Holiday 2008 GPU Guide: Price Cuts Galore

Movin' On Up: $180 - $220 Graphics Cards

And here's where it gets really messy. The competition is brutal in this market and price cuts have bounced back and forth since this past summer. It's great for the consumer, but it makes it much harder to recommend products.

The graphical quality you can expect at this price point is terrific for everything short of a 30" monitor. It might not always grab you 4x or more antialiasing at the highest resolutions, but these parts will do high quality at high resolution (1920x1200) in most modern games. This is really the minimum spec graphics card you should look at if you've got a 30" display and want to game at full resolution, but you won't always be able to hit the highest quality options and AA will be really tight (especially in games that make heavy use of a lot of framebuffer at ultra high resolutions). Gamers who bought a 30" monitor for gaming and still have money left over will want a higher performance card.

The hardware up for debate here is the GeForce GTX 260 and the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. It's not quite that simple, as it could be with the price wars going on. And NVIDIA has been pushing for us to get out reviews of with all the games released last month. We are definitely working on testing all those new titles, and we do clearly see more competition from NVIDIA with the addition of these games. Clearly, it is possible for NVIDIA hardware to shine given the right title, but we know AMD hardware is no slouch either. Far Cry 2 is one of the games NVIDIA was pushing as a win for them, but in our recent tests we saw it was more of a wash. And washes are fine with us, as that means the consumer is really the winner.

Honestly before November, we would never have recommended the GeForce GTX 260 over the Radeon HD 4870. This time around, considering the increased competitiveness of NVIDIA hardware both in terms of performance on recent games and price mean it's not as clear cut. We also have the Core 216 to consider and the fact that manufacturers offer overclocked versions of NVIDIA hardware far more frequently than AMD hardware.

At the low end of this market, we are going to stick with recommending the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. Finding this part for under $200 is now possible (this is the original price point of the Radeon HD 4850 back at launch), and it competes with stock clocked GTX 260s with 192 SPs. If you want to stay in this general market segment and have a little extra money to spend, it's possible to find GeForce GTX 260 core 216 cards with modest overclocks that could push a buyers decision in that direction for an extra $20 or so. Really, with the pricing like it is here, you just can't go wrong no matter which option you go with. Solid recommendations are hard because of the variety of options and the tight pricing, but really the beneficiary is the consumer buying cards in this market.

Thus, we've decided to make a recommendation here based on platform. We still have some qualms with the AMD drivers running on Core i7 systems. Because people spending this much money should not have to worry about whether or not upcoming drivers will iron out all the outstanding issues, we will recommend that people with a Core i7 system go with the GeForce GTX 260 and those with other platforms pick up the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. Of course, if price is the absolute deciding factor for you, the cheapest 4870 we found did beat out the cheapest GTX 260 we could find.

Unexpectedly Affordable: The Radeon HD 4870 512MB (Image From newegg.com)

Non-Core i7 Recommendation: ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 260, a better mate for an i7 system (Image from productwiki.com)

Core i7 Recommendation: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260