Best Graphics Cards in The World Today
There are a lot of terms and acronyms that get bandied around when talking about graphics cards, and not a lot of explanation to go along with them.
Before we delve into the meat of the feature let’s take a minute to clear things up a little.
GPU ? This is the graphics processing unit, the chip at the heart of the graphics card. Many cards use the same GPU but partner it with different components and at different clockspeeds to produce slower or faster graphics cards.
GDDR ? Graphics Double Data Rate memory is the specific kind of memory that is used on graphics cards.
ROPs ? The Render Output unit comes into play during the final stages in the rendering process, bringing together the data from each of the memory buffers in the graphics card’s local memory. The more of them you have, the better off you are.
CUDA ? Compute Unified Device Architecture is a coding language Nvidia invented to allow parallel computing on its range of GPUs. From its 8 series upwards all its cards can use CUDA to speed up parallel processing applications, such as video encoding, faster than your computer’s CPU.
PhysX ? Originally an accelerator chip and software layer from the small company Ageia, Nvidia bought up PhysX and has now applied it to its GPUs, again from the 8 series forward. It allows for more advanced physics simulations, such as liquid or cloth, in games that have been coded with the PhysX software included.
Crossfire and SLI ? These are the relevant multi-GPU configurations from both AMD and Nvidia. Both allow multiple graphics cards to be connected together to increase the rendering performance. Historically this has been fraught with driver issues and diminishing returns for the extra cards, but as the latest cards have been released we are getting closer to doubling the performance by adding in a second card.
PCB ? The Printed Circuit Board is the physical board that graphics cards (and all other micro-electronics) have their components attached to. The boards are printed with conductive pathways between the relevant components instead of using physical wires.
DirectX ? Microsoft’s DirectX is a collection of its own proprietary APIs (application programming interfaces) for dealing with multimedia tasks on its own operating systems. The Direct3D part is specifically to do with 3D graphics and utilises hardware acceleration if there is a GPU in place to take advantage of it.
Tesselation ? This is one of the key buzzwords to come from Microsoft’s latest graphical API, DirectX 11. It’s designed to add extra geometry to a simple polygon, using displacement maps to tell the GPU where to raise and lower parts of the polygon as the graphics card computes the data. The idea is to add geometry to objects in a game world without significantly impairing performance. It’s set to become a key battleground in the graphics war in the coming years.
The first generation of DirectX 11 graphics cards boasted some notable GPUs. Here’s our lowdown of the cards that still manage to be relevant even after the second slew of cards settles in:
15. Nvidia GeForce GTS 450 (