Video card thoughts

[Grauniad]

Since April of this year, there has been a huge controversy brewing in the video card market. It has to do with dropped frames and whether benchmarks using FRAPS were accurate benchmarks. Turns out that is was not and that the AMD Radeon line had severe issues with dropped frames. The Tech Report started it and there are numerous articles on their site where they explore this issue.

Suffice to say that NVidia came out of this a lot better than AMD and that AMD has been scrambling to improve their drivers.

For us consumers, the nice part of it is that AMD Radeon prices on GPUs have dropped significantly. The high-end dual-GPU HD 7990 can now be had for as low as $600, down from the $1,000 price at announce in April. this price reduction is reflected through their entire lineup. My HD 7950, has dropped by about $100 since I bought mine (for what I thought was a good price) a year ago.

If you have an AMD Radeon HD card, make sure you download the latest Catalyst Drivers, and if you're in the market for a mind-range card, you can do worse than buying a Radeon card that has seen a substantial price drop and will work well now and even better with updated drivers.

[Blaze]

I believe my drivers are fully up to date (but then again I'm low on sleep today), but is there any way to be fully sure?
I've always found it hard to figure out if my drivers were up to date or not.

I used AMD's driver auto-detect since I couldn't really figure out what the actual driver was, and it says I'm up to date, but I'm not sure on how accurate it is...
Included my current Driver info and the page I was looking at (with URL) for updating.

I'm not sure if the AMD Catalyst Software Suite is the driver or not. :-\
And I don't think a Beta Driver would be good, since Beta stuff is normally unstable.

[Grauniad]

The new Radeon R9- and R7-series cards are essentially the same architecture as the previous generation Radeon cards, only with a huge price drop.

Here is how Anandtech compares announced prices of the new cards with the price of the predecessor cards at announce time.

[Grauniad]

Today mark the announcement of the Nvidia Titan Black  for the same $1,000 as the Nvidia Titan originally cost a year ago.

Also appropriately, Tom's Hardware is looking at the performance myths surrounding graphics card performance.