The holiday season is upon us and there are a slew of new game releases out for the PC. One of the burning questions when buying games during a holiday season is what hardware to best run the games on. After all, while the integrated graphics of the Intel G45 chipset are much improved in features and performance over the previous generations, no gamer will want to play a game with those integrated graphics.
Recent graphic card releases including the 4830 and the 4850 x2 and the various NVIDIA counterparts have taken the sub-$300 graphics chip to a new level of performance and features. However, as a gamer wanting the best performance out of a high-end system a minimum specification of the $200-300 price range with the HD 4870 and GeForce GTX 260 216 core should be looked at.
Today's release of the Big Bang II drivers from NVIDIA means that there will be substantial performance increases in the performance of their cards. XFX sent a GeForce GTX 260 Black Edition card for review and I took the opportunity to test it today with both the video card test platform and a few new games that have been released in recent weeks to show performance with the latest drivers in the latest hottest games. With this review I hope to answer the question which video card is the best bang for the buck for the $200-300 price range this holiday season and what games that really stands out from the others.
