The advance of gaming technology demands much from the hardware side of comput­ing. Complex polygons, shaders and textures are the architects of a good game these days and to support this what is needed is RAW comput­ing power. Graphics card manufactures have also splurged on research and development, producing complex and powerful products in the process. While these cards are still used predominately in gaming, they are also essential for creative content producers and creative professionals. Software like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premier, AutoCAD and Maya work better when paired with a decent graphics card. A newfound use of the card was in BitCoin mining, which led to a surge in its demand, greatly inflating graphic card prices the world over. The graphics cards aren’t as useful in BitCoin mining these days, but they are still essential if you want to build a decent personal computer for creative use as well as for gaming.

 

Companies like Nvidia and AMD are locked in a heated graphics card war, with promising devices from each side; consumers only need to analyze and decide if they want to go green or red. Here we look at two of the best graphics cards that cater to two different tasks, as well as their prices.

 

 

Asus ROG Strix GTX 1070 TiAMD

Price
Rs 106,250

 

If you want the best of the best, look no further than the Asus ROG GTX 1070 TI. True, the 1070 TI is not the best card from Nvidia’s 10 series graphics card line, yet it is a great performer for the price. It has a massive 8GB of video memory, with 2434 CUDA Core, which come very close to the 2560 core count of the GTX 1080. A better performer than the base 1070 card from Nvidia, the card is also cheaper.

 

The card is cooled well with a three-fan cooling system but, at 180 Watts, is power hungry. Backing up these hardware specifications, the card also performs extremely well with games, averaging about 100 fps on games like Metro Redux, Shadow of Mordor and Tomb Raider on 1080p.

 

It comes with an RGB lighting system to go with its performance in games. The RGB lighting can be tweaked from inside Asus’s Aura control panel and the customization can be moved further with edits to the core-clock speed. Overclocking this card is also very simple with an easy-to-use Asus GPU Tweak II software. Overall, if you’re looking for an expensive high-end card at a decent price, I’d recommend this one.

 

 

TiAMD Radeon RX 470

Price
Rs 41,250Asus

If instead what you are looking for is something cheap that will also fulfill your gaming desires, then the AMD Radeon RX 470 is good enough. While early in the launch cycle the RX 470 had glaring power drain problems, AMD has managed to fix this and now the card draws a decent 120 watts from the power supply. It comes with 4GB of video memory and 2048 stream processor, a significant downgrade from the GTX 1070, but for the price the card per­forms wonders with games on 1080p. It pushes a respectable average of 60 fps on games like Hitman, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Assassin’s Creed Syn­dicate. For the price, the RX 470 is a great card for gaming and mining too.