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Page 1 of 7   When the current state of the graphics card market is compared to the situation of four or five years ago, one might think that it’s much simpler to buy a graphics card nowadays. Indeed, the numerous LE and SE models are long gone and there is no covert memory bus halving, when users ended up with performance far inferior to those in reviews. You may stumble upon a few models containing DDR2 memory, instead of the referent models’ GDDR3, but these are usually end-of-life products at the rock bottom of the current product gamma, so buyers actually do end up with the performance they paid for these days. Still, the unequal speed of new chip development in the two competitor companies, followed by strong economic impacts last year and a no-holds-barred battle for market dominance, caused the existence of a higher-than-needed number of similarly priced models present on the market at the moment, so customers may be in doubt as to which card will give them the best performance in a given price range. That’s why we decided to make a test of all models from the current generation available at the market.
Complementary Colours
Nvidia doesn’t have a huge variety of cards available, on the market as well as on our test, and the reason for that is rather simple. The GTX 260-285 models have been on the market for nearly two years, whereas GTS 250 and 9800GT fare even worse. Although these cards are more than capable to run the newest games, it’s still basically the same, “immortal” G92 chip, present for almost two and a half years (GeForce 8800GT, 8800GTS, 8800GS, 9600GSO, 9800GT, 9800GTX+). Even the latest iterations of these cards are at the end of their market lifetime and are becoming increasingly harder to find, so we didn’t take them into consideration. We’ve chosen the new models GTX 470 and 480 as the representatives of this company, as well as the GT 200 series models, located on the other end of the scale. These can be pretty interesting as the choice for a multimedia computer to be used in conjunction with an HD TV, since the chips were manufactured in the 40 nm production process, which means that they are physically smaller than the previous generation ones and require less cooling. Another feature of theirs is the native HDMI output, and it isn’t even required to connect audio to the TV separately, because the process of audio transmission is now finally an integral part of the Nvidia drivers, the same way as in the Radeons for a few generations back. On the other hand, the GT 200 series cards proved to be weaker than their competitors at the initial tests already, despite the theoretical advantage. Still, there are always buyers who appreciate power savings and the lack of noise made by graphics cards, so there is no reason to believe that these cards aren’t doing well on the market.
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The situation is a little different as far as AMD is concerned. Radeons HD 5870 and 5850 have been available for eight months already, which isn’t a little in the computer world, but they still continue to “grind” all games at high level detail. Then again, their price is still too high for most gamers to reach, so AMD decided to provide them with the HD 5700 series, which turned out to be spot-on for the gamer niche. Even cheaper models, which bring most of the profits, shortly followed, so AMD can truly pride themselves on the fact that they cover the entire range of as low as 40 up to over 500 euros at the moment. Even more importantly, the entire range is technologically up to date, with top-class multimedia capabilities even in the cheapest models.
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Graphics cards 
