Greetings Gurus,
I'm shopping for a new video card to put on my Christmas list, and I've narrowed it down to either the GTX 260 or 275, depending on how much she loves me.
Question 1: Is the difference in performance incredibly significant? I'm currently scraping every last bit of usefulness out of my GeForce 7950 GT, so either way I figure it will be an enormous leap forward and I'll be impressed. Just looking for most bang for buck with newer games.
Question 2: As if choosing the architecture weren't complicated enough, I'm staring down about 5 different brands of the same card, each a little different, and with surprisingly varied prices. I'm leaning in the direction of an Asus card, if for no other reason I'm running an Asus motherboard, and I know they've always been fairly reliable. What direction should I be looking in, brand-wise?
Thanks in advance for any clarification and recommendations you can offer.
EDIT: I was originally steering clear of ATI, as I have since my Radeon 8500. Research on Direct X 11 has me leaning toward an HD 5770 as a reasonable bang-for-buck card, so I altered the subject of the thread.
I'm shopping for a new video card to put on my Christmas list, and I've narrowed it down to either the GTX 260 or 275, depending on how much she loves me.
Question 1: Is the difference in performance incredibly significant? I'm currently scraping every last bit of usefulness out of my GeForce 7950 GT, so either way I figure it will be an enormous leap forward and I'll be impressed. Just looking for most bang for buck with newer games.
Question 2: As if choosing the architecture weren't complicated enough, I'm staring down about 5 different brands of the same card, each a little different, and with surprisingly varied prices. I'm leaning in the direction of an Asus card, if for no other reason I'm running an Asus motherboard, and I know they've always been fairly reliable. What direction should I be looking in, brand-wise?
Thanks in advance for any clarification and recommendations you can offer.
EDIT: I was originally steering clear of ATI, as I have since my Radeon 8500. Research on Direct X 11 has me leaning toward an HD 5770 as a reasonable bang-for-buck card, so I altered the subject of the thread.