There's been a deluge of graphics card announcements of late, happily coinciding with the holiday season that begins with the release of hotly-anticipated games. Sure, we'd all love a GeForce GTX 780 Ti or Radeon R9 290X, but the solemn truth is that both are way over budget for most people.

And given that many readers use 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution monitors affording a full-HD experience, looking for the card with the most attractive bang-for-buck is arguably more important than salivating after the very best silicon.

So you want to play the newest games on that inexpensive, 22-24in monitor but don't want to fork out a king's ransom to do so, right? Nvidia has the GeForce GTX 760 (£175) and GTX 660 (£140) GPUs for this purpose, and AMD counters with the R9 270X (£150) GPU launched last month, which is basically a Radeon HD 7870 with faster clocks.