Video Card Recommendations That Won't Break the Bank

Reader Brett Featherstone writes: I was wondering if you could recommend a graphics card to me. I want something that i will be able to play all PC games on and will not be outdated in six months. I don't want to spend a whole lot of money: at the maximum, $280. As I was looking at different cards I saw something about DirectX 10, I was wondering what it is, and do I need it. I have a PCI Express slot in my computer. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

The video card world is in flux right now as the industry transitions to Vista. The reason? Vista requires different drivers from Windows XP, and Vista includes this DirectX 10 that you've heard about: Microsoft's latest version of its DirectX system for handling graphics, which is universally supported by the world's PC game creators. The catch: DirectX 10 only runs on Vista, and it requires special graphics hardware in order to work. The bottom line is that if you're buying a video card today, you should get one that supports DirectX 10 whether you're on Vista or not. Unfortunately, DirectX 10 hardware costs $450 and up right now, so you probably want to put off such an upgrade until prices come down and more DirectX content is on the market. (Suffice it say that DirectX 10 simply looks better than ever before, but it requires some nice hardware to achieve such good looks.)

Essentially you have two choices when it comes to a video card: One using an Nvidia chipset and one using ATI/AMD. Both make high-quality hardware at a variety of price levels, and I've had good luck with both sides of the fence.

Vista complicates things, however. Nvidia has been slow to get drivers working well under Vista, and many users have critical of how well its hardware works with Microsoft's new OS. As well, many games have problems running under Vista at all, so tread with caution if you've already upgraded to the new OS.

So let's look at some specific recommendations. Note that all of these are DirectX 9 cards. 

With ATI, $280 will take you about to the top of the line: an X1950 XT or XTX card. Several vendors offer them: Diamond, PowerColor, and Sapphire are the most common brand names. Performance doesn't vary much from one to another. You could also check out a card running an ATI X1900 All-In-Wonder uses a slightly slower chip but gives you 256MB of video RAM and a TV tuner for about the same price.

For Nvidia: The EVGA e-GeForce 7900 GT KO Superclocked is a 256MB card based on nVidia's second-to-highest GPU in the 7 series. It should give you blazing performance no matter what you throw at it but will be slightly slower than the ATI card. If you can't find a good price on the GT KO (they can be hard to find), shop around for anything in the 7900 or 7950 line that fits your budget.

Which camp to choose? I really have no problem with either, but ATI's drivers are a little more mature. If I had to buy a card for gaming today (especially if you're running Vista) I'd pick the ATI. Otherwise it's a toss-up.