflict benchmark it actually dropped behind. Still, thanks to its Fermi roots the GTX 470 has still got the tessellation goods and this is more of a future-looking card.
Still, Nvidia is having problems getting enough cards out into the market meaning that in those terms at least the AMD cards have the edge, having gotten over their own production problems.
Many of Nvidia’s manufacturing partners had only the one sample card doing the rounds for the entire of the UK press, and that says a lot about how easy it will be for the consumer, you, to actually find a GTX 470 in stock anywhere.
Read: Nvidia GeForce GTX 470
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2. Nvidia GeForce GTX 480
The fastest single-GPU card in the world. Job done.
- Price: £470
- GPU: GF100
- Manufacturing process: 40nm
- Memory: 1,536MB GDDR5
When you come this late to the party you need to make sure you bring one hell of a good bottle of wine and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 480 is just about good enough to justify its tardiness. Coming almost six months after AMD launched the first DirectX 11 graphics cards ever things were looking fairly bleak for the Californian company.
Yields from its 40nm production facilities meant it wasn’t getting the number of fully functional processors out of its wafers that it wanted and so it had to cut the expected performance of these chips in order to improve the number of good chips coming out of the factory.
The full Graphics Fermi 100 GPU (GF100) is a marvel of graphical architecture, but some of the 512 small processing (CUDA) cores had to be dropped. The GTX 480 then comes with 480 of these cores, but still manages to pack one hell of a punch.
The key for Fermi, and the purported reason for its lengthy delay, was to ensure it had the best possible tessellation performance.
Tessellation is going to be one of the key tasks for future GPUs, the ability to render more detailed geometry rather than simply better, smoother textures, and Nvidia wants to be at the forefront.
The difficulty is that once tessellation becomes that important, and that heavily used in modern gaming development, this card may not quite have the grunt. For now though, if you can find one of these rare-as-dog’s-eggs cards, it’s still an incredible piece of engineering.
The minimum aim for the GTX 480 was to beat AMD’s HD 5870 and thankfully for AMD it has managed that. Unfortunately for Nvidia though it cannot lay claim to the number one slot in our best graphics card list, and instead must settle for the fastest single-GPU card. I wonder then if you can guess which card grabbed the top spot…
Read: Nvidia GeForce GTX 480
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1. ATI Radeon HD 5970
More powerful than Steve Jobs…
- Price: £560
- GPU: Hemlock XT
- Manufacturing process: 40nm
- Memory: 2 x 1,024MB GDDR5
So here it is; the fastest commercial graphics card available today; the Radeon HD 5970.
AMD has taken the top spot and managed to hold out against the very, very late Fermi card from Nvidia, the GeForce GTX 480.
This twin-GPU beauty is one big, beefy, powerhouse of a graphics card, capable of spewing out polygons like last night’s bad chicken kebab. And it bloody well should be considering it’ll cost you the best part of £600 for that simple pleasure.
It isn’t just two HD 5870s strapped onto one slab of PCB though – there’s definitely nothing simple about fitting two graphics cards into one form factor.
The actual GPUs are slightly slower than a vanilla HD 5870, making them more akin to twin overclocked HD 5850s. This also means that a Crossfire setup sporting two actual HD 5870s will beat this card in a foot race. But this is Crossfire made easy and that’s something that could rarely be said in the past.
Surprisingly, given the power requirements, it doesn’t get quite as hot as the volcanic GTX 480, a card that actually wiped some of our fingerprints during testing. And, again surprisingly, it’s remarkably stable and happy to be overclocked.
Some would say though that overclocking what is already the fastest graphics card in the world is a bit of an overkill, but the option is there for the brave. There are already concerns over driver support though, given that DX11 launch title, and AMD Game title, DiRT 2 didn’t support the multi-GPU HD 5970 until very recently, so it could present an issue going forward.
The only real problem with the HD 5970 though is that incredible price. You can actually buy gaming PCs that will do a sterling job for the price of this graphics card alone.
That said it is most definitely the fastest graphics card out there, posting figures with a healthy lead over the closest competitor from Nvidia. Considering that just a couple of generations ago ATI looked to be choking on Nvidia’s dust with the HD 3xxx series of cards, it’s quite incredible that it has managed to take the top spot and hold it against cards coming out almost half a year later.
Hats off to you then HD 5970, you are the fastest graphics card in the world.
Read: ATI Radeon HD 5970 review
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AMD’s ATI brand is the no holds-barred winner in the performance graphics war then, with the incredibly fast Radeon HD 5970.
It is, without doubt, the single fastest graphics card commercially available right now. But does that necessarilly equate to being the best?
There are many different things to factor into what constitutes the best graphics card on the planet, and performance is certainly not the least of them.
The price/performance ratio though has to be the most important factor and as good as the HD 5970 is, it’s hard to justify spending almost £600 on a single graphics card, no matter how fast it is.
In gaming terms graphics cards have a far longer shelf life than they’ve had in years, as shown by the number of last generation cards still outperforming the latest GPUs.
This is mostly down to the fact that most games are multi-platform now and so developers are designing games to run on five year old hardware, namely the Xbox 360.
That means that unless you’re playing on a 30-inch panel, at its 2,560×1,600 native res you’ll get lightening performance out of any of the cards in our top ten graphics cards list.
Indeed you’re still looking at above 30fps across the board even at that resolution.
It has to be said then that the real performance sweet spot is around the £250 mark, with the HD 5850.
And remember you can still get great performance, though not the future-proofing of DX11 capabilities, when you dip below £200. But no matter what your budget, as we’ve shown, there is a great graphics card there waiting for you.
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