On the other hand, though, you’ve got a vast number of cards still rocking ageing graphics architectures with potentially hugely updated versions on the way.
That means, of the cards we’ve got in our test this month, only a few of them could genuinely be recommended for purchase right now.
The top-end of the market is the toughest – mostly because, and we can probably all agree on this, pricing has become utterly insane.
At the top of the pile is Nvidia’s GTX Titan X, at $1000. Mental. And now it’s not even the fastest card, only holding its 12GB frame buffer over the rest of the graphics market.
Then we’ve got AMD’s only genuinely new GPUs of this latest, late generation. The two Radeon Fury cards simply don’t do anything to make them worthwhile.
They are cheaper than the top Nvidia cards, but lose out in the performance stakes despite having that brand new memory technology. They only have 4GB each, and that’s simply too little to expect to hit high-res gaming speeds in the future of gaming.
ALL-ROUND CHAMPION
Up top then – and probably overall – the GTX 980 Ti is the only high-performance card worth spending money on right now.
The 6GB frame buffer and exceptional gaming performance will mean that, even when the 16nm GPU revolution happens next year, it will still be able to hold its head up high in the performance stakes.
Nvidia’s old GTX 980 could still be worth a punt if you can find it for closer to $500 – again, it’s not going to cope well with the 4K future with its older GPU and 4GB frame buffer, but it’s an absolute rock at 1440p. This Palit version is super-quiet and super-cool.
Surprisingly, the re-branded Hawaii cards, specifically the excellent R9 390, have made themselves more worthy than we initially expected.
The 390X is impressive for the fact it outperforms its 290X forebear. But then so does the straight 390, and for considerably less cash.
And that 8GB memory capacity means the 390 is going to still be gaming happily at 1440p for a good while to come, even when the Arctic Islands and Pascal GPUs arrive sometime next year.
This Sapphire R9 390 Nitro is the other bright spot in our supertest, and is the one we’d recommend for a mid-range card.
Down at the bottom of the pile, the much-maligned GTX 970 still has some skills, but with the performance of the 390 and its hefty frame buffer, the GTX 970 is not going to be able to stand out against the AMD card.
And propping things up at the real budget end, where the GTX 960 goes head-to-head with the R9 380, we’ve again got to hand the glory to the Radeon offering.
And yet again, that’s down to the additional frame buffer. The 4GB capacity of the R9 380 isn’t going to mean you can suddenly nail super-high resolutions, but it does mean that at a more standard resolution, it’s going to cope with even the most demanding of future titles.
