IntroductionI would like to purchase a graphics card (GPU) with a performance ~2x better than my current GPU, a Radeon HD 7850.PreferencesPrice < $120 (If it costs more and I can get it used for this price that's fine)Performance at least 2x better than the HD 7850Compatible with windowsnVidia preferable, but anything more than a miniscule performance downgrade and I'll take AMDI can wait a few months if something is coming outI'd prefer not to do SLI/CrossFireX, but if the peformance benefit is substantial, I'll consider doing it with two cheap cards.TDP <= 300WAdditional InformationI play games such as Team Fortress 2, Trackmania 2, Trackmania United, Minecraft, SimCity 4, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, and World of Warcraft.I also do Blender rendering, however this supports OpenCL and CUDA now so AMD is not a concernI have done my research and know about cards such as the GTX 960, GTX 770, R9 280X, R9 280, HD 7970, etc. I just want to know if there's something I've missed.I would prefer if you provided benchmarks, links and maybe the occasional picture to back up your answer.
Graphics card with better performance than AMD HD 7850
desktop;graphics cards
There's nothing that meets both your price requirement and your performance requirement.Price-wise, the traditional budget GPU is the 750 Ti at around $90-$100, but it's slightly less powerful than your current card; $120 gets you a factory-overclocked 750 Ti that just about matches your card for performance.Performance-wise, three times your current performance is the GTX 980, at a price of around $400.At twice your current performance, there's still nothing within your budget: the options are the GTX 970 (twice the specs) for $275, or the GTX 770 (twice the raw number-crunching ability, but only moderate gains in pixel-pushing) for $200.The Tom's Hardware GPU Hierarchy illustrates the problem you're running into: you're looking for something three to four tiers above your current card, and you're already near the top of the chart.