Your graphics card is the most important factor in determining what games you can play, how good they’ll look, and how well they’ll run. The other 2 important factors are your chip and your memory.
The performance of your gaming computer is especially critical when playing online games. In a fast action online game you will not be able to compete without a decent graphics card.
You can expect to upgrade your graphics card every 2 or 3 years to maintain support for all the latest graphics advancements. New games tend to take advantage of the features and extra processing power introduced by the latest graphics cards. With an older card you might have reduced graphics quality or in extreme cases be unable to play the game.
| Geforce 9800 GX2 | GeForce 9800 GTX | ATI Radeon HD 3780 X2 |
GeForce 8800 GT | ATI Radeon HD 3780 |
|
| Retail | £370 | £250 | £220 | £110 | £90 |
| Core Clock | 600MHz | 675MHz | 851MHz | 600MHz | 400MHz |
| Memory | 1 GB | 512 MB | 1 GB | 512 MB | 512 MB |
| Released UK | Mar 2008 | April 2008 | April 2008 | Oct 2007 | Dec 2007 |
The table
These are the top 5 cards for 2008. The one on the left is the best and they get weaker as you move to your right.
Every graphics card has a GPU, which is the main processing chip on a graphics card. The Geforce 9800 GX2 and the ATI Radeon HD 3780 X2 has 2 GPUs. The chips work in parallel to try and get more performance out of the card. From there they get their 1 Gb memory, each GPU has 512 MB.
Who makes these graphics cards?
The Geforce cards are make by Nvidia which is owned by Intel. The Radeon cards are made by ATI which is owned by AMD.
Watching HD DVD and Blu-ray
You can hook a HD screen to any of these cards. They will process HD DVD and Blu-ray discs no problem.
No doubt this is a super card, but it does come with a super price tag.
As you can see from the picture below the card is physically large. So make sure that it can fit into your box before you buy it.
The GX2 probably has more power than you need. But I bet next years games will make full use of it’s awesome power.
The card gets it’s power from a single 6-pin PCI Express to single 8-pin PCI Express adapter.
Wit a slightly lower cost, but with plenty of power the GeForce 9800 GTX is a very good gaming graphics card.
Of the 5 cards the 8800 is probably in the widest use. It is the workhorse of serious gamers everywhere. The 8800 is tried and tested technology.
With this card you will get very good performance on just about any game on the market.
If you are on a tight budget, the Radion HD 3780 is the card for you.
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
