Question

Usually I find it hard to know the comparison between graphics card, sometimes only by the price of it ($80 versus $400).

For now I am comparing several ones offered for the Dell desktop XPS 9000:

ATI Radeon HD 4350 512MB [Included in Price]
nVidia GeForce GT 220, 1024MB [add $50 or $2/month]
nVidia GeForce GTS 240 1024MB [add $130 or $4/month]
nVidia GeForce GTX 260 1792MB [add $230 or $7/month]

Since Apple has a chart saying that GT 120 is ok, so I thought GT 220 must be even better

http://www.apple.com/macpro/features/graphics.html

but another chart I found suggests GT 220 is about half as good as Radeon 4870 too... so GT 220 and GT 120 may be similar...

Are there places that have a chart of comparison of all current models of graphics card?

What if I just play Age of Empires 3? Then is a Radeon HD 4350 or GT 220 good enough? What about for MotoGP or Need for Speed? Will those require GTS 240 or GTX 260? Are games such as DOOM 3 or 4, or Team of Fortress 2 the ones that really require a powerful graphics card like GTS 240 or GTX 260?

For some Flash games, such as Restaurant City on Facebook, even though they have lots of 3D graphics, but it seems that the CPU is the one that matters for the speed. Could it be that Flash games only use the CPU to render 3D?

Update:

by the way, I just saw this chart:

on Dell's Alienware website... oh well... a 12% gain is giving the impression of 100% gain (twice the performance)... oh well.

Answer 1

Graphics card performance can be very subjective, since some games are optimized for certain cards, it's often hard to definitively say one card with similar specs is better than another. Even worse, the numbering systems rarely tell you whether one model is better than another.

When selecting a card, I tend to follow the benchmark results for various games, in particular looking at the ones I play. For a more general look, you could take a look at the Total Combined Scores to get a general idea of which card performs better overall.

Answer 2

Tom's Hardware has more charts than you can shake ten mice at, some of them specifically categorizing (from a performance perspective) the various video cards.