You need a fair amount of engineering muscle to jam two of the fastest GPUs you've ever manufactured onto one slab of PCB and still get it running happily, and that's exactly what AMD has done with this, the AMD Radeon HD 6990.

A good value all-purpose GPU with integrated basic TV tuner

This graphics card offers decent performance at a reasonable price

So you could get a wonder chip with crazy performance, or you could just get a little bit more for your money. It's a decent card, but the vagaries of GPU headroom could be a worry.

So really there's no compelling reason to pick this card up over a standard HD 6950. It's around £50 more expensive, and you'll still be able to hit the same overclock, admittedly with a little more heat, as this Twin FrozR II version.

Affordable and factory overclocked, Palit's GeForce GTX 560 Ti Sonic could be the ideal iteration of Nvidia's latest mid-range Fermi.

A capable low-end card, but struggles at higher resolutions and with DX11

The GTS 450 offers mainstream gaming at an affordable price-point. This tiny powerhouse (well, it's still dual-width, but pleasingly short) is capable of feats beyond its £100 price tag. What's more, in SLI, you'll see massive performance gains of 80 to 90 per cent, making the dual-card upgrade path a realistic and rewarding option for budget systems

A pokey mid-range card, with good CrossFire performance

The HD 6850 is a very capable mid-range card

As with every generation of cards, the flagship sets sail before the hanky-waving crowds, and the slimmed down versions with slightly less capable GPUs follow in their wake. The GTX 470 came hot on the heels of the GTX 480, and with only marginally reduced architecture.

Great DX10 and competent DX11 performance make this an attractive card whichever way you slice it

If you're more of an Nvidia fan, or just love PhysX, and you're looking for the finest example of its mid-range Fermi silicon, then this Zotac GeForce GTX 560 Ti AMP! is quite simply the fastest you'll find.

The already blistering GF110 isn't noted for its overclocking headroom, and Zotac's AMP! Edition GTX580 offers noticeably – though not vastly – higher component-speeds than the stock GF110-based GTX580.

The GTX 460 was an awesome card when it first tipped up, and the GTX 560 Ti is following in those footsteps. What's changed though is that those footsteps are far more well trod than they were when the GTX 460 came out.

Another passively cooled graphics card but one that doesn't break the bank

A passively cooled HD 5770 which aims to keep your PC running quiet

In performance terms the Radeon HD 6950 is a rather impressive beast. Considering it's around £80 cheaper than the Radeon HD 6970, and you're only losing a couple of frames per second on most of the benchmarks, that makes it doubly so.

Finally they've arrived; the much-anticipated Cayman GPU-powered HD 6900 series cards from AMD. And right here we've got the very top-end of AMD's latest single-GPU cards, the AMD Radeon HD 6970.

Can 3D outputs and a few extra megahertz improve the 6870?

Can an overclock make this card more desirable?

Faster, cheaper, quieter. So, not bad then…

Factory-overclocked 3D cards, such as the XFX Radeon HD 5750 XXX, are a pretty common next step for most manufacturers when a GPU starts maturing, and it's no surprise. When your fabs have cranked out squillions of chips, the price-war between stock cards has stabilised and a new generation of cards is peeping over the horizon, there's the natural drive to differentiate and offer a little more performance to keep the GPU attractive.

With no new top-end AMD cards to pit the GTX 580 against, there's no clear competition for what's now the fastest DX11 card around. Even the twin-GPU HD 5970 has met its match. So until the Caymen cards make an appearance, this is as good as it gets.

Cheap but very, very cheerful