Finding the perfect balance of price and gaming performance

Whether it’s the release of next-generation consoles, Windows Vista’s higher than normal graphics requirements, or that integrated graphics have improved significantly in the last few years, the cost of discrete graphics hardware has come down substantially over the past two hardware refreshes. While there are still ultra-end $500+ graphics solutions out there, they’re becoming increasingly uncommon. Nowadays, it isn’t out of the ordinary to find adequately powerful mid-range hardware between $100 and $150 dollars, with high-end hovering around the $250 mark. And with nVidia’s SLi and AMD’s CrossFireX, multi-card solutions have made for a quick and easy option to increase the performance of your setup after your initial purchase.

When it comes to PC gaming the graphics card is arguably the most important aspect of your system (with CPU and RAM not far behind). The trick to buying graphics hardware is to find a solution that meets your performance needs and graphics technology support, but that is still within your price range. Fortunately the graphics hardware manufacturers have been nice to us in this regard as they tend to offer the same graphics core at different speeds, modifying the cost of each accordingly. This allows us to purchase a graphics card that supports the same technology (from something small, like CFAA support, to something big, like fulfilling the DirectX 10 (DX10) requirements), at vastly different price points.

Being that this issue is all about gaming, we’ve decided to look at a few of the more common options available from graphics processor heavyweights, nVidia and AMD (formerly ATi). What’s interesting is that while this report’s focus leans more on the mid-to-high scale of the graphics hardware range (which is fitting for a PC gaming), even the entry-level variants of these cards support most, if not all, of the same technology. Things like hardware accelerated HD playback, DX10 support, etc., are present in even the $50 cards based off of this generation’s tech. Cool!

Next: AMD Radeon HD3650

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