Graphics card buying guide

AMD and Nvidia have been flaunting Eyefinity and Surround technology now for a while but the reality of it is that most of us gamers still only use a single screen. Only a very select few actually have the multiple screen set ups required to utilise Eyefinity and Surround technology. That said you may indeed be one of those people.

The reason why we mention screen size and screen resolution is for quite an important one. The issue with screen resolution is reflective of how much frame buffer or VRAM you will actually need and this is important as if you have too little VRAM you will end up with a scenario when you suffer performance drop because you may lack the VRAM to render certain levels of texture or if you have too much then you will find yourself in a scenario where you have probably paid more for a graphics card than you need. There is no definitive mathematical rule but we have found that the following rule seems to stand up quite well: 1GB for 1920 by 1080, 1680 by 1050 resolutions or higher and 512MB for 1440 by 900 monitors or less.

Of course in a logical fashion if you have three 1080p screens it makes sense to say that you will need 3GB of VRAM, or if you have three 1366 by 768 monitors then you would need about 1.5GB of VRAM. Although what you must consider is we are writing primarily about gaming purposes. Should you wish to utilise 3 monitors for everyday applications like presentations and office documents then of course you would only need a card that had the ability to support 3 screens with a much smaller amount of VRAM.

Another issue crops up when talking about multiple monitor set ups and that is of Eyefinity and Surround support. Some cards do not have built in Eyefinity or surround supports whilst some do. For example the HD 5870 supports 3 displays out-of-the-box. Whereas Nvidia’s GTX 560Ti does not support more than 1 monitor out-0f-the-box. You must purchase another card to run in SLI to get surround support. But as we already mentioned earlier most people will still use only 1 monitor so in that case the aforementioned rules apply well.