Best of Graphics Cards: Gaming at 1920x1200 and 2560x1600

Hehe, I'll just wait for a 50% drop in price for these 'new' cards. Until then I'll keep enjoying the summer, sunshine & girls everywhere I'll buy another card when it's worth, no shiny games to play anyway. cheers

Great rundown, thanks TS.

My GTX 570 Superclocked still rips the gisum out of any game I have played yet! I wont upgrade atleast till 2013.

@TS, love your work! Brilliant article!

Is there such a thing like a budget gamer's video card, say for a 20" or smaller monitor @1600x900 resolution?

(Long live my Nvidia 9500gt 1gb!)

Any chance of updating this?
http://www.techspot.com/guides/382-best-budget-mainstream-graphics-cards/

Awesome story! I got a Gigabyte Windforce GTX 670 back when it was released, and I couldn't be happier with it. It's worth noting that a slightly overclocked GTX 670 performs as well as a stock GTX 680 for a slight price premium ($10 for mine).

The Radeon 7770 or GeForce 560 wouldn't be a bad choice, especially if you're satisfied with a 9500gt. By comparison either would make you cry with happiness. They're cheap too.

Just one mistake detected before proceeding: in the Deux Ex @1920x1200 performance notes you wrote "while the best performance-oriented card is the HD 7950 at 74fps." While it was 87 FPS. Anyway, it's a great detail you offered a downloadable Excel file right out of a benchmark, pretty much appreciated.

Editor: Thank you, fixed.

Another great review - thanks TS. And timely for me...I'm video card shopping right now and use a 1920x1200 monitor.

Wow, looking forward to finally buy 1GB ATI Radeon 6850 DDR5 256bit @ 6,495pesos.

Already bought and assembled the following:
Intel pentium g630 (2.7ghz, 3mb cache), Asus p8h61-m lx mobo, 2x2gb ddr3-1333 gskill ram, running on Windows 7 home premium x64.

In the meantime, Angry Birds!

Great review, although your results for Alan Wake are very odd. Not a single review I have read had NV cards beating AMD in that game. Did you use 4xMSAA or FXAA?

I agree that GTX670 is the best gaming card for $400 but now Newegg has HD7950 MSI TwinFrozr for $320 and it's a mad overclocker too (and quiet).
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127667

Also, for $450, you can get an 1100mhz PowerColor HD7970 Vortex II that will beat every card in this review easily:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131471
1100mhz vs. 925mhz stock is a 19% GPU overclock for $450.

Overall good review but the prices for HD7900 series are even lower than what you posted/or you can get much faster cards for $450 than a stock reference 7970.

I just got a used GTX 570 for $225 to replace the GTS 450 I got from techspot. Getting a fresh 670 was really tempting.

$225 for a GTX570? Wow, that's crazy expensive for a used one. HD6950 2GB unlocked into a 6970 can be found for $170-190 and at 6970 speeds, it beats a 570 + retains 2GB of VRAM that's going to be all but a must very soon. 1.28GB of VRAM on the 570 at 1080P is going to be a huge liability in probably 8-12 months as next generation games arrive (Watch Dogs, Crysis 3, Metro Last Light, GTA V). For used, I think 6900 series is the only way to go from last generation. At $225, the 7850 2GB can be had and it beats 570 easily, once overclocked.

Awesome!

"Note that although we have the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition on hand, we didn't include it in this review because we don't see why anyone would buy the factory overclocked solution at a $50 premium."

Why not? Or why not include some of the vendor overclocked versions? A large number of consumers DO pay extra for factory overclocked (and < $50) - just because you dont "see why", is a narrow viewpoint. Additionally, this very well would change some of the results.

Why not? I just wrote an entire review on the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition explaining why, that’s why. Factory overclocked graphics cards developed by AMD and Nvidia’s board partners are very different from the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. For one they don’t usually come at such a price premium and often provide even greater performance gains and most importantly they offer vastly improved cooling solutions.

Adding the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition would have been a waste of time because all we would have been doing is once again telling readers to stay away from it as the performance vs. price ratio is poor.

As the graphs state we used 4xMSAA. We posted the typical price you can expect to get a 7970 for from places such as newegg.com, its the best and fairest way to do it.

Nice review thanks!