How to Choose the Best Graphics Card

Some people choose which video card to buy by its brand. However, if you're looking to get the most performance for your money, that's not always the best way. If you want to get the best graphics card, you should first decide what your needs and budget are.

For example, you might be looking for a good gaming card with the best performance. Or, you might be specifically looking for a card with several DVI ports so you can connect multiple monitors to it. Perhaps you want a card that can accelerate MPEG4 videos, or perform PhysX calculations.

Budget is also important because you'll be looking at products from the two most popular GPU producers - nVidia and AMD - in the same price range.

Let's say you've decided what you need and how much money you'll be spending. Your next step should be researching the video card performance. The best way to do that is studying some AMD vs nVidia benchmark charts. Good sites for video card benchmarks are TomsHardware.com, Futuremark.com and similar. Look at two cards from nVidia and AMD that have similar costs, and compare their performance in various video game and graphics benchmarks. Pick the one with the best price / performance ratio.

This way of choosing a video card is the best because you will be getting the most performance for your dollar.