Staff Writer

After a long and lonely reign, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 650 Ti is finally being challenged at the $150 price point. Does AMD's Bonaire-based Radeon HD 7790 offer enough performance to put up a fight, or is its familiar GCN architecture too little, too late?

Crysis 3 boasts amazing graphics quality, and is based on an engine that takes the strongest PCs to their knees. Is it playable on low-end hardware? Can we run this one at its highest detail levels on today's graphics cards? Our benchmarks tell the story.

Now that Piledriver-based CPUs and APUs are widely available (and the FX-8350 is selling for less than $200), it's a great time to compare value-oriented chips in our favorite titles. We're also breaking out a test that conveys the latency between frames.

The third installment of the Far Cry series is more impressive as a game (to us, at least) than its predecessor. But do you need really powerful hardware to enjoy it? We benchmark 15 different graphics cards and eight different CPUs to find out.

The Call of Duty series is an old favorite of ours, so it's a foregone conclusion that we'd check out Black Ops II's performance on the PC. How well does your graphics card handle it? Does this title have what it takes to stand out in a crowded genre?

We take Medal of Honor Warfighter for a spin on 12 different graphics cards to figure out how much hardware you need to get this modern-day account of our Tier 1 operators' work running smoothly. Not surprisingly, the single-player campaign is GPU-heavy.

We already know that the look and feel of Windows 8 is very different from Windows 7. But once you fire up your favorite title, does Microsoft's latest affect your experience? We test 10 games and talk to one of the company's SDEs to answer that question.

AMD has the clock rate on its side. But Intel's Ivy Bridge architecture boasts superior IPC throughput. We pit the 4.2 GHz FX-4170 against Intel's new 3.3 GHz Core i3-3220 in an effort to determine which CPU is the better buy for $125.

Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 650 Ti is designed to fill the gap between its GeForce GTX 650 and 660. Is the GK106-based board fast enough to outmaneuver classics like the GeForce GTX 460 and Radeon HD 6850? Or, should you be looking to a 1 GB Radeon HD 7850?

Overclocking AMD's Radeon HD 7970 requires effective cooling, but the company's design is incompatible with most aftermarket heat sinks. Arctic and Deepcool claim to have solutions able to get the job done, without the reference cooler's loud fan.

We have two new graphics cards in the lab today: Nvidia's GeForce GTX 650 and 660, filling the gap between its GeForce GT 640 and GTX 660 Ti with Kepler derivatives. Are these GK107- and GK106-based boards able to challenge the Radeon HD 7750 and 7850?

The anticipated sequel to Guild Wars is here, and we're putting this MMO through its paces to let you know what hardware you'll need in order to play it at its highest details. We also explore which processor architectures work best with Guild Wars 2.

Nvidia's Kepler architecture is finally manifest in a $300 graphics card, which the company says beats AMD's Radeon HD 7870 and challenges its more expensive 7950. Can this GK104-based mainstream card carve out a spot between the GCN-based competition?

We recently hooked up with overclocking guru Sami Mäkinen to get his take on the best way to overclock AMD's A8-3870K APU. Using his advice, we tweaked five retail -3870Ks and compared their overclocked gaming performance to a discrete Radeon HD 6670.