Video Card for Under $120

[Soviet Heavy]

Mostly I'm looking for "I want the Witcher 2 to have a steady framerate, but I won't touch Ubersampling".

Right now I'm working off of a laptop with a 4330 in it. Despite being two years old, I'm actually impressed at how well this card holds up. It runs Mass Effect 2 at about 25FPS on high at max screen resolution.

5870! my 5850 can do just about exactly that, high-very high with some AA and no ubersampling, playable rates. If you can afford to get a stock 6950 it's secretly just a 6970 with lowered clocks, which you can revert with some safe flashing (Safe because it actually has 2 BIOSes on the card, one which can be altered and a fixed, safe one). That gets you a very good card for the money. I wish I'd sprung for that instead of settling for a 5850, but it all depends on what you're spending.

The 5870 is closer to my price range. I haven't checked out the 6000 series, but the 5000 cards have DX11 and are cheaper while still being really damn good.

Warning though some of the DX11 features like tesselation murder the card for no legitimate reason, especially considering what visual fidelity you're gaining from it. I can't run any game with tesselation also on. It's not that great a feature anyway.

I'm mostly wanting the DX11 to fix the damn engine issues with Dragon Age 2. The game has some weird ass problems that show up when you put it at higher graphic levels.

 

[Baneat]

Mostly I'm looking for "I want the Witcher 2 to have a steady framerate, but I won't touch Ubersampling".

Right now I'm working off of a laptop with a 4330 in it. Despite being two years old, I'm actually impressed at how well this card holds up. It runs Mass Effect 2 at about 25FPS on high at max screen resolution.

5870! my 5850 can do just about exactly that, high-very high with some AA and no ubersampling, playable rates. If you can afford to get a stock 6950 it's secretly just a 6970 with lowered clocks, which you can revert with some safe flashing (Safe because it actually has 2 BIOSes on the card, one which can be altered and a fixed, safe one). That gets you a very good card for the money. I wish I'd sprung for that instead of settling for a 5850, but it all depends on what you're spending.

The 5870 is closer to my price range. I haven't checked out the 6000 series, but the 5000 cards have DX11 and are cheaper while still being really damn good.

Warning though some of the DX11 features like tesselation murder the card for no legitimate reason, especially considering what visual fidelity you're gaining from it. I can't run any game with tesselation also on. It's not that great a feature anyway.

I'm mostly wanting the DX11 to fix the damn engine issues with Dragon Age 2. The game has some weird ass problems that show up when you put it at higher graphic levels.

When I set tesselation on DA2 it dropped the fps to 6, and when I set DX11 as a whole I got red vertical lines everywhere. Dno if they fixed that by now.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

Mostly I'm looking for "I want the Witcher 2 to have a steady framerate, but I won't touch Ubersampling".

Right now I'm working off of a laptop with a 4330 in it. Despite being two years old, I'm actually impressed at how well this card holds up. It runs Mass Effect 2 at about 25FPS on high at max screen resolution.

5870! my 5850 can do just about exactly that, high-very high with some AA and no ubersampling, playable rates. If you can afford to get a stock 6950 it's secretly just a 6970 with lowered clocks, which you can revert with some safe flashing (Safe because it actually has 2 BIOSes on the card, one which can be altered and a fixed, safe one). That gets you a very good card for the money. I wish I'd sprung for that instead of settling for a 5850, but it all depends on what you're spending.

The 5870 is closer to my price range. I haven't checked out the 6000 series, but the 5000 cards have DX11 and are cheaper while still being really damn good.

Warning though some of the DX11 features like tesselation murder the card for no legitimate reason, especially considering what visual fidelity you're gaining from it. I can't run any game with tesselation also on. It's not that great a feature anyway.

I'm mostly wanting the DX11 to fix the damn engine issues with Dragon Age 2. The game has some weird ass problems that show up when you put it at higher graphic levels.

When I set tesselation on DA2 it dropped the fps to 6, and when I set DX11 as a whole I got red vertical lines everywhere. Dno if they fixed that by now.

If I wanted to go past medium graphics settings, it would fuck up my screen resolution and put the stupid black bars on the screen, so I dunno. And it still has the memory leak that will crash your whole comp if you play too long.