by Scott Anderson

Created on: September 13, 2008

The best graphics card is a manner of opinion for any person. With two graphics giants ATI and Nvidia competing for your money it is important to know what you want. Best can mean fastest, it can mean cheapest, or it can mean having the most features. The job of the customer buying the new card is to determine the requirements they have for the card. Without having the proper expectations the customer is very likely to purchase the wrong product for his needs.

Newer cards are offering many enticing features to the computer user. A new card is capable of supporting more than one monitor, a great boon for productivity software as it allows more screen space. It can accelerate movie viewing on slower machines. This is a great way of creating a home theater computer for storing movies and music. For those running vista, it can enable the new aero interface, a new 3d view for viewing certain windows. In the case of an older system, the addition of a video card over integrated graphics can breathe new life into a computer by freeing up RAM space and CPU power. Most graphics cards today have a relatively similar feature set. A large majority of cards will allow more than one monitor and all cards available today offer some form of video acceleration.

Users who are looking for a very cheap card need to be cautious as they need to know why they need a cheap card. Though even the cheapest of graphics card is many times better then the integrated graphics that come with most motherboards, they are still very overpriced for the performance you get relative to the rest of the market. For those users who do not play games but are looking for features can rest easy as features are very similar across the price range. If you are looking for gaming performance it may be wiser to save more money. The best price/performance ratio tends to occur around the 150 250 $ range.

For the group of people who are looking for a new card to play the latest game have the hardest choice as price ranges widely from 50 - ~650. Performance varies just as widely across the market. Cards below the price/performance ratio tend to be very underpowered relative to what you pay. On the other hand cards higher than that ratio are the flagship products of ATI or Nvidia and demand a hefty premium for the relatively small increase in performance. Another issue with high end cards is power consumption and as a consequence heat. Make sure the computer can take the demands of the new card before committing to the purchase

Graphics cards are the fastest moving field in the computer industry. Every year the performance roughly doubles of the newest card so the consumer must realize that the best graphics card is not set in stone nor is the company making it. Many online resources, a knowledgeable friend or a sales man from a reputable computer hardware store can help a customer through the decision making process.

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