Best 5 Performance 3D Video Cards

While the GeForce GTX 280 and Radeon HD 4870 X2 are neck and neck in most games, the GeForce GTX 280 comes in at a slightly less expensive option. The GTX 280 offers superb performance at extremely high resolution with a large number of filters enabled. It may lag slightly in some benchmarks, but most people probably will not notice. The eVGA SSC Edition card overclocks the processor to a higher 648MHz core clock compared to the standard GTX 280 cores. In addition to this, eVGA has their lifetime warranty and superb Step-Up program in case a newer faster card comes out within 90-days of your purchase.

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is a massive card. It is essentially the combination of two Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics core and memory onto a single board. This gives it phenomenal performance in certain games that can properly utilize multiple graphics cores. The problem with this setup is that the card is unusually long compared to a traditional card and thus limits what systems it can properly fit into. It also draws a fair amount of power that will require uses to either upgrade their power supplies or select a lower power card. Finally, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is also one of the most expensive cards on the market.

With the pressure on from ATI, NVIDIA decided to update its GeForce GTX 260 graphics core. The result was a graphics core that retained the same name but actually added additional stream processors up to 216 total compared to the original design's 192. This makes shopping for them a bit difficult. BFG Technologies has given their new GTX 260 216 stream processor cards the MAXCORE name. In the case of the OCX MAXCORE, it is also overclocked compared to the standard card. This gives it a significant boost in performance that doesn't put it too far behind the stock GeForce GTX 280 but at a lower overall cost. It still falls behind the 4870 X2 but is a significant improvement.

Sapphire has been a long time partner with ATI. As such, they have a long history of making high quality ATI based graphics cards. The new Radeon HD 4870 is ATI's first graphics core to use the new GDDR5 graphics memory that offers extremely fast memory speeds. Rather than using a larger 512-bit bus like NVIDIA though, ATI has chosen to use a smaller 256-bit to help keep costs down. This makes the Radeon HD 4870 significantly less expensive than the GTX 280. Performance doesn't suffer though as performance is very good and tops the original GeForce GTX 260 in most tests but at a lower price.

The original GeForce GTX 260 may have been extremely overpriced when it was first released, but prices came down dramatically after the release of the Radoen HD 4870 cards. With further product introductions, the cards are much more reasonable priced and offer a fair amount of performance. So, why isn't a card like the eVGA GeForce GTX 260 FTW higher on the list? Because NVIDIA's GTX 260 216 stream processors offer a larger number of processors and better performance at the same or lower cost. Still, if one can find a deal on a card such at the eVGA GeForce GTX 260 FTW that was highly overclocked, it may make for a good alternative.