Finding a good video card

[qcom]

How does one find a good video card, and tell one video card from another. In other words, what specs does one look for?

[dejo]

you cant really compare nvidia and ati on specs alone. when looking at one brand and comparing you can look at the shaders (gtx480 has 480 and the gtx470 had 448) another big thing to look at is the mem bandwidth (gtx480 has 384 bit bus gtx470 has 320 and gtx465 has 256

[tinymouse2]

What dejo said or just look at all the benchmarks.

Go onto the egg and look through the graphics card section. Just look at the model names (470, 480 for Nvidia or a 5850, 5870 and so on for ATI). Just go over to google and type <model name> benchmarks and see what kinda framerates it gets in different games.

That's probably the best way of learning what GPU is good.
You can obviously also compare it to the price you would have to pay so you understand price for performance.

[wingman99]

Ditto just compare FPS numbers, the technology is interesting however I see it mostly for increasing sale when they tech it up and make it sound so good:drool:. The real world FPS game testing is the only true measurement off progress.: burn: The cards to look at, start with 5850, 5870, GTX 470, GTX 480