The new card actually has the same core clock speed as its predecessor, but it now supports fast 1GHz GDDR4 memory, which will help feed extremely high game resolutions. Set to ship September 14, the Radeon X1950 XTX replaces the Radeon X1900 XTX as ATI's top video card. ATI Radeon X1950 XTXĬore: 16 pixel pipelines (48 pixel shaders), 650MHz It's undoubtedly the fastest single card available by virtue of its dual GPUs, but it's also the most expensive.

It has two graphics-processing units and a unique double-board stack design that requires only one PCI Express slot. The GeForce 7950 GX2 is Nvidia's current flagship card. Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2Ĭore: 48 pixel pipes (24 per GPU), 500MHz The dual-card setups require specialized motherboards and a big power supply capable of delivering enough juice to all the components in the system. Note that dual-video card SLI and CrossFire configurations have added costs beyond the price of the cards. Go for a high-end card or dual-card setup only if you require the best image quality at extremely high resolutions, but understand that top-of-the-line today becomes average in two years and ready for the trash bin in four. If you buy a $500 video card now, there's a good chance you'll be able to buy a card that's just as powerful and can produce better-looking graphics for $250 two years from now. Video cards double in performance every 18 to 24 months, and new cards also support a constantly growing feature set that can produce advanced graphic effects that older cards simply can't do. The problem with that approach is that a computer isn't a timeless item like good cookware or a classic coat, where it makes sense to pay extra for quality. Inexperienced buyers will often choose the most expensive cards when putting together a system with the belief that investing in better parts now will pay off in the long run by delaying the inevitable hardware upgrade by several years. You can easily get away with buying a far less expensive card if you have a small monitor, prefer lower screen resolutions for whatever reason, or don't need extremely high image-quality settings.ĭon't go high-end with the sole purpose of trying to 'future-proof' your system. We're talking resolutions that start at 1600x1200 (4:3) and 1680x1050 (widescreen) and image-quality settings that have the best antialiasing (smoothes out jagged lines) and anisotropic filtering (keeps textures looking good at all distances and angles) settings enabled by default. You should consider buying a high-end video card or dual-card configuration if you want to play your games at the highest resolutions with the highest image-quality settings. We've focused on current-generation GeForce 7 series and Radeon X1K series video cards in this roundup. And finally, we have our extremely broad high-end category that includes everything over $400 that covers both single cards and dual-card setups. Bump the price range up to $200-$400 to get to our performance cards. The mainstream group includes cards that retail for up to $200.

Our budget list includes all the current-generation video cards available for $100 or less. We've divided the video cards by price into four categories: high-end, performance, mainstream, and budget. If you're just starting to learn about video cards, we recommend that you check out GameSpot's Ten Things to Know Before Buying a Video Card guide to get a few basic buying tips before jumping into the roundup. This video card guide will show you what cards are available in your price range and how they perform in today's PC games. By: Sarju Shah and James Yu - Posted on Thursday, Sept 7th, 2006

Video card benchmark roundup