Video Card Roundup: Performance vs Value

For this article, we wanted to focus more closely on the question of GPU power per dollar. To make that work, we've relied on test data from (as much as possible) clearly GPU-limited scenarios—performance results obtained at very high resolutions (most often 2560 x 1600) with some level of antialiasing and anisotropic filtering enabled. That way, we can highlight questions of performance scaling. We can see how the cut-down shader power and memory capacities of the less expensive cards impact performance and observe how much multi-GPU solutions can distance themselves from their single-GPU brethren.

These scatter plots may look a little intimidating, but they're really quite simple. The best possible offering would be in the top left corner, offering the highest frame rate for $0, while the worst possible one would be at the bottom right, yielding 0 FPS for the most money. We obviously never get such extreme cases, but the best offerings still typically lie closer to the top left corner of the plot. In the example above, the GeForce 9600 GT looks to be a better deal than either the Radeon HD 3870 or the Radeon HD 3850. The GeForce 9600 GT SLI config puts in a very good showing, as well. Conversely, the GeForce 9800 GTX three-way SLI setup is a poor value.