Videocard Buying Strategy

[reaper12]

Well, I think people are making it hard. It's not complicated, set your budget and buy the best card you can afford within that budget. With the amount of cards that are available at the moment there should be something no matter what your budget is.

And there is this thing lately of advising people to buy the next card down because for less money you only lose 10 or 15% performance. But there are so many cards out now that every card has card near it in performance for less money, so where do you stop??

Grpahics cards now are all good generally. This is from both camps. You really can't go wrong with whatever card you buy.

So my advise is pick a budget, don't be swayed to go over that budget, but likeways don't go too far under your budget. Just buy the best card you can afford within that budget.

 

[Forceman]

That's generally good advice, but you do need to take a look at the picture around your budget as well. If you have a $300 budget, say, you might be able to get card X, but for $320 you might be able to get the significantly faster card Y. Likewise, you might have a $500 budget and so can afford card X, but maybe card Y is $100 cheaper but offers 90% of the performance (like the 680/670). You have to try to find the inflection points in the price/performance curves.

 

[Sovereign]

Naysayers 0, stock 470 1.

Large mob testing reveals no problems, especially in later levels. This is purely my perception, however, and was not measured by a framerate tool.

To recap: I had concerns that my GTX 470 wouldn't be able to handle Borderlands 2 with PhysX maxed out @ 1920x1200 with all other settings on their highest based on some initial impressions from other users. This turned out to not be the case.