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This week saw the launch of the latest graphics card to bare the mantle 'fastest in the world'. Yep, the ATI Radeon HD 5870 is truly an astonishing card.

The problem is that it costs over £300. And at a time when spending £300 on anything at all is a big deal, let alone a monsterous GPU that no one really needs, it just seems a bit pointless.

Strange as it may now seem then, there was once a time not so long ago when the launch of a new high-end graphics chip was an event we genuinely looked forward to with excitement.

Weeks of rumours, plotting and early silicon sampling would precede a frantic day at launch, when competitor publications and sites were furiously scanned to see how they compared and make sure there wasn't a single detail that we'd missed.

Then AMD bought ATI and decided pixels were no longer as important as price, and refused to compete for top frame rates.

What seemed like an admission of failure to produce a competitive part – and the HD3000 series was pretty terrible – now looks like an act of supreme foresight.

A new direction

For the vast majority of gamers, there's absolutely no need to spend £400 on a graphics card any more.

Here we now have a situation where a whole generation of technical trending has been reversed. Screens are, thanks to the move to 16:9 HDTV ratios like 1,920 x 1,080, getting lower in resolution, not higher.

Games engines aren't getting more complex, because developers are looking at multi-platform releases and concentrating improvements more on the non-graphical elements.

It also goes without saying that we're in the middle of a global recession and blowing your savings on a new GPU suddenly looks a little bit silly too. In short, Nvidia may traditionally have had the very fastest hardware, but it looks a little like an Olympic hero whose homecoming has been ruined by the fact everyone in town is queuing up for the opening of a new Lidl.

Where has the graphics glamour gone?

Feature focus

Vendors are more interested in talking about GPGPU features than trouncing each other with performance. It's almost enough to make you wish for the days of dodgy drivers and bent benchmarks again.

Maybe, just maybe, we've got our priorities wrong.

Instead of stifling a yawn every time another card drops into this already crowded price point and puts out enough pixel power to render a life-sized model of the Burj Dubai for less money than a good meal for four, we should celebrate the ridiculous amounts of processing power on offer, and experiment with how far we can push them – since they're damned near disposable anyway.

Of course, just because the graphics world isn't what it used to be doesn't mean you should just throw your cash away without consideration. There's a staggering amount of choice available for less than £160, and not every card in the category is created equal. Some, in fact are real stinkers.