The most difficult shopping decision you have to make when purchasing a new gaming computer is what graphics card to choose. The CPU’s performance ceased to be a limitation long ago. Today, a $100 CPU will do just fine for a majority of gaming applications. It is even simpler with system memory and hard disk drives: it is the amount of memory and disk space that is important for games in general. With the memory and HDD prices we have today, there is no problem in getting as much of either as you want. So, the only component left to choose is the graphics card – the main part of a gaming computer that directly determines the latter’s speed and your gaming experience.

That’s why in this review I will describe four new graphics cards (and test a total of nine graphics cards/configurations) priced at $100 to $260 and will try to figure out what performance benefits, in what games and for what money you can get by spending more and more for your graphics subsystem. To illustrate this, the next diagram shows the recommended and retail (according to Newegg.com for the 27th of May, 2009) prices on reference graphics cards selling in the mentioned price range:

The products in the diagram fall into three groups. The first group is the single $99 Radeon HD 4770. Next goes the GeForce GTS 250 which is 50% costlier. The Radeon HD 4850 512MB has the same recommended price as the GTS 250 but its retail price has declined due to the release of the Radeon HD 4770. The Radeon HD 4870 and GeForce GTX 260 (216SP) are only $20 and $30 more expensive than the GTS 250. That’s only 13.4% and 20.1% of difference, so these three cards can be viewed as belonging to the same group.

The remaining two cards stand aside from the entry-level class. The new Radeon HD 4890 and GeForce GTX 275 cost about the same money (39.1 % and 44.7 % above the GTX 260), but there is a gap of $70 between them and the GeForce GTX 260. I will fill it in my test session with two Radeon HD 4770 cards in CrossFireX mode ($198). The more expensive product costs 2.38 times as much as the cheapest one.

So, we’ve got a steady progression of price, but is there a proportional progression of performance? Are the performance benefits from purchasing a faster solution worth the money paid? I will try to answer this question in this review. Besides, I will compare two GeForce GTX 250 cards with 1 and 2GB of onboard memory and find the difference between Radeon HD 4870 and HD 4890 as well as between GeForce GTX 260 (216SP) and GeForce GTX 275. And finally, I will do a comparison of graphics cards’ performance in Windows Vista and Windows7.

First I will present the new graphics cards to you.