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The best GPU's for every budget, with performance testing and tuning tips.
By Richard Leadbetter
Welcome to the Digital Foundry 2015 graphics card upgrade guide! It's an extensive effort that attempts to address all elements of the most important upgrade you can make to your games PC - the GPU, or Graphics Processing Unit. We're attempting to cover everything here, starting with the basics including the actual upgrade procedure and the importance of the surrounding components in your set-up, all the way through to the extreme in-depth analysis we put into road-testing every new graphics card that comes our way.
The topic at hand is vast, so some element of simplification is required. To that end we've split graphics hardware into three segments - entry-level, mainstream enthusiast and top-tier performance, covering budgets from £80/$130 all the way through to £430/$550. We'll have benchmarks from the latest wave of Direct X 11 games on all contenders, along with hints and tips on improving frame-rates with the least impact on overall image quality. Our primary focus here is in delivering a game play experience on par with or better than that offered by PlayStation 4 or Xbox One.
According to the Steam hardware survey, 1080p displays account for the majority of core gaming PC set-ups, so full HD gets the majority of our attention, but we're also aware of the importance of the so-called 2.5K screens operating at 2560x1440, while for the top-tier cards we also have coverage of 4K gaming too.
Our aim here is to build an evolving guide to the best graphics upgrades available for all budgets, updated with new analysis whenever a new contender hits the market, covering not just the raw stats and benchmarks, but also limiting features elsewhere in your system that could affect a purchasing decision - the CPU and power supply, for example.
To skip straight through to the tests, here's a handy series of links:
By Richard Leadbetter
Welcome to the Digital Foundry 2015 graphics card upgrade guide! It's an extensive effort that attempts to address all elements of the most important upgrade you can make to your games PC - the GPU, or Graphics Processing Unit. We're attempting to cover everything here, starting with the basics including the actual upgrade procedure and the importance of the surrounding components in your set-up, all the way through to the extreme in-depth analysis we put into road-testing every new graphics card that comes our way.
The topic at hand is vast, so some element of simplification is required. To that end we've split graphics hardware into three segments - entry-level, mainstream enthusiast and top-tier performance, covering budgets from £80/$130 all the way through to £430/$550. We'll have benchmarks from the latest wave of Direct X 11 games on all contenders, along with hints and tips on improving frame-rates with the least impact on overall image quality. Our primary focus here is in delivering a game play experience on par with or better than that offered by PlayStation 4 or Xbox One.
According to the Steam hardware survey, 1080p displays account for the majority of core gaming PC set-ups, so full HD gets the majority of our attention, but we're also aware of the importance of the so-called 2.5K screens operating at 2560x1440, while for the top-tier cards we also have coverage of 4K gaming too.
Our aim here is to build an evolving guide to the best graphics upgrades available for all budgets, updated with new analysis whenever a new contender hits the market, covering not just the raw stats and benchmarks, but also limiting features elsewhere in your system that could affect a purchasing decision - the CPU and power supply, for example.
To skip straight through to the tests, here's a handy series of links: