This week saw the launch of the latest graphics card to bare the mantle 'fastest in the world'. Yep, the ATI Radeon HD 5870 is truly an astonishing card.
The problem is that it costs over £300. And at a time when spending £300 on anything at all is a big deal, let alone a monsterous GPU that no one really needs, it just seems a bit pointless.
Strange as it may now seem then, there was once a time not so long ago when the launch of a new high-end graphics chip was an event we genuinely looked forward to with excitement.
Weeks of rumours, plotting and early silicon sampling would precede a frantic day at launch, when competitor publications and sites were furiously scanned to see how they compared and make sure there wasn't a single detail that we'd missed.
Then AMD bought ATI and decided pixels were no longer as important as price, and refused to compete for top frame rates.
What seemed like an admission of failure to produce a competitive part – and the HD3000 series was pretty terrible – now looks like an act of supreme foresight.
A new direction
For the vast majority of gamers, there's absolutely no need to spend £400 on a graphics card any more.
Here we now have a situation where a whole generation of technical trending has been reversed. Screens are, thanks to the move to 16:9 HDTV ratios like 1,920 x 1,080, getting lower in resolution, not higher.
Games engines aren't getting more complex, because developers are looking at multi-platform releases and concentrating improvements more on the non-graphical elements.
It also goes without saying that we're in the middle of a global recession and blowing your savings on a new GPU suddenly looks a little bit silly too. In short, Nvidia may traditionally have had the very fastest hardware, but it looks a little like an Olympic hero whose homecoming has been ruined by the fact everyone in town is queuing up for the opening of a new Lidl.
Where has the graphics glamour gone?
Feature focus
Vendors are more interested in talking about GPGPU features than trouncing each other with performance. It's almost enough to make you wish for the days of dodgy drivers and bent benchmarks again.
Maybe, just maybe, we've got our priorities wrong.
Instead of stifling a yawn every time another card drops into this already crowded price point and puts out enough pixel power to render a life-sized model of the Burj Dubai for less money than a good meal for four, we should celebrate the ridiculous amounts of processing power on offer, and experiment with how far we can push them – since they're damned near disposable anyway.
Of course, just because the graphics world isn't what it used to be doesn't mean you should just throw your cash away without consideration. There's a staggering amount of choice available for less than £160, and not every card in the category is created equal. Some, in fact are real stinkers.
Asus EN9600GT - £59
A stock interpretation of NVIDIA's GeForce 9600GT, Asus' card distinguishes itself in two ways.
First of all, it's the cheapest on test here, which isn't bad for a chip which would have been considered 'mainstream' just a generation ago.
Its second claim to fame, though, is that it's also the worst performing by some way.
If it were a horse race, the 9600GT is the three legged donkey clearly on its way to the knackers' yard. The reason it lags compared to the rest though isn't hard to fathom.
For just £10 more you can bag the far superior Radeon HD4770 (read on), which is a whole class above this for the same sort of money. It's time for the 9600GT to retire gracefully from the field.
Gigabyte 9800GT - £99
Not so long ago, Nvidia's GeForce 8800GT was our favourite graphics chip of the lot. In the same league as the Nvidia GeForce 3Ti and ATI's 1900XT, it had the sort of performance per pound ratio that flew off our charts and shamed all its contemporaries.
Then it was renamed the '9800GT', and we still liked it though – just not as much as before. Hoping to win back some of our initial love for the G92 core, Gigabyte has taken the relatively old chip and invigorated it by fitting an enormous passive heatsink.
Given that game engines really haven't advanced much since the original was pumping out frame rates with the best of them, it follows that decent performance plus absolute silence should be something of a winner.
Not just for a lounge-based media centre, but any gaming rig that you don't necessarily want to sound like a jet engine taking off.
At lower settings the AMD card slaughters it, but again the 9800GT remains playable. So if it's silence you crave and you don't mind paying a premium, it's not a terrible choice.
Read: full Gigabyte 9800GT review
ASUS EAH 4770 TOP - £70
AMD's curveball card really does present a problem for, well, almost everything else out there.
The chip itself is very similar to the much loved Radeon HD4850. What it lacks in physical shader cores, 160 of them to be precise, it makes up for in higher clockspeeds, a fact made possible because it's produced on a mere 40nm process.
It's also tiny, one of the smallest printed circuit boards we looked at, and has an equally small and quiet heatsink. To top off these astounding details, this card also draws around 40W less than the Radeon HD4850, so it's a lowpower card too.
Benchmark-wise, it gives its stablemate a good run for its money at lower resolutions and image quality settings, even beating it on occasion thanks to that higher clockspeed.
The trouble is that prices have fallen so far that you're not actually saving much money by choosing this over its more consistent older sibling any more. A ten percent price advantage might sound like a lot, but since that's only £7 it's fairly negligible in this particular case.
Read: Asus EAH 4770 TOP review
HIS Radeon HD 4830 - £75
Looks can be deceiving: take this curious little card which, although more expensive and boasting a more impressive code number than the HD 4770, has considerably less impressive specs.
Introduced at the tail end of last year as a cut down HD 4850 to hit a £130 price point, in many ways it's a surprise to find it still around now that the more talented HD4770 is here.
