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A follow-up to last year's video card guide, GameSpot's Video Card Roundup for 2007 will show you what cards are widely available in your price range and how they stack up against one another. 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 to $400 to get to our performance cards. Finally, we have our extremely broad high-end category that includes everything over $400, which covers both single cards and dual-card setups. We've focused on current-generation GeForce 8 series and Radeon 2000 series video cards in this roundup. Check out last year's guide to see how the older cards performed. 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.
Performance Video Cards
While a step down from the high-end category, our $200 to $400 performance cards still provide a lot of the power without the premium price. Cards closer to the $400 end of the spectrum will let you run your games with all the advanced graphics effects enabled. You'll be able to run games at resolutions of 1600x1200 and higher, but you might have to go easy on the antialiasing to keep the frame rates high.
At the moment, there are only a few single-card options in the performance category. The GPU manufacturers traditionally release new performance level cards when they take advantage of manufacturing improvements to "refresh" their lineups with faster chips. You can find the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB and the Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB at the $400 level. We had both cards in the high-end segment, but we're also including them here because they're right on the borderline and card prices usually fall over time. Once you drop all the way down to about $300, you'll find the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB and nothing else as far as single-card solutions are concerned.
The rest of the performance-level video cards consist of dual-card SLI and CrossFire setups. We also included a few of the older dual-card combos from last year to give you an idea of how they compare to the newer cards.
| Price | Processors / Speed | RAM / Speed | Additional Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $400 | 320 742MHz | 512MB 512-bit 1.65GHz | The Radeon HD 2900 XT works fine with two 6-pin power connectors, but you'll need a new power supply capable of providing a 6- and 8-pin power configuration to provide extra juice for overclocking. | |
| $380 | 96 500MHz | 640MB 320-bit 1.6GHz | The GeForce 8800 640MB GTS has fewer shaders and a lower clock speed than the GTX, but it's a lot more affordable. | |
| $330 | 32 675MHz | 2 x 256MB 128-bit 1GHz | Nvidia gave the GeForce 8600 GTS a third as many shaders as the 8800 GTS and far less RAM. If you plan on getting an 8600 GTS SLI setup, make sure to have at least a 450W power supply. | |
| $320 | 12 575MHz | 2 x 256MB 256-bit 1.38GHz | A hold over from last year, you can find these cards at plenty of retailers. The cards don’t support DirectX10, and you can find better values for the same price or less. | |
| $290 | 96 580MHz | 320MB 320-bit 1.8GHz | With half the RAM of its 640MB sibling, these 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS cards might begin to falter when you crank the resolution beyond 1600x1200. | |
| $260 | 120 800MHz | 256MB 128-bit 1.4GHz | The Radeon HD 2600 XT slides in alongside the other mid-range setups, however a pair of them lands in the performance category. The cards compete well enough, but they’ve got stiff competition. | |
| $260 | 32 540MHz | 2 x 256MB 128-bit 700MHz | Aside from some clock speed differences, the GeForce 8600 GT and the GeForce 8600 GTS are identical. | |
| $210 | 32 540MHz | 2 x 256MB 128-bit 1.35GHz | Like the X1950 Pro, the X1650 XTs don’t support DirectX10 and are older products. |
The Results
We graphed the average dollar per frame for each card and dual-card setup we tested. We calculated the individual dollar-per-frame amount for each game and then averaged the results for presentation in this graph. It's not a definitive chart due to weighting issues; some games have higher frame rates than others. But it serves well enough to show which cards give the most frames for your money. A lower cost per frame results in better performance for every dollar spent. If you're looking for more details behind our testing, you can find the individual results for each game, as well as price/performance comparisons, on the following pages.
Price/Performance
(Shorter bars indicate better value)
The Verdict
The two GeForce 8800 GTS cards come away the winners in our game performance tests. Our 320MB GTS is an overclocked variant, but it's available on the market just like the other cards. You can find numerous Nvidia and ATI factory overclocked parts for the same price or for a little more than standard parts. The price/performance characteristics of a regular GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB would be the same or slightly inferior to the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB.
The Radeon HD 2900 XT performs well in a number of games and even beats the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB in Company of Heroes and Quake 4, but the XT lags behind the GTS by a wide margin in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and by a smaller margin in Oblivion. ATI might be able to coax more performance out of the XT with a few driver updates because the Radeon HD 2000 series is still relatively new.
As you can see from the price/performance comparison, the SLI and CrossFire setups, with the notable exception of the Radeon HD 2600 XT CrossFire, don't offer a whole lot of value in this price category. We still wouldn't recommend purchasing the Radeon HD 2600 XT pair because the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB is only a few dollars more and provides more performance with none of the headaches associated with dual-card configurations.
GameSpot's Summer Video Card Roundup 2007
In our final installment of the Video Card Roundup, find out which sub-$100 video cards are worth buying.
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