How To Pick A Video Card

Picking a video card is never easy, because there are a lot of variables that you need to consider if you want to make the best decision. The first rule is that performance is always proportional to price. For example if you compare the benchmark results of a $100 nVidia graphics card with those of a $100 AMD (formerly ATI) video card you get pretty much the same figures (+/- 10%).

The reason why you should spend some time on research when picking a video card is mostly related to compatibility issues and your final goal you want to reach with the specific computer system and video card.

Someone at Tomshardware.com had the excellent idea of putting together a video card hierarchy chart. This way you don’t have to look at benchmarks and test results, but just to find the specific video card model in the list. At the moment the best two video cards are the nVidia Geforce GTX 590 and the AMD Radeon HD 6990. In reality AMD didn’t make better graphics chips than nVidia, but manufacturers have built graphics cards with two AMD graphics processors instead of one. From this point of view it seems an unfair battle, as nVidia is not able to put two FERMI chips on one circuit board because of power requirement issues. While nVidia’s GTX 590 video card needs around 365Watts for the single graphics processor on-board with 512 CUDA cores active, AMD’s Radeon HD 6990 Dual processor card has a maximum TDP of 375Watts.

AMD’s slogan speaks for itself, as at this moment AMD’s products aren’t necessarily faster, but they are much more efficient then nVidia’s and Intel’s products. This fact impacts the computer’s cooling system, power supply and ultimately your power bill, so with AMD you always spend less money over time.

Even though the two video cards I have mentioned ore the fastest, it needs to be said that there are a couple video card models that have much better performance/cost indicators. For example the nVidia GTX 560 video card features an improved graphics processor, much more efficient than previously released high-end models. On the AMD side there are a lot of very impressive models, starting with the low-end Radeon 6450 card, which features Eyefinity and DirectX 11 with 160 stream processors and 64bit memory bus. It delivers an unprecedented 3D performance for a low-end card. The AMD Radeon HD 6570 and 6670 cards feature 480 stream processors with 128bit memory buses, thus taking the place of the very successful Radeon 4650/4670 and 5550/5570/5650/5670 video cards.

For more information check out newegg’s 150+ AMD Radeon 6000 series video card price list. You can’t go wrong if you pick a video card from the latest generation.

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