In an effort to further express the performance you get for every pound spent on our recommendations, we chart out the hierarchy of cards in our column. The red, black, and blue bars represent average performance at entry, medium, and high detail settings and resolutions, while the orange line represents cost. If you mouse over the bar chart, you'll get a pop-up that shows performance relative to Nvidia's GeForce GTX 690 (our 100% ceiling). Mousing over the dots on the orange line pops up a low price easily attainable on Newegg. Clicking a bar or dot gives you the option to shop for that card, taking you to a link of our pick in that category. Often, our picks give you a lower price than the average displayed.
As far as performance goes, the first clear group of GPUs includes the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost 1 GB and below. You see a great correlation between speed and cost up to this £130 card. Every pound you spend yields a commensurate return in performance. In the value-oriented segment, that's exactly what you want to see.
After £130, the £140 GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost 2 GB doesn't deliver much extra at standard settings, although the additional gigabyte of GDDR5 sometimes helps at high resolutions and more demanding detail presets. The GeForce GTX 660 is a good intermediate £170 step before the £200 Tahiti-based Radeon HD 7870.
Beyond that point, price increases faster than performance, negatively affecting absolute value. Having said that, if you're a hardcore gamer who desires high resolutions and taxing detail settings, cards like the GeForce GTX 670 or Radeon HD 7970 will make the difference between playable and unplayable frame rates.
Nvidia's GeForce GTX Titan is significantly faster than the Radeon HD 7970, but its £800 price point hurts any semblance of value. In that highest tier, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 690 performs close to the dual-Tahiti Radeon HD 7970 cards currently available. However, the AMD boards are power-hungry, typically triple-slot solutions, and hot (not to mention loud).
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0 HideBlahman11 , 19 April 2013 17:49I have seen DDR5 6670s on ebuyer for not much more than £50. It's worth stretching to the DDR5 version, the available bandwidth doubles
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0 HideHazzacanary , 21 April 2013 14:56A 7750 for £80? I'm pretty sure you can get the 7770 for £80-£90 on numerous websties, making it much more competitive. Also, some special offers on the 7790 get it down to £110-£120, making it stiffer competition for the 650 ti surely (unless you also point out that the 650 ti can be had for around £100 now anyway)? Where were the quoted prices from, as they all seem slightly high.
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0 Hidejakjawagon , 24 April 2013 19:14Missing chart on the last page.