Video Charts - Comparing Relative Power of Video Cards

Since WoW is mostly GPU limited (as long as you have enough ram and CPU power) - I found it to be helpful to compare the relative performance of modern video cards. I personally prefer Nvidia cards for several reasons but ATI (now AMD) cards are also listed.

Tom's Hardware does a GREAT job of comparing cards:

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html

Simply select two cards, select a benchamark and have at it.

It will tell you that, for example, a Nvidia 8500 is WORSE than a 7600 GT in terms of FPS. You might be surprised at how much better some cards are. The resulting selections are highlighted in blue once you do a comparison.

I would use Doom 3 as a general benchmark as it stresses the GPU a great deal. There MAY be a better benchmark than that one but I don't know enough about some of the other game engines to tell you for sure. Most should be fairly similar anyway.

Would point out that a 7600 GT will beat an 8500 on older games, once you arrive at things that require DX10... things will change. But then, an overclocked 6800 should beat both of those on DX9 games also. As with all things, you pretty much get what you pay for ;)

Also keeo an eye on the DDR2 or DDR3 RAM, if you are grabbing an 8500 on a budget there are some with DDR3, come overclocked as standard and will be alot faster than the DDR2 8500's... And they're the same price. I just ordered an 8500 with DDR3 as the 2nd card in my main rig for 2D apps etc, so it's overall performance in games doesn't matter much to me... my 8800 handles that ;)