Graphics Card Rankings – 74 Cards From Best To Worst

This month’s PC Gamer featured an interesting article about how the minimum specs on the back of PC games are a pretty ineffective way of measuring whether or not your system is capable of running a game.

Even industry insiders acknowledge that the recommended specs are pretty inaccurate, and with the vast differences in individual PC configurations its almost impossible to decide what a ‘minimum spec’ might be.

I won’t ruin the whole article, you can pick up the March 2008 issue in the shops, but there was a particular piece of the article I thought was very useful. What they’ve done is to compile a list of the ‘hottest hardware’ and try to define a pecking order for graphics cards and processors.

They acknowledge that in some cases its very difficult to say that card X is better than card Y, but they’ve ranked them on performance features and value for money. You might not agree with the standings, and I’m not going to criticise, but it does make a good list to see how your system compares with what’s available to buy right now.

I, for one, get a bit lost in the neverending releases of graphics cards and processors, all with model numbers that don’t necessarily mean an awful lot. Sometimes graphics cards with similar model numbers can be very different in terms of performance, and when you’re shelling out anything up to £400 you want to be sure you’re buying the right one. The same with processors, where two similarly named chips can have different architecture that makes one considerably slower than the other.

So, from best to last, in order, here are PC Gamer’s rankings for graphics cards.

Credit to this list goes to PC Gamer. Don’t forget to pick up a copy and check out the rest of the article as there’s some helpful advice if you’re thinking of upgrading.

You can also check out the processor rankings.

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