HN Explorer

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windsurfer
I thought video cards just display graphics fast. There's a lot of options, but really it's just a scale from <i>slow</i> to <i>fast</i>. They're practically one-dimensional.

I think this conversation applies to computers in general, however, much more than just video cards.

timcederman
Practically one-dimensional? Have you bought a video card in recent years?
windsurfer
Well, what do you mean? What 'options' would I want?
timcederman
Memory bandwidth, memory size, fill rate, slot type, SLI/non-SLI, DirectX support, HDR support. Certainly not a range from slow to fast.
windsurfer
Do you really need to pay attention to those things? The average card manufacturer won't make a card with super slow memory bandwidth and put in a huge amount of memory. Most people don't really have to worry about such things. Agreed, yes, slot type may be an issue, but that's not really an "option". It's more like a requirement.
Gonsalu
What I do to research which video card is the best deal, is to check the latest Tom's Hardware graphics card charts:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/graphics-cards,1.html

That really eases the comparison between the loads of cards to choose from! :-)

chops
This is exactly what I do. Tom's Hardware charts are so very helpful when comparing benchmarks for graphics cards (and CPUs for that matter).