For intense PC gamers, nothing is more important than their graphics accelerator card - the piece of hardware that sits between the monitor and the computer. Everything that appears on the computer screen flows through this critical card, and when it comes to drawing and shading 3-D environments at highspeed, the vanilla models of graphics card that come with a basic PC are not adequate. The ATI Radeon x1000 family of cards are a favorite with computer users as are the nVIDIA GeForce 7800 and and earlier 6800 and 6600 series. ATI and nVIDIA have been duking it out for sometime, with the crown of "fastest graphics card" being passed back and forth a number of times as they constantly try to outdo one another.
The ATI Radeon X1300 Pro with 256MB memory runs about $149 SRP, while the non-pro version with 128MB of memory is just $99 MSRP. These are powerful cards at a good price, but not the highest-end. nVIDIA has been at the forefront of the graphics card market, providing the specialized chips that power these beasts, along with the reference designs that card manufacturers use to create their finished products (nVIDIA makes just the chips, not the cards themselves, so two different cards based on their GeForce 7800 chipsets from two different vendors may well perform differently). Their GeForce FX is a lower price option, while the prior generation GeForce 6 series (6600, 6800) and the newest GeForce 7 series (7800 with 512MB memory) are their top of the line products. Amazingly, these cards have processors and memory configurations that are faster and more powerful than a lot of complete computers. The 7800 takes advantage of technologies like High Dynamic Range for special lighting effects, subsurface scattering makes realistic scenes when skin or other substances take on translucent properties in front of bright lights, and transparency supersampling avoids aliasing and blocky display of areas of super fine detail.
Best 3-D Graphic Cards
For the average home computer user, even one who plays games, a standard graphics accelerator card will usually do the trick. You may sometimes get some jumpy action scenes in games, but nothing too bad. What you don't see though is that many games are programmed to take advantage of these high-powered graphics cards, and the extra details, effects, and realism only are visible if you have these special cards that can handle the processing associated with these special effects. After playing some of these games on a souped up machine, you'll notice the difference. But is it really worth spending $400 or $500 bucks on a graphics card? Probably only for the most serious gamers, given that you can now buy a pretty good PC (whole system) for $500-$700 - it is hard to justify spending that much just on the graphics accelerator. You can get the GeForce 7800 GTX for around $460, while the GT runs around $339. The older GeForce 6800 128MB runs about $179, while the 6600 128MB is only $60. So you can save alot of money by buying a prior generation card - worth thinking about.
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