Best Gaming Video Card

For the last few months the best gaming video cards were the AMD Radeon 6990 and nVidia Geforce GTX 590. It's hard to pick a winner, as different games and applications give different results. This is absolutely natural, because the two largest graphics chip manufacturers (AMD and nVidia) have their own chip designs, almost none of their parts are similar.

In 2012 we already have a new high-end video card from AMD, which already started shipping to stores around the world a few days ago. Its name is AMD Radeon 7970, which was made to dethrone all previous single processor video cards. It has a 600 USD average retail price, performs better than it's Radeon 6970 predecessor and needs just 250Watts of power (6+8pin cables + a few watts through the PCI-Express 2.1-3.0 slot).

Today, this video card seems to be the best option of you're looking for a cheap efficient solution, although it's clearly slower than previous generation dual-processor video cards from both manufacturers.

The real high end video card with two graphics chips will most likely arrive from AMD in March, 2012. Like most top models from recent generations, it is called AMD Radeon 7990 and will feature two high-end graphics chips and a lot of on-board memory.

Pricing is not clear yet, but rumors say that it will be around 800 USD. If this is accurate, then the AMD Radeon 7990 video card will be a very cheap upgrade option for Radeon 6990 owners, as this older card costs around 730 USD.

Tech specifications of the upcoming AMD Radeon 7990 dual processor video card are already known and they sound very tempting. On the reference model both graphics processors will run at 850MHz, so the 2 x 2048 stream processors will surely outperform every video card released to date. Let's not forget that the new AMD Radeon 7000 series video chips are manufactured on 28nm technology, which means serious overclocking potential. Video card manufacturers which are known for their factory overclocked high end products, will surely break the 1GHz GPU clock barrier with these chips. As for the on-board memory, the reference model will have 2 x 3GB GDDR5 memory, which is not an industry first, but will certainly satisfy the needs of any game or application.

Nvidia has announced its Geforce GTX 680 video card for February in order to compete with the recently released AMD Radeon 7970. It will be interesting to see what nVidia will produce to compete against the AMD Radeon 7990 video cards. For the competition's sake, let's hope there won't be any power consumption issues with these high-end products and will be available soon to gamers everywhere.

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