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What Kind of Card Should I Buy?
Software
Price
Your System

Which Chip Should I Choose?
Gamers Need the Latest Chipsets to do 3D
Just About Any Will Do for 2D

How Much Should I Spend?
Gamers: Under $100 to $600
Business Applications: $50 to $130
Professional Graphics: $130 to $1,000+

How Much Memory Do I Need?
Gamers: 256MB DDR and Up
Business Graphics: 32MB and Up
Professional Graphics: 256MB to 2GB+

Will All Games Run Faster?
It Depends on the Game
Your System Can Also Be a Bottleneck
Test Your System

What Other Features Are Available?
TV and Video

How Should I Pay?
Always Use A Credit Card
Avoid Restocking Fees

How Can I Choose A Reliable Brand?
Know Thy Warranty
Ask Other Buyers

What Kind of Card Should I Buy?

Software

Take a look at your applications. Are there a lot of games in your software library that use 3-D acceleration? If so, it may be time to move up to a 256MB or 1GB card with a newchip so that you dont get choppy video images or movies.

Are you a heavy user of AutoCAD, Lightwave 3D, or other professional 3-D packages? For these, you need a card with a good OpenGL installable client driver (ICD), and depending on whether you need access to real-time previews, plenty of RAM.

Are you a heavy user of Adobe Photoshop, QuarkXPress, or other graphics-intensive 3D applications? For these, you need a fast card that supports high refresh rates at high resolutions, generally starting at 128MB of RAM.

Is most of your time spent in Microsoft Word, Quickbooks or Surfing the web on Internet Explorer? Standard business applications will work fine with just about any standard video card.

Price

How much are you willing to spend? You may have dreams of real-time color previews in 3D, but if your budget is $100, you may not get what you want. On the other hand, there are now some capable cards running at around the $100 mark for most 2-D applications. If you can afford between $150 and $200, you can buy a top-notch video card that will handle the most demanding games. Graphics professionals may require video cards that perform geometry in hardware and include large amounts of local memory. These can run for $500 or more.

Your System

3-D Still Needs a Fast CPU
The fastest 3-D accelerator on Earth won't help much if your applications are CPU-limited. A Pentium 3 or K7 system can crank out only so many polygons. In that case, a fast 3-D card will be loafing along, never really performing to its fullest capacity. So consider system-balance issues when you're choosing. Note that some CPUs, such as AMD's K8 and K6-III and Intel's Pentium 4, have special instructions to improve performance with the CPU-intensive transformation and lighting portion of 3-D games. This should alleviate some of the bottleneck, although processor speed will also play a role.

Not All Cards Work With All Systems
Second, if you do have PCI-based graphics (no AGP), that will also limit your choices, because not all newer cards have PCI counterparts. Finally, if the graphics chip in your current PC is soldered to the motherboard, you may need to bypass that chipset and have your computer use the available PCI or AGP slot on your motherboard, a technician can help with this type of bypass change for video card upgrades.

Which Chipset or Brand Should I Choose?

Gamers Need the Latest Chips

With most 3-D games, fill rate is the most important feature on a 3-D chip, followed closely by triangle rate, image quality, and texture management. Most new chips have a host of features built into hardware to improve performance and image quality. The days where you have to trade features over performance are almost gone.

On the other hand, newer-generation chipsets which have higher clock speeds with 256-bit color. In addition, they offer solid performance up to a whopping 2GB of RAM, better support for AGP and the new PCI Express plethora of advanced 3-D features.

Just About Any Will Do for 2-D
If your graphics work revolves mostly around word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation graphics software, almost any brand-name consumer-level video card will work fine. Just look for high refresh rates at 1,024x768 (good for 17-inch and 19-inch monitors) or 1,280x1,024 (for 19-inch users who are comfortable with smaller text).

If you are willing to live with older technology, options such as ATI's Rage Pro are still good options that are available for well under $100.

How Much Should I Spend?

Gamers: Under $100 to $600

Some hard-core gamers spend upward of $600 for their graphics cards. But you can get some good functionality for well under $200, and at least a few new 128MB cards are available for under $100 for the budget-constrained.

Unless you have the fastest Pentium system, though, try to balance speed vs. cost. If all you have is a 1GHz Celeron, it may be better to get a 128mb video card than a 256mb DDR, Users of AMD K8 systems used primarily for 3-D games might seriously consider a ATI card, as the drivers have been optimized to take advantage of the special instructions built into those chipset. Note, though, that this applies only to games based on 3D enhancements.

Business Applications: $50 to $130

Really, if you're doing only business apps or Internet browsing, you can get by for $100 or less in most cases. That $100 can buy you a reasonably fast graphics accelerator with as much as 32MB of video memory. You can even find decent 32MB cards as low as $50.

Professional Graphics: $130 to $1,000+

A fast 2-D card with some 3-D capability should cost well under $200 with 64MB DDR or 256MB DDR of onboard memory. A specialized 3-D card may cost a lot more—in excess of $1,000. Many of these cards have more than one accelerator chip and as much as 2GB DDR2 of onboard graphics memory. But this is a case where more is often better. A hefty array of graphics accelerators lets users manipulate huge scenes relatively quickly, greatly improving productivity.

