Graphics Cards with a Recommended Price of $199 and Below

At the bottom of the stairs we meet the good old GeForce 5900 and 5900 XT embracing the RADEON 9800 Pro . What’s your choice if your budget is rather tight but you still want to enjoy modern games? The answer is simple: with the price being roughly the same, you may want to prefer the RADEON 9800 Pro to the GeForce FX 5900/5900 XT due to the same reason according to which you’d prefer a RADEON 9800 XT to a GeForce FX 5950 Ultra.

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Then, if you cannot have a RADEON 9800 Pro, and you choose between the RADEON 9600 XT and the GeForce FX 5900 XT, the latter graphics card seems preferable due to its 8 pipelines as well as good overclockability.

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And lastly, if you’re choosing between the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra and the RADEON 9600 XT, you should again consider the games you’re playing or intending to play. Due to its architectural peculiarities, the RADEON 9600 XT is better in pixel shaders-heavy games, while the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra shows its best in games where geometry data processing and fast work with shadows is important.

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Anyway, you can hardly play any modern game on one of these cards in a resolution of more than 1024x768, especially with enabled FSAA and AF.

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A Few Final Remarks

Our today’s testing session confirmed the fact that modern computer games more often use the complicated pixel shaders version 2.0. The complexity of the geometry of the scene grows up, too, and this affects the performance provided by the available graphics cards. That’s why you should start shopping for a new graphics card by identifying the range of games you’re going to play and the range of video modes you’re intending to use.

You see that we can’t give a simple recommendation since the choice of each user depends on many factors, also those we don’t count in. The main thing you should have when shopping for a new graphics card is knowledge of what you want to use it for. In this case, you are unlikely to make a wrong decision.

So far, any recommendations for the PCI Express platform would be too early, but we’re going to discuss this subject in one of our upcoming reviews.