Which Graphics Card?

It would be fair to say that anyone technically unaware, looking for a new graphics card capable of playing the latest games at the moment would be somewhat confused.

The situation has not really been helped by nvidia's naming policy - the 8800 series has had so many revisions that anyone could be forgiven for wondering what's going on.

For your reference the cards in order of speed (including AMD's top cards) go 8800gs 384, 3850, 8800gt 256, 8800gts 320, 8800gts 640, 3870 512, 9600gt, 8800GT 512, 8800gts 512, 8800 GTX, 9800 GTX, 3870 X2, 9800 GX2.

Confusing eh? Especially as Nvidia reused the GTS tag for newer cards. So which card would I buy? Clearly budget is an issue and it depends on what your system is, as there's no point in pairing a £400 9800gx2 with a ageing cpu as the graphics card will be hopelessly bottlenecked.

The recent king of the middle market has been nvidia's 8800gt 512 - released as a spoiler for the 3870 from AMD it actually spoiled it's own 8800GTS 512 which was released shortly afterwards. Who would want to spend £210 on the GTS when the £150 GT did the job nearly as well?

Since then the 9600gt has come out as well, and is only marginally slower than the 8800GT.

The graphics card market is saturated with minor revisions, slightly overclocked versions of the same cards and so on, but I think that I'd still go for the 8800GT 512 - if you can find it for around the £115 mark!