We all love graphics cards because they make our screens much prettier; if we buy better graphics cards, we can use it on larger monitors to play our games and watch our movies.
We also get bragging rights for getting the highest 3DMark score amongst our group of friends.
But does this really matter? Recently, I've noticed a trend in the connection between the graphics card industry and the computer gaming industry: graphics cards develop at a much faster pace than the computer games do.
You see, constantly, graphics card manufacturers releasing newer and better graphics cards, adding 50 or 100 or even 1000 to their previous number(hahaha...
).
And yes, game companies do release brand new games each year, good and bad, high-end and low-end graphics, intense and boring plot lines.
All that is good, except the part where I mentioned before: the graphics card industry is developing at a much faster pace.
I mean, if you look at some of the benchmarks for the high-end graphics cards, they churn out FPS(frames per second) so much higher than 40 FPS that it doesn't really matter how much more you're getting over 40.
Once you get more than 40FPS, the human eye can't really distinguish between 50FPS and 60FPS.
So what's the point of buying a high-end NVidia or ATI graphics card if a lower graphics card can get the job done just fine? If you're thinking about upgrading right now, I don't really think it's the time.
Let's say you have a 9800GTX, a good graphics card now-a-days at a good price.
That card can take on most games well, and if you're thinking about upgrading just so it feels good, I wouldn't do that.
Even if it's for playing higher-end games(Crysis comes up at the top of my head), I still wouldn't do it.
You can always lower the quality just a bit, and play it at a playable FPS.
And in the economic situation we are all in right now, I think that's more than enough.