We know you want to play games, so we've put 18 PCI Express graphics cards under the microscope to see who really does the job the best.

Last month in PC Authority we brought you a look at the best performance machines available on a sky's-the-limit price cap. This month we're in future-tech mode and have rounded up the latest and greatest next-generation graphics cards available and put them through a series of rigorous tests to see who really is the winner in their field.

As AGP slowly seems to go the way of other industry changing technologies such as PCI and SDRAM, we embrace PCI Express with it's bi-directional bandwidth, increased data transfer throughputs and hot-swappable architecture with open arms. With GPU performance now rivalling that of the CPU, it's not uncommon to find graphics bucking the trend and becoming bottlenecked by the system's logical processor rather than the other way around as we've come to accept. Given cards such as NVIDIA's 6800 Ultra now feature double data memory clock frequencies of up to 550MHz resulting in 1+GHz of effective onboard memory, CPUs are quickly becoming the ones struggling to keep up.

While Moore's law ideally keeps CPU frequency doubling every 12 to 18 months, the major graphics manufactures work to a six monthly production cycle and ATI has been able to keep a monthly Catalyst update schedule for some time now, ensuring better performing drivers and bug fixes are available to users. The battle continues to rage between NVIDIA and ATI for market supremacy and although each seems to be selling on a slightly different feature set we've done the hard work to show you which cards are worth handing over your hard-earned cash for across DirectX 8.0 and the latest DirectX 9.0 tests as well as real world performance in the games you bought the hardware to play. Wondering how Doom 3 or Half Life 2 will fare on your system if you upgrade to PCI Express? Wonder no longer, we've done the legwork for you, read on to find out just what to expect.