Video Cards: here's a general guide on picking these up --
'Family' is the year the card was produced, 'Product line' is their relative performance compared to other cards in the same family.
NVidia:Current family: GTX 1000 series.
Prior families: GTX 900/800 series.
Product lines: look at the ten's digit. 10-30 is their 'budget/business' line (GT 930 and GT 820 all examples of these), 40-60 their 'enthusiast line' (GTX 1060, GTX 950 and GTX 840 being examples of these), and 70-90 their 'performance line' (the GTX 1080 Ti being NVidia's flagship... at $700).
Budget cards are useful to add extra monitors to a system, but are bare-bones gaming capable. Enthusiast cards deliver better gaming frame rates, and Performance cards are the best, but cost the most to have. Performance cards are also lately the only cards that support multi-card linking (SLI for Nvidia, Crossfire for AMD) for combined performance gains.
Notable NVidia cards: the
GTX 1050 is a sweetheart. Price is around $140, good performance, and these require no additional power leads from your Power Supply. They work off of PCI-Express slot power alone, so no Power Supply shopping is necessary. (Certain 'performance line' cards require Power Supplies with a specific number of amps on the +12V rail. If yours can't supply it, then you'd need to replace the PSU as well.) What's weird: past families of the same number are more expensive. I can't really advise going for the GTX 950 or 850, as their prices are higher with the same performance.
AMD:Current Family: R9 series.
Prior Families: R7 and R5 series.
Product line: The same rule as NVidia applies here concerning their performance lines-- look at the tens digit. 10-30 is their 'budget/business' line (R9 230, R8 220), 40-60 their 'enthusiast line' (RX 460), and 70-90 their 'performance line' (Radeon RX 480 being the current flagship of AMD).
Naming across families is less consistent with AMD, so you have to pay attention: RX, Fury and R9 graphics cards are in the same family essentially. R8 and R7 cards are in the R7 family, etc.
Notable AMD cards: The RX 480 is supposed to be the competitor to the NVidia GTX 1070/1080 at $200, although in practice, I have yet to find any RX 480 card below $200 from any manufacturer. For the same price point as the GTX 1050, XFX makes a
Radeon RX 460 for $140 that not only doesn't require a PCI-Ex power lead from your power supply, but is also fanless.
A Note on Monitors: Current video cards are dropping all support for VGA (either as a dedicated port, or through a DVI splitter, touting DVI-D only if they even offer a DVI port at all). If you've had your monitor around since City of Heroes shut down and you like it, understand that newer cards will either require you to down-convert the signal to keep using it through the use of an adapter (good luck with that), or it's time to consider a new display as well that uses either DisplayPort or HDMI connection.
What is interesting: a Variable Refresh Rate is possible enhancing visuals more than frames per second normally would. NVidia calls it G-Sync, AMD calls theirs FreeSync. Both are the same thing, and both have the same requirement: you need a monitor that is compatible with the technology... and they're not cheap. And I have yet to find a monitor that is both G-SYNC and FreeSync compatible. (Share if you do find one!)
----------
(But Tahquitz, what about the Titan X, or the Radeon Duo Pro? These are past the mainstream market, priced over $1K. As a general rule, if your video card outprices the rest of the system's components, there's something wrong with buying one of these unless you're a professional gamer. Especially if the performance gain from one of these is maybe 20% better than the highest mainstream card available.)