Now that all of Nvidia and AMD’s
latest-generation GPUs are available, we find out which 28nm GPU you should buy
One of the best aspects of being a PC
enthusiast is the depth and scale of PC gaming; no other platform can match it
for mod support, depth of online features or graphical fidelity. The current
generation of GPUs from AMD and Nvidia can deliver visuals that aged consoles
can only imagine, being able to run games at higher resolutions with superior
image quality and detail settings. There’s nothing quite like firing up the
newest triple-A game, setting the detail settings to maximum and watching your
GPU crank out a silky smooth frame rate.
Nvidia
GeForce GTX650 Ti 2GB
Both team red and green now have a full
range of GPUs too, catering to the needs of any gamer, regardless of whether
your graphics card budget is $1,287 or $128.7. However, while there’s a fair
degree of price/ performance jostling, not every card represent great value for
money. AMD in particular has been incredibly aggressive over the past few
months in cutting costs, shaking up the U landscape and putting pressure on
Nvidia’s 6 series.
To make sense of what is often a confusing
market, we’ve built a new GPU test system and tested every current-generation
GPU over $128.5, including the new Nvidia GeForce GTX650 Ti 2GB. Each card has
been tested using the latest WHQL drivers and with a new set of demanding
benchmarks, including one that you can try at home for free to see the
difference you’d get from upgrading your current GPU. We’ve also reconsidered
each card based on its current pricing, as many have received huge price cuts
since their debut reviews.
This is a complete reassessment of the GPU
market from top to bottom, helping you to choose the right GPU for your budget,
and push those graphics settings as high as possible.
How we test
Our
Asus Maximus V Formula Z77 motherboard offers three 16x PCI-E 3 slots
For this month’s Labs, we’ve rebuilt our
graphics test rig to provide more accurate results, as well as adding the
flexibility to test SLI and CrossFire configurations in the future. An Asus
Maximus V Formula Z77 motherboard offers three 16x PCI-E3 slots, as well as the
ability to overclock an Intel Core i5-2500K to 4.2GHz (42 x 100). PCi-E2 isn’t
a performance limiter for GPU performance yet, so we’re continuing to use a
Sandy Bridge CPU, with the ability to upgrade to an Ivy Bridge PCI-E3-compatible
CPU in the future. We’ve also used 8GB of Corsair DDR3 memory running at
1,600MHz, and a Samsung SSD 830 256GB SSD for SATA 6Gbps storage.
We test our four test games at three
different resolutions; 1,920 x 1,080 (full HD), 2,560 x 1,600 and three-screen
5,760 x 1,080, giving you an idea of how well each GPU will perform on your
display setup at home.
We test The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrimat its
maximum, ‘Ultra’ preset, with maximum detail settings, 8x anti-aliasing (AA)
and 16x anisotropic filtering (AF). Our benchmark captures the frame rate over
60 seconds of gameplay outside of Whiterun from the character’s third-person
perspective. The benchmark is repeated three times and the average result
recorded.
Battlefield 3 has long been part of our CPU
benchmark suite and continues to be a stern test for any graphics card. Our
test captures the frame rate over a 90 second sequence at the beginning of the
game’s third mission, ‘Going Hunting’. The game is tested at its ‘Ultra’
graphical preset, with 4xAA and 16x AF. Results are averaged over three runs.
New to our benchmarks, The Witcher 2’s
RedEngine has proved to be surprisingly demanding, as well as utterly gorgeous
despite only using DirectX9. We test at the game’s ‘Ultra’ preset, but have
disabled the UberSampling option due to its massive impact on frame rates. We
manually walk a set path through be busy town of Flotsam, found a few hours
into the game. Results are taken as an average from three runs.
Meanwhile, Crysis 2 may not be the most
demanding game out of the box, but install its high-resolution texture pack and
DX11 patch and it’s a very different beast. We test using the freely available
Adrenaline Crysis 2 benchmark tool, running the time square time demo at the
game’s ‘Ultra’ detail preset. AA is disabled, but Edge-AA is enabled. The
benchmark tool’s ability to report minimum frame rates is inconsistent, so we
record the frame rate using Fraps, from frame 1,000 to frame 4,900.
Finally, we’ve added the Unigine Heaven 3.0
benchmark to our tests, as an easy way for you to gauge the performance of your
graphics card at home against the latest and greatest. It’s entirely
GPU-limited even at low resolutions, so your CPU and motherboard will have
minimal impact on performance and takes just a few minutes to run. It’s also
free to download from unigine.com. We run the benchmark at 1,920 x 1,080 with
16x AF, 4x AA and normal tessellation, averaging performance over three runs.
We also use Unigine to gauge the peak power consumption of each card, running
the benchmark while taking a reading of the power consumption for a whole test
system at the mains.