Featuring the same number of shaders, ROPs and all, the HD 4830 is at a deficit of 225MHz in core clockspeed alone. How can it possibly compete? Perhaps it exists purely to catch the unwary who think the '8' in its designation actually means something?
The card was clearly a stopgap measure which shouldn't have hung around this long. The fact there are so many on sale still gives us hope that the public wised up to this fact early on.
Sapphire HD 4850 512MB - £77
Long a byword for elegance and excellence in the graphics world, this slim single-slot card has topped the reviewers' awards since it launched over a year ago.
And that makes it almost 101 in videocard years yet still going strong. The reason is simple, it may not top the performance charts in many tests, but it's good enough to game on if you're using anything smaller than a 30-inch monitor.
And it runs so quietly that you'll hardly know its there. It's also improved with age. Driver revisions have put it well above the 9800GT with which it once competed in terms of frame rates, and time has brought the price down to under £80 – which is astonishing really.
It's not our winner mind, because as much as we treasure its value for money, stronger performing cards at higher resolutions are well within modest budgets.
Read: Sapphire HD 4850 review
Sapphire HD 4870 512MB - £100
Reluctantly edging our way into the three-digit price bracket, we're led there by the RV770XT-based Radeon HD 4870.
Only twelve months ago, this was AMD's most expensive single chip card: a flagship model that demanded double the number of gold coins and forced NVIDIA not only to start a fi resale, but revise the GTX260's core design.
When the new DirectX 11 cards arrive in a couple of months to accompany the recently-launched Radeon HD 5870, it will likely tumble again, and that's when things will start to get surreal.
Comparing this to the 1GB version opposite, it's obvious that the mere 512MB of GDDR5 present here holds the card back from fulfilling its full potential.
Read: Sapphire HD 4870 review
Sapphire HD 4870 Toxic - £130
Since the Toxic edition of the HD 4870 is £30 more expensive than the stock version and it has three key improvements over the latter, it follows that if each one is worth ten pounds of your money, then this is the card to buy.
For a start, it comes with the full fat 1GB of memory, and while it may not allow the card to achieve stratospherically higher scores than the 512MB HD 4870, the gap between this and the HD 4850 is the difference between playable and not playable at high quality settings – even though both are saddled with the same number of ROPs.
It's absolutely worth the investment of ten pounds if you are running a larger monitor. That's helped, of course, by the second advantage of the Toxic.
The elegant heatsink isn't just lovely to look at if you have a window in your case, it cools the card sufficiently that Sapphire has upped the clockspeeds by a notch too – and opens up headroom for you to do the same again.
Sapphire HD 4890 - £154
We ought to point out that this feature wasn't sponsored by Sapphire – it's just that as the largest manufacturer and supplier of ATI cards its the one with the largest volumes and as such are the easiest to get hold of.
Therefore, if you're going to pick up an ATI card most of the ones you'll find will be under the Sapphire umbrella.
For these reference design cards, you could insert any vendors' name on the box – the overall performance will be the same. Take this example. It's a plain old red-heatsinked Radeon HD4890.
Based on the RV790XT core, it's little more than an overclocked and slightly tweaked version of the RV770XT that powers the HD 4870.
As expected, then, benchmarks are better than that family of cards, even the Toxic edition on the page before, but not an order of magnitude greater. Certainly never more than 10 per cent, even at the most demanding settings.
Read: Sapphire HD 4890 review
Zotac GTS 250 AMP! - £136
The latest addition to the GeForce family seems to repeat the same model as AMD's HD 4770.
The core features fewer shader processors than the full fat 260s and 275s of this world, but runs at extremely high speeds to compensate.
Actually, though, if you look a little closer, the 250 is yet another rebrand of the 8800/9800, with yet another 150MHz or so piled onto the clockspeed, an extra half gig of memory and a launch price of £130-ish.
The chip must be having a real identity crisis, no longer sure if it's an 8 or 9-series or GT-thing.
BFG GeForce GTX 260 OC - £130
You should be aware by now that there are two versions of the GeForce GTX 260 kicking around, with little to differentiate them from each other in terms of nomenclature.
For some reason this one has to be called the 'GTX 260 OC'. The original, which was long phased out but still on sale in some quarters, has just 192 stream shaders in its core, the later revision enabled another quad and took that total to 216.
Otherwise, they're more or less the same GPU. The performance difference is considerable, though, so do avoid the earlier model if you can.
Needless to say, this is one of the more powerful cards. Build-wise, the 260 is the same size as the 275, which is just another way of saying 'gigantic'.
The winner: XFX GeForce GTX 275XXX - £158
XFX GeForce GTX 275XXX - £158
AIl this talk of price performance ratios is getting a little wearing, but we've saved the best until last.
You cannot get better benchmarks than this for under £160, and in some circumstances it's faster than the £200+ GTX 280.
The only advantage the latter card has is its four extra ROPs, which help with high image quality settings.
Not content with that, this 'XXX' edition is also factory overclocked, albeit by a fairly minor 37MHz. It does mean that realistically, if you want to go beyond this level you're into the realms of CrossFire and SLI multi-chip set-ups and all the driver issues that brings with it.
Like the GTX 260 it's big, but quiet, and based on the 55nm revision of the G200 core that all the top end GeForce cards share.
In the most demanding tests we ran it through, it was over 10 per cent quicker than its nearest competitor, the HD 4890, yet cost just £4 more.