The first three quarters of 2009 didn’t see much in the way of innovation in the little world of graphics cards. Neither ATI nor NVIDIA really broke sweat, simply releasing souped up versions of the star cards of 2008: the ATI Radeon HD 4890 and GeForce GTX 295, 285 and 275.

No great jump forward in terms of performance or technology. In fact, only NVIDIA were able to score any points with the release of its 3D Vision technology. This enabled NVIDIA to bring in stereoscopic (like at the cinema) 3D gaming. You also need special glasses, a 120 Hz screen and, of course, a 3D NVIDIA card. The card needs to be pretty rapid to ensure satisfactory fluidity. The final sum comes to an impressive £550. Not a set-up for everyone then.

ATI: DirectX 11 - NVIDIA: nothing until 2010

With ATI everything’s been going a little crazy since the end of September with the arrival of the first DirectX 11 compatible cards, the Radeon HD 5000 series. The games that use this new DX version won’t only benefit from a new face lift, they’ll also be more responsive than games of equal quality on DirectX 10.

Apart from DirectX 11 compatibility, the new Radeons – and particularly the Radeon HD 5870 – offer excellent performance in games, outdoing NVIDIA cards by some distance. In addition, ATI have really done well in terms of energy consumption management in idle: they draw down 50 W less than the previous generation! We’ll have to wait until the beginning of 2010 to see the first DirectX 11 compatibile cards from NVIDIA.

Results in detail and performance indexes

We don’t blind you with stats in the product surveys. To compare cards one with another and to observe performance across 9 test games, you can consult our graphics card face-off. So as to give you an overall vision of the performance of different cards tested we're also using a series of table summaries with a performance index for each model contingent on the resolution tested. Consult our test procedure and hardware used here.