Current crop of graphics cards compared, ranked by price

Although NVIDIA's pledged to simplify its lineup for consumers and ATI's been getting better, the current state of the graphics card market is still a pretty wild alphabet soup of model numbers and specs lists, so the crew over at The Tech Report decided to break things down using the only stat that matters: price. While the results aren't exactly shocking (surprise: more dollars equals more FPS), what's interesting is that multi-GPU rigs are really quite cost-effective, delivering performance on par with higher-end cards at significantly lower prices. For example, two Radeon HD 3850s run nearly as fast as a single Radeon HD 3870 X2, even though they cost a fair bit less, and two GeForce 9600 GTs can potentially outgun a GeForce 8800 Ultra. That's always been the promise of SLI and CrossFire, and it looks like it's paying off -- any system-builders out there care to share their experiences?

[dsstrainer Posted May 9th 2008 4:07PM]

Certainly:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3140&p=7

[bjsguess Posted May 9th 2008 4:10PM]

8800GT > 8800GTS (G80)
8800GTS (G92) > 8800GT

[jaalin Posted May 9th 2008 5:55PM]

thanks bjsguess that's what i was looking for

[dsstrainer Posted May 9th 2008 6:03PM]

But the slight performance increase for the price isn't quite worth it. 8800GT OC'd all the way

[(Unverified) Posted May 9th 2008 4:29PM]

Please tell me those are Crysis frame rates!

[(Unverified) Posted May 10th 2008 2:53AM]

There's no point in having your game's FPS higher than your monitor refresh rate. Anything higher than 80 FPS is overkill unless you have a very fast monitor and very good eyes.

Of course games can be fun at 30 FPS or even lower, but 80 FPS is really an upper limit for almost everyone.

[(Unverified) Posted May 10th 2008 12:36PM]

I love how this bias picture using multiple GPU setups in its chart for nVidia only. That is rather strange to me seeing as how ATI Crossfire was released first and scales better. This chart needs the 3870 and 3870 X2 in 2x, 3x, and 4x configurations to be complete.

[(Unverified) Posted May 16th 2008 5:52AM]

Can anyone tell me what happened to the 880GTX?? Has it changed names or dissapeared?