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How Much Memory Do I Need?

Gamers: 256MB DDR and Up

Most consumer-level 3-D accelerators now ship with 128MB of video memory, though a few still ship with 64MB. With 3-D graphics, more is usually better. For example, at a resolution of 800x600, two buffers (the minimum needed for double-buffering 3-D graphics) take up nearly 32MB. Add a z-buffer (for accuracy in placing objects behind one another), and that creeps up to 40MB. This leaves a lot of room for triple-buffering or storing large texture sets locally in the card's memory.

On the other hand, if you want to run in 256-bit color (useful for multitexturing today and 256-bit textures in future games) at 1,024x768 with a z-buffer, you've now eaten up nearly 64MB of graphics memory, not counting the size of the textures. That's why you're seeing new cards ship with 256MB of DDR RAM. However, if you have an older CPU such as a 1GHz Pentium, you probably won't be running in 256-bit color much, nor at high resolutions. In a nutshell, don't spend extra if your processor is the bottleneck.

Business Graphics: 32MB and Up

For 2-D tasks, 32MB is more than adequate to run 32-bit color at 1,024x768 or even 1,280x1,024—something only a few people with 19-inch monitors actually run. However, you may find it just as cost-effective to get a newer 128MB card.

Professional Graphics: 256MB to 2GB+

Professional 3-D graphics often requires high bandwidth because users of image editors will run at high resolutions and refresh rates. Graphics memory is less important—in many cases, the images are so large, they would never fit in even 128MB of RAM. Far more important is a high-speed digital-to-analog converter (DAC), since many professional 3-D graphics users want high refresh rates at resolutions of 1,600x1,200 or higher. Check the card's refresh rate at the highest resolution you want to run before buying and make sure your monitor can handle the same without image degradation.

With 3-D, Higher Is Better
Users of 3-D modeling packages, however, need the onboard RAM. This lets them preview their renderings in real time (or close to real time) if the system and the card are fast enough. Although a high refresh rate is important, being able to run them at the top resolutions is not as critical—many pro 3-D users run at 1,280x1,024 rather than at the highest resolutions. If you do any 3-D work at all, look for a card that supports a full OpenGL ICD. That's a critical item for any 3-D work these days.

Will All Games Run Faster?

It Depends on the Game

You probably won't see a dramatic increase in the performance of 3D games. In fact, if you spend most of your time playing 2D strategy games and you have a card that's less than a year old, you might not need a new graphics card at all. Just be sure to check that the manufacturer still provides driver updates so that you can take advantage of future performance improvements. Nonetheless, note that many future strategy games will take advantage of 3D.

Your System Can Also Be a Bottleneck

If you have a slow CPU, a new card may let you see prettier graphics—essentially larger textures with 256-bit color for accurate multitexturing and higher-resolution game play. However, the games may not actually run much faster. Think twice about buying the hottest 3-D card if your system is any slower than 1GHz.

What Other Features Are Available?

TV and Video

Not everyone is a hard-core 3-D gamer. But there may be other features of interest, like output to TV, TV input, built-in TV tuners, and better performance with DVD movies through built-in MPEG decoding features such as motion compensation and inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT). ATI make cards with a built-in TV tuner and hardware-based video-capture capabilities.

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How Should I Pay?

Always Use A Credit Card

You don't forfeit your rights as a consumer if you pay by check, money order, check card, or debit card, but you forfeit the most practical way to enforce those rights—credit-card companies' clout—if there's a problem with the product or its delivery. Under the Fair Credit Billing Act, you have 60 days from the occurrence of the problem in which to report the details in writing. No credit-card company guarantees it will solve every problem or issue a chargeback for every disputed purchase, but the power of the creditor is often the heaviest weapon you can wield. Many debit cards now limit your liability to $50 in the event of fraud, but the money is already out of your checking account. It's the same with checks and even worse with money orders—they're the equivalent of cash.

Avoid Restocking Fees

It's the sometimes shocking reason you should always read the fine print: Restocking fees—often 15 to 20 percent of your total purchase price—can take a big bite out of a money-back return policy. Be sure to ask about the existence and terms of any restocking policies before you buy. Often, different restocking fees apply to different types of products or even to different parts of a system purchase. PC hardware, for instance, might be returnable without a restocking fee, but bundled software may be subject to a fee or nonreturnable once opened.

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How Can I Choose A Reliable Brand?

Know Thy Warranty

All things being equal, a three-year warranty is obviously more attractive than a one-year warranty. But sometimes, a solid one-year plan—one that covers parts and labor on all components, not just some—can be better than three years of haggling and headaches. Ask questions like: Must you install replacement parts yourself? Who pays for return shipping for major repairs? Is a loaner unit available during downtime?

Ask Other Buyers

Advice from trusted colleagues is always a good recourse, as long as you keep in mind that a single person's experience with a company doesn't guarantee that yours will be the same.

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