 Over the last few months AMD and Nvidia have released a slew of new graphics cards promising better performance at, in some cases, lower prices. But which P should you choose? Polaris or Pascal? And how much should you spend? Let's try to answer those questions. Music TunnelBear is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse privately and enjoy a more open internet. To try TunnelBear for free, check out the link in the video description. So we're going to start as usual with the TLDR. If you're building a budget box or upgrading an existing machine, you can't go wrong with this Power Color Radeon RX 460 2Gig video card that we found at 110 bucks. The RX 460 delivers smooth frame rates at full HD 1080p in popular titles like League of Legends, Dota 2, Overwatch, and CSGO without having to compromise on graphical quality settings. Stepping up to the $200 price point, this EVGA GTX 1060 3Gig is a standout deal on the green side of the fence with Asus's Strix RX 470 4Gig holding down the fort for Team Red. These cards will perform on average, very similarly, and pack enough horsepower for AAA games at high details 1080p with PCMR approved frame rates. For a little more oomph, this Sapphire RX 480 4Gig costs 15% more than those, but is also about 15% more powerful, making it an equally good value if your piggy bank can handle the pain. Now there's an unusual void right now in the next price range I would normally address. $300 to $350. It's populated almost exclusively by overpriced RX 480s and GTX 1060s. I mean, they're good cards, and thanks to their extra horses and onboard memory, they're capable of driving solid gaming experiences at higher resolutions like 2560 by 1080 ultra-wide and 2560 by 1440, but I wouldn't pay more than 260 to 270 dollars for them given the availability of this Gigabyte Windforce 1060 6Gig and this Sapphire RX 480 8Gig. Which leads us finally then into Enthusiast class cards that cost $400 or more, where my pick is this EVGA GTX 1070 Super Clock. The FPS per dollar number is a little lower than our other cards, but the 1070s value is also not bad. It delivers 80% of the performance of its bigger brother, the GTX 1080, enough to run almost anything at 4k with some tweaking, but at a price that's closer to 65% as much, thanks to its lower cost GDDR5 memory and cut down processor. There are slightly cheaper GTX 1070s, but I felt like the EVGA tax of 10 bucks was worthwhile in this case because there is more to life than frames per second. But that's a subject for the next portion of this video, TLDR is over, where I'll explain the methodology that I used to select these cards. This is my spreadsheet. As some of you understood when I did my little rant on low-end video cards and why nobody should buy them for gaming, value by definition is not determined by price alone, but by a ratio of price to reward. A meal that costs half as much, but contains a quarter as much food is cheap, but it is not a good value, especially if you're still going to be hungry when you're done. So back to my admittedly imperfect spreadsheet. It was designed to help me use performance numbers from trusted review sites around the web to calculate which cards will give me the best value or the most FPS per dollar across a variety of games and resolutions. The more I add, the more meaningful the final average numbers become. Here's how it works. I could use exact FPS values, like 42 FPS, if I was pulling all of my data from one source where I knew that every game was tested with the same methodology and the same settings. But since no single review covers every possible scenario, I've opted instead to normalize to a last generation card whose drivers are mature and that was well sampled, making it a great point of comparison for both modern flagships and mid-range solutions, the GTX 980 reference design. So when I enter exact FPS values for both the card I'm investigating and the GTX 980 here, I get a relative performance number, which I fill into my spreadsheet. This allows me to compare cards across different review sites or even cards that haven't ever been directly benchmarked against each other with, from some spot checking, anywhere from 2 to 3 percent margin of error. For cards that have never been benchmarked against the GTX 980, like the 750 Ti, I used a card that has been benched against both as an intermediary, the RX 460, though this method is not ideal. And I approximated a lot of other stuff as well. Only a small fraction of the cards available for sale have ever even had a professional review done. But thanks to GPU Boost 3.0 especially, actually, we're more limited by power limits imposed by NVIDIA and AMD than by factory over clocks anyway these days. So I've approximated most non-reference cards to perform pretty similarly, which won't