Introduction
Wanna play the latest video games at the highest resolutions with all the eye candy turned up? Well then, you better buy your self an ATvidia XYZ990000XT-OMG-ROLF or better yet, a pair of them. If you have a mere XYZ980000XT-OMG-LOL running in your system, you probably need to go out and spend your life savings on a new card for that extra 5 frames per second you’re missing out on.

As you’ve probably noticed, the world of video cards can be a bit confusing and overwhelming. With new products coming out every 6 months or so and a constant effort on the part of the 2 leading makers of graphics chips, ATI and nVidia, the market is never stagnant and seems harder to understand every day. In this article I will get to the bottom of all this confusion and make some recommendations that are valid for more than a week.

AGP and PCI-Express
AGP and PCI-Express are the 2 types of slots that video cards plug into. There’s really not much confusion here. AGP is an older technology that is just about at the end of its life and PCI-Express is the new technology. It is nearly impossible to get a new motherboard with an AGP slot, and if you still have one, it is getting increasingly difficult and expensive to get new video cards for that slot.

Chip Makers and Card Makers
In the graphics world, there are 2 types of manufacturers to talk about. A few companies make graphics chips, which are the actual chips that perform all the graphics processing, and several companies take these chips and use them to make complete video cards. When people talk about their video cards, they generally just talk about the chip. This is because you will get fairly identical performance with cards from several different video card makers if they use the same graphics chip.

ATI and nVidia are currently the only makers of graphics chips that are powerful enough to give a good experience in modern video games. While Intel makes integrated graphics chips suitable for 2D applications and a few other companies, such as Matrox, make dedicated cards suitable for 2D, anyone serious about gaming is only looking at products from ATI or nVidia. The remainder of this article will focus on chips from ATI and nVidia.

There are several manufacturers who make complete video cards, and they all make pretty good products. Some manufacturers, such as Gainward, are known for making premium products that are overclocked out of the box. Others release their products with novel cooling systems that are either quieter or offer better performance than the standard cooler. Beyond these two ways of differentiating video cards using the same chipset, the only real difference between cards from different makers is the warranty offered. If you are not looking for a premium card that’s factory overclocked or comes with a fancy cooler, you can generally be safe buying the cheapest card with the chip that you want. Well known makers of video cards include Asus, BFG, Gainward, HIS, Powercoler, Sapphire, PNY, eVGA, BFG, and ATI. That’s right; ATI also sells complete video cards using its chips, while nVidia does not.

Chips Chips Chips!
Now that you understand that chips determine the fundamental characteristics of a video card let’s make sense of all the various chips themselves. There are 3 main families of chips: enthusiast, mainstream, and budget. Enthusiast cards are for those who are only concerned with performance and usually cost $400 or more, with $600 cards being common. Budget cards are for those who are mainly concerned with costs and are a small step up from an integrated graphics processor. These cards generally cost under $100. Mainstream cards are everything in between and usually represent a good balance between price and performance.

These 3 families and smaller gradations within them translate into numbers and letters representing products from ATI or nVidia in a fairly basic way that has become more and more confusing over the last few years. The first number in the name of a graphics chip denotes simply the generation of the card, the middle numbers denote the performance class of a card, and the last couple numbers and letters tacked on the end denote finer gradations of performance. Generally, enthusiast cards have an 8 in the middle of their name, mainstream cards have a 6 in the middle of their name, and budget cards have a 2 or 3 in the middle of their name. Sometimes new cards come out that have improved performance but are still not a new generation, so a 9 will take the place of an 8 in the middle of the name or “50” will take the place of “00” at the end of the name.

How does this translate into real products? Let’s look at some current and past examples of various cards and explain where they fall in the product line. As of the writing of this article, the current flagship chip from ATI is the X1900 XTX, with the X1900 XT being very slightly slower. A few months ago the top was the X1800 XT, a year ago it was the X850 XT, and 2 years ago it was the 9800 XT. The X1600 Pro is a current mainstream chip and the X1300 is a current budget card from ATI. nVidia’s current flagship chip is the 7900 GTX, which is slightly faster than the 7900 GT. A few months ago the 7800 GTX was the flagship, a year ago it was the 6800 Ultra, and 2 years ago it was the 5950 Ultra. A current mainstream chip from nVidia is the 6600 GT and the 6200 is a budget chip.

It seems like the suffixes tacked on to the names of the chips get more confusing with each new generation of chips. I have fond memories of the days when an ATI name was either plain or Pro and an nVidia name was either plain or Ultra, but those days are long gone. Right now X’s and T’s and G’s are in fashion, and it’s hard to generalize very much what they mean since both companies seem to change there scheme at the drop of a hat. ATI’s current top product ends in XTX and nVidia’s ends in GTX. The next step down for nVidia is GT, and for ATI it is the XT, but they are soon coming out with a GT.

SLI and Crossfire
No discussion of modern video cards would be complete without talking about SLI (nVidia) and Crossfire (ATI). These are marketing names for linking two video cards together to (hopefully) get a large performance increase. Running a dual card setup is very expensive and the performance increase is not fully doubled.  Nevertheless, it is becoming easier to set up these systems, new drivers are making them more reliable and better performing, while new games are often written to take advantage of these setups. nVidia just released an innovative product called the 7950 GX2 that has two entire video card chips combined into one unit that only needs one PCI-Express slot to plug into. It is currently the fastest single-slot graphics solution on the market, but it has a price tag to match. I personally think the performance benefit does not make up for the increased power consumption, heat production, and most importantly the increased price, but only time will tell if I am right or not.

Buying Recommendations
For most people I would recommend getting a current generation mainstream class of card. However, sometimes it makes sense to get an older enthusiast card rather than a current mainstream card. Right now the nVidia 7600 GT and ATI X1800 XT cards are moderately priced cards that offer good performance. In any specific situation, it is necessary to look at several benchmarks using both synthetic tests such as 3dMark and real games to decide what the best performance for your money is. If money is absolutely no object, get one or a pair of the top of the line cards from either ATI or nVidia. Right now this means the ATI X1900 XTX or the nVidia 7900 GTX. If money is very important and you rarely play any 3D games, a budget card such as the current ATI X1300 or nVidia 6200 would be just fine for. Each of these companies has their die-hard fans, but in all honestly the competition is so fierce between them that their products are almost always very similar in performance and price.

Conclusion
I hope this discussion of modern video cards has been informing. This can be a very confusing area because of the short time between product releases, but it also means that the price for current and older cards is always dropping. For more information about any specific card and to see several performance tests, I would suggest taking a look at the interactive VGA charts over at Tom’s Hardware. This site and many other sites review just about every new video card that comes out.

Like what you read?

If so, please join over 28,000 people who receive our exclusive weekly newsletter and computer tips, and get FREE COPIES of 5 eBooks we created, as our gift to you for subscribing. Just enter your name and email below: