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It's been six months since we reviewed AMD's Radeon HD 6870, priced then at £100, where we were shocked to find that you don't need to break the bank to achieve the coveted 1080p at 60 frames per second for most games. Anchored by game designs based on current-gen console capabilities, we found that it's possible to radically improve upon the Xbox 360 and PS3 game experience with relatively inexpensive PC graphics hardware. So the question is, with a new wave of budget cards upon us, what can we expect from them in terms of price vs. performance, and how do these cards stand up to the most popular cards from the last GPU generation?For those looking for a cheap GPU upgrade, no time is better than the present. There are now a slew of viable options around the £100 mark that can play the heavy-hitters of yesteryear - from Battlefield 3 to Crysis 2 - at settings which fall closer to our expectations of the next console generation than the current. To round-up the best offerings at the time of writing, we thought we'd test Nvidia's GTX 650 and AMD's Radeon HD 7770 to see how performance fares for those on a budget of around £70-100. For gamers with a slightly more generous budget, we also take a look at each firm's higher-end offerings, with the GTX 650 Ti and HD 7850 accounting for the £100-130 range.
Of course, the cheaper end of the GPU spectrum is traditionally an area where AMD dominate once the performance-per-pound stakes are tallied up and even recent deals are showing that its cards can go lower than £70 if you can snag a good sale, but the level of rendering power available for less than £130 is quite phenomenal - as we'll see later on. Nevertheless, with gradual down-sizing of Nvidia's Kepler GPUs over the course of 2012, the eternal question remains: which cards offer the best combination of price and performance?
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