This video card guide will show you what cards are available in your price range and how they perform in today's PC games. 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.
We've divided the video cards by price into four categories: high-end, performance, mainstream, and budget. Our budget list includes all the current-generation video cards available for $100 or less. The mainstream group includes cards that retail for up to $200. Bump the price range up to $200-$400 to get to our performance cards. And finally, we have our extremely broad high-end category that includes everything over $400 that covers both single cards and dual-card setups. We've focused on current-generation GeForce 7 series and Radeon X1K series video cards in this roundup.
Performance Video Cards
A performance card will support high resolutions with a moderate amount of antialiasing. Think about getting one of these setups if you want fairly high frame rates at 1600x1200 with 4xAA. Two of the best cards in the $200 to $400 performance category actually sit on the affordable side of $300. You can get an Nvidia GeForce 7900 GT for around $250, and you can find its recent replacement, the GeForce 7950 GT, for just under $300. ATI introduced its 512MB Radeon X1900 XT earlier this year at just under $400 but set its new 256MB version at $250 to better compete with the GeForce 7900 GT.
ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB
Street Price: $300 to $400
Core: 16 pixel pipelines (48 pixel shaders), 625MHz
Memory: 512MB, 1.45GHz
Recommended Power Supply: 450W
The Radeon X1900 XT 512MB is a decent card if you can find it for $300, but keep in mind that you can get almost the same performance out of the 256MB model since the cards are basically identical. The price premium is for the extra memory.
ATI Radeon X1900 XT 256MB
Street Price: $250 to $300
Core: 16 pixel pipelines (48 pixel shaders), 625MHz
Memory: 256MB, 1.44GHz
Recommended Power Supply: 450W
You might see Radeon X1900 GT cards for around the same price, but stick with the XT model. The Radeon X1900 GT only has 12 pixel pipelines (36 pixel shaders), and it packs a slower core and memory compared to the Radeon X1900 XT.
ATI Radeon X1950 Pro
Street Price: $278-299
Core: 12 pixel pipelines (36 pixel shaders), 575MHz
Memory: 256MB, 1380MHz
Memory Interface: 256-bit
The Radeon X1950 Pro is ATI's answer to Nvidia's GeForce 7900 GS. Its 36 shader processors and 575MHz clock speed will provide plenty of graphics power. ATI wants the X1950 Pro to hit the same price point as the 7900 GS, but we might have to wait a few weeks or months for retailers to bring prices down to 7900 GS levels. It's a bad deal at $299, but it'll be a great value at $199.
Nvidia GeForce 7950 GT
Street Price:$290 to $330
Core: 24 pixel pipelines, 550MHz
Memory: 512MB, 1.4GHz
Recommended Power Supply: 400W
The GeForce 7950 GT has 24 pixel pipelines, which is the same as the GeForce 7900 GTX but with a slightly lower core clock speed. The GeForce 7950 GT is slightly faster and has more memory than the older 7900 GT model.
Nvidia GeForce 7900 GT
Street Price: $250 to $300
Core: 24 pixel pipelines, 450-520MHz
Memory: 256MB, 1.32-1.5GHz
Recommended Power Supply: 400W
Expect the GeForce 7900 GT to fade away as the 7950 GT takes over as Nvidia's performance GPU.
Nvidia GeForce 7900 GS SLI
Street Price: $400 to $450
Core: 20 pixel pipelines, 450-525MHz
Memory: 512MB (256MB per card), 1.32-1.4GHz
Recommended Power Supply: See site
A dual-GeForce 7900 GS setup is a possibility if you have an SLI-compatible motherboard and a decent power supply. The configuration should compare well against single-GPU high-end cards.
Nvidia GeForce 7600 GT SLI
Street Price: $290 to $350
Core: 12 pixel pipelines, 560-580MHz
Memory: 512MB (256MB per card, 128-bit interface), 1.4-1.6GHz
Recommended Power Supply: See site
If you already have a single GeForce 7600 GT card and an SLI motherboard, getting a matching card will be more affordable than putting down $300 for a whole new card. Unfortunately, we were not able to get our dual-GeForce 7600 GT system running in time for publication. We will update our benchmarks with GeForce 7600 GT SLI performance results as soon as we can.
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GameSpot's Video Card Roundup 2006
This video card guide will show you what cards are available in your price range and how they perform in today's PC games.
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