@JohnIndigo Good catch, the division threw in some rounding errors. Fixed shortly.

@da_illest101 Would loved to have included more countries/states. But it would have made the design much bigger.

@thunder350 We started work on the article before 10.9a was released. And the point here isn't to tell you how fast expensive cards run the game. It's Civ V - there's no mystery if a single 460 pulls off nearly 60fps with everything enabled at high resolutions. The article is called "On the Cheap" - a single GeForce GTX 480 costs more than the build we recommend at the end.

@vashkey The shots were taken as direct screen captures at 1920x1080. We simply cropped the portions of the screen out for comparison purposes.

@Joshgt2 I'm perfectly aware that both the 480 GTX and 5870 cost considerably more than the 9800GTX. Note that I only included those two flagship single GPU cards, and not any of the other mid to high end GPUs. The whole point of their inclusion was to demonstrate that it's not worth pouring your money into the GPU even if you have it sitting around.

@hassy94 http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007611%20600006050%20600006066&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&Order=PRICE&PageSize=20

@jedikevin2 The point of the article was to answer how to run the game very well as cheaply as possible. I didn't see the need to run lower resolutions if a $135 video card can manage to pull off 1920x1200 with Ultra quality settings. Yes, we could have waited until we had a working AMD testbed, but it's not terribly hard to figure out where you want to go with that if a $120 Intel CPU is good enough. @Gelugon_baat CNET's PC review team is based out of New York, we're in SF. The distance makes it difficult to simply grab something when you needed it yesterday. If there's that much interest in how the AMD side fares, I can try to cobble something together.

@whiteagle18 We tried, but the testbed just kept acting wonky. Likely a motherboard gone bad.

@erbium21 Hah! Good catch, that line's the default setting in our chart tool. Fixed now.

@jedediahpelland I made it quite clear that the game doesn't require much to run at high quality settings. If you have any suggestions on how I could improve the guides going forward, I'm all ears. Thanks!