Technical prowess vs. pragmatic usage
AMD and NVIDIA have gone toe-to-toe in a fight to see who has the world's fastest graphics card. The dual-GPU Radeon HD 6990 and GeForce GTX 590 cards represent genuinely cutting-edge technology, and both tear through gaming benchmarks at an electrifying pace.
Starting off this piece with some obvious controversy, both super-fast cards are pointless for most people: yup, pointless. Not only do they cost over £500 a-piece, they're (comparatively) loud, hot and can be expensive to run.
You see, these behemoths are simply practical showcases of what graphics-card engineers can dream up, and I know this because I've benchmarked practically every graphics card released in the last 10 years.
Of course they're not pointless, silly Sandhu, I hear you say. But think about it, even mid-range cards can play almost every game once you've spent a few seconds in the options sub-section.
I've been dallying with F1 2010 - DX11, naturally - on my PC. It's hooked up to my 46in, 1080p TV. A Radeon HD 6850 or GeForce GTX 460 runs it just fine on high-quality settings and damn if I can tell a difference between them and 'Ultra' when sitting a few feet away. 'Ooh, look, that rain appears to be a little better rendered on Ultra, honest!'
But then you say F1 2010 is hardly a GPU-bashing game. Go play something decent. Well, I have, and I'm not ashamed to say that I like Metro 2033. Guess what, both aforementioned GPUs crawl when I dial-in HQ settings, but a quick trip to the options menu and it's all tickety-boo and Bristol fashion. (mixing phrases is one advantage of being the editor)
Heck, even a Radeon HD 6950 2GB or GeForce GTX 570 is overkill for most folk, and neither are a patch on the Daddy cards.
My point here isn't to demean the considerable efforts of AMD and NVIDIA, for both pixel munchers are wildly fast and cause arousals that only geeks can appreciate. Rather, it's to tell you hardware is so far ahead of PC software that it's becoming embarrassingly one-sided. There's something wrong when folk looking at graphics-card reviews resort to oft-used criticism of 'where's Crysis Warhead?'
There is a place for the Radeon HD 6990 and GeForce GTX 590, though. It's located in a tiny, tiny portion of the market that can actually use the monstrous power on tap. These are the people who have the financial clout and perceived need to run three screens and have absolutely every image-quality slider hogging the right-hand side. These people aren't me or you, I wager.
For me, the very best graphics card is one that strikes the optimum balance between features, cost, noise, and power-draw. Keeping Joe Average very much in mind, that card, subjectively speaking, is either the Radeon HD 6850 or GeForce GTX 460 1GB. Spend any more and the returns begin to diminish quickly; spend less and the gaming experience suffers. And you know what? Either card makes F1 2010 look much better on the PC than the Xbox 360 or PS3.
Coming back to matters at hand, an absolute killer, PC-only game is needed for these top-dog dual-GPU cards to really show their worth. A staggeringly beautiful-looking title that drips with gameplay, and one that requires a truly high-end card to run well at almost any setting. Let me know what that game is, by the way.
Finishing off just before I make a beeline for the fire-retardant suit, I view the HD 6990 and GTX 590 more as technical marvels than practical cards, then. Oh, and as to the question of who has the best graphics card of the lot? I haven't quite decided yet.
