In a perfect world, the hardware experts at PC Gamer would accompany you on a shopping trip to pick up your next graphics card. We'd happily share our experience and tell you what to watch out for, what to avoid, and what you need from a GPU to squeeze the highest number of frames per second out of your gaming rig. Then again, would you really want to spend an afternoon with our posse of hardware-obsessed game addicts? The good news is you can receive the same benefit by reading our new buyer's guide below. When you're done, you don't even have to shake our clammy, mouse-worn hands.
The three most important traits of a graphics card: Model number, model number, and model number
The ultimate performance indicator of any graphics card is its model number, which represents a combination of graphics processor (GPU), clock rates, and memory bandwidth. The format is brand name + model number, i.e. Radeon R9 290X, or GeForce GTX 780 Ti.
The point is that a flashy factory-overclocked product with more RAM might look impressive, but you can bet it's grossly outperformed by a plain-Jane specimen of the next higher model.
Therefore, when game performance is the goal you should buy the highest-tier graphics card you can afford. That's within reason of course. Even if your budget is unlimited you shouldn't need to spend over $325 to get a really fast specimen, and investing more than that provides diminishing returns. Other components of your system can also be a limiting factor, see The platform: know your bottlenecks below .
Figuring out the relationship between graphics card models and performance will require research because model numbers aren't intuitive and don't compare well across different generations or brands, but the knowledge really pays off.