What is a Graphics Card?

          

          If you're anything like me then this is your favorite part of a computer this is a graphics card and it lets your computer do awesome things like super complex computations physics processing and most importantly producing shiny graphics and games so what is a graphics card and how do you figure out which one you should buy that's what we're going to talk about y the clock speed so for example if we multiply the stream processors and clock speed of the 270x we get 1280 x 1050 or 1.3 million compare that to the 290 with 2560 x 947 or 2.4 million and we can pretty safely assume that the 290 is considerably more powerful than the 270x  even though the 270 X has a higher clock speed so a higher clock speed.

          A higher number of stream processors are both good things but you can't look at any single specification to gauge the performance of your graphics card often the best and simplest way to determine the right video card for you is to consult real world game benchmarks benchmark measurements are based on frames per second or fps which is the number of game images the system is able to render every second higher frame rates are better and 60 fps is a good target for PC games although slower paced games can be comfortable down to around 20 fast paced games can benefit from higher than 60 to demonstrate how you can compare graphics cards through gaming benchmarks let's look at some benchmarks for The Witcher 3 here are the frame rates of 1080p on ultra quality we can see the NVIDIA GTX 980 averages 59 FPS while our AMD r9 290 averages 36 a 270 X can only squeak out 14 FPS which is essentially unplayable moving up to 1440p frame rate strapped to 40 FPS on the GTX 980 for the 290 we see a drop to 28 which is still playable but far from the ideal 60 plus FPS to 70 X meanwhile is in full slideshow mode at 10 FPS for 4k benchmarks.

           We're going to switch over to another source gamers Nexus because they tested slightly more powerful setups 4k is a demanding resolution for the witcher 3 2 gtx 980 Burrage 42 FPS even the gtx titan x can only manage 36 while a single gtx 980 gets 26 that reminds me of something else I should mention multi-gpu setups in those 4k Witcher benchmarks the best performance came from two gtx 980 s which we're operating in the same system assuming you have a compatible motherboard and power supply a PC can have as many as 4 graphics cards working together to split up the graphical load two GPUs can be almost twice as fast as a single GPU adding a third GPU however usually only gives you a small advantage over two and four GPUs is rarely any better than three here's an example of battlefield 4 performance that 1440p and 4k one two three and four gtx 980 s you'll notice that four gtx 980 s actually perform worse than three because the complexity of adding a fourth card outweighs the extra horsepower provides the technology that connects multiple GPUs is called s alive with Nvidia cards and crossfire with AMD cards typically your graphics card is the single most power hungry component in your computer a single GPU like this 290 can easily take 300 watts from your power supply adding multiple GPUs can quickly rack up the power consumption and is the quickest way to requiring a power supply upgrade graphics cards like all of the other components in your computer waste about 90% of the power they use as heat meaning and good air flow is important as you upgrade to large graphics cards or build a multi card setup keep that in mind while selecting a case for your build and when they're under a high performance load the fans on graphics cards can quickly become the noisiest thing in your computer.

            You would like to keep your computer nice and quiet you'll want to compare noise levels of different cards noise is a tricky thing to compare because it's difficult to measure consistently you have to find third-party benchmarks to get useful noise measurements and they won't be directly comparable with noise measurements from different sources here's a comparison from hardware info showing load noise levels of different GTX 970s and 980 s lower numbers mean less noisy the rule of thumb is that a 10 decibel difference sounds about twice as loud so the loudest GTX 970 s more than twice as loud as the quietest gtx 970 in conclusion if you're shopping for a new graphics card we highly recommend familiarizing yourself with each card specs comparing benchmarks and checking out recommendations from reliable sources the GPU chip in each graphics card is made by either Nvidia or AMD but the card itself is manufactured by another company such as EVGA Asus or gigabyte the main differences between these manufacturers will be customer service warranty and the noise level and quality of the heatsink like I mentioned Nvidia and AMD released new generations of graphics cards every year...