necessarily be true, but as you can see here, adjustments to price have a far larger impact on our value calculation than the kinds of single digit performance differences that you'll typically see from one GTX 1080 to another. So yes, I know, I said it already, but it merits repetition here, so the entire comment section isn't full of people pointing it out. This method is imperfect and would require either many, many days of additional manual data analysis of additional manual data entry, if I wanted to go beyond relying so heavily on Guru 3D, for example, whose reviews are linked in the excel sheet, by the way, or ideally some kind of fancy custom statistical analysis software. And it also ignores a lot of factors. Here are the ones I could think of in no particular order. Multi-GPU. You want to shop for an SLI or Crossfire setup? They would each need to be added individually for every pair or more of cards. Have fun. I'm not doing that. Two, characteristics like board length, display connectors, or the required physical plugs that might affect physical compatibility with your system. Three, warranty. There is a huge range of policies, not just in terms of the coverage period, but in terms of whether resale, overclocking, and or physical modification is permitted. And this is critical for folks who plan to water cool. Four, cooler style and quality. Aesthetics aside, though some people care a lot about that, for some configs, a rear exhaust blower design might be better to avoid recycling hot air to cool other components. While in a better ventilated case, an open air cooler's additional performance for the GPU itself will result in tangibly better performance in games. Consult your case manufacturer if you're not sure. Oh, and double ball bearing fans are probably worth a couple bucks for a card you plan to keep for a long time. Five, frame buffer size. Now, generally speaking, bigger frame buffer cards end up underpowered before the extra RAM is necessary, but there are some exceptions. Someone who is really into Skyrim texture mods will definitely want to grab an 8GB RX 480 versus a 4GB one, regardless of what the performance per dollar metric looks like, because VRAM is one of those things that doesn't affect performance at all until you run out of it and the card is swapping textures out to system memory. And at that point, everything goes south faster than all the Canadian birds and seniors do in the winter time. Six, driver improvements over time and the features that are difficult or impossible to quantify. Shadowplay and FreeSync are examples of things that I care about, but maybe someone somewhere cares about true audio or the automatic game settings optimization in GeForce Experience. Your mileage may vary here, and that can definitely affect your decision, especially when you're looking at Red Team versus Green Team. Seven, sanity checks. This GTX 950 at $130 could look like a great value for 4K gaming with its similar FPS per dollar number, but even though this 1080 Founders Edition costs $700, its 47 FPS versus 5 FPS might be a factor here for you if you actually want to play games. So consulting actual reviews for raw performance numbers is still part of the process, leading us to eight, and perhaps the most important, actual availability. Just because you can Google some super cool card, if no retailers in your region carry it, then you're kind of out of luck. That is to say, unless the retailer ships worldwide, like Massdrop, though it does cost a bit extra, if you're not familiar with Massdrop, I'm gonna run you through the basic concept. Massdrop takes a whole bunch of people who want to buy a thing, and then a whole bunch of manufacturers who want to sell a lot of things, and they put them together. The community says, hey, we'd love to buy that product X, but it's like, expensive. If a whole bunch of us agreed to buy it, do you think the price could drop a little bit, you know, volume discount? And Massdrop goes to the authorized distributors, or even the manufacturers directly, and negotiates a better price if a bunch of people want to buy. Or, in certain cases, they even have manufacturers produce special products just for them, like the K7XX headphones that we're featuring today, and this is the same ones that I reviewed last year. So they were configured by Massdrop and manufactured by AKG, they're open-backed headphones with large cushiony earcups that feature a flat wire voice coil, a genuine leather headband, memory foam earpads with velour coverings, and a two-year warranty covered by Massdrop. And what kind of a price do you get? Well, the more buy, the better it gets, because that's how Massdrop works. So check out the link in the video description. So thanks for watching, guys. 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