I'm currently building my new PC (yay!). I'm just not sure what video card to go for, but have it down to two at least:

A GeForce GTX 750 Ti or a Radeon R7 265 (or maybe a 270).

The GeForce has the advantage of PhysX calculations by the card, NVidia Shadowplay (to record directly from the video card), and a lower power draw. The Radeon is slightly faster. And uh, I guess that's it. :p

This new PC is gonna have an i7-3770 CPU (I got it on the cheap) so I don't know if that would be good enough to handle recording gameplay videos or not.

Any thoughts? :)

Looks like you're going to have an awesome rig there, mate. Generally I have had better experiences with Nvidia cards. Although, the newest card I've ever gotten is a 650, so this is a little over my head.

Here's a comparison article between the GTX 750 and Radeon 265.

They seem to give the edge to the Radeon.

It depends on what you want to do with it. If you're going to focus mainly on older games or indies, the 750ti will probably be the best option because of Shadowplay and the lower power consumption.
If you plan on playing newer and more graphically intensive games, the r9 270 is probably the best option. The r7 265 is in a weird spot where it costs almost the same as the r9 270 (I think the difference is ~$20) yet performs significantly worse.

I have a radeon, I would suggest get NVidia, a lot of games just plain hate radeon

Go with 2 GTX 660's :p

And that's why I was thinking of the r9 270. It's only a little bit more money, so why not go for that one?

My CPU and video card are just too old already. I'm having trouble running Escape Goat 2...

You might want to check the hardware forums to see which card is able to play your favorite games and base your decision upon that, both Nvidia and AMD have a lot of compatebility gaps.

I would definitely go for the R9 270 if you have the money. It is simply the faster card on the paper with broader memory bandwidth and more raw power. If energy consumption is important for you, the NVIDIA card will certainly be the winner though.
I somehow doubt that PhysX will benefit much from the NVIDIA GTX 750 Ti because the performance may not be all that good. I have the feeling you would need an additional PhysX card on top because the 750Ti needs all its power to put stuff on the screen rather than spending calculation time for PhysX. I have no experiences with this though, so I might be wrong. Anyway I would not count too much on PhysX with this card. In the worst case you will have to chose whether you run a game with PhysX effects turned on and reduced graphic effects or with high graphic details and PhysX turned off. I don't know, but it seems a gamble for me.
On the other hand AMD will support Mantle for some games which might have a bigger benefit performance-wise than having PhysX, especially on low and mid-range systems.
Shadowplay seems from what I read so far a gimmick that uses GPU performance to compress the video stream and record it. Basically what Fraps does, but using the hardware codec of the GPU. It seems to show that the performance with Fraps is better, although the videos get bigger because of less compression. It seems to me that Shadowplay is not a must-have feature.

I might be biased favouring AMD here because I am still running a Gigabyte Radeon HD5870 with 2GB RAM which still works pretty well on most stuff. Might need a better card when Witcher 3 is released, but until then ... best card I ever had so far, for only a lousy bunch of 150 Euros back in the days I bought it, thanks to the new generation of the HD6-series being released. Never had severe driver problems or compatibility problems with AMD. Coincidentally the last time I hade those where on a GeForce 6 card. My next card was an HD3870 which was OK, but destroyed itself with heat problems. Last time I bought an ASUS card! I can recommend GIGBYTE as a vendor all the way.

Signed. I had the same experience.

The Chip of the 750 TI, the GM 107, is certainly the BEST CHIP currently in the grafics market.
It´s just using the most advanced architecture and thats why its delivering absolutly outstanding effitiency.

But, and that is the important point, this chip is only optimised for the MidPerformanceSector, as it got no 6-Pin Power Supply Connector! If you want to push it up into HighPerformanceRegions via Overclocking, you should aim for a card with that additional power SupplyConnector. A very nice one would be the EVGA Geforce GTX 750 Ti w/ ACX Cooler 2048MB GDDR5, which is awailible at every high
But you´ll have to mind that you loose warrenty if you overclock your GPU...


If you don´t like to take the risks of OC:
As your CPU is best suitable for HighPerformanceCards, so I´d actually recommend an R9 270X from AMD.
That´s a very solid graphics card (good efficiency, good performance, good "Coolablity") for a very fair price.
But you´ll have to mind that´s it, like every other card from AMD and Nvidia, excerpt the GTX 750 and 750 TI, based on LastGenArchitecture!

Yes, this. This was my experience in a system for my son, and I haven't bought radeon since. And probably never will either. Usually when a company earns it's way onto my do not buy list, it stays there. Not always, but usually.

And through at least about a dozen different Nvidia cards over the years, never had the problems we had with that one Radeon card.

This is only partly correct. It is correct that Shadowplay uses hardware instead of software to record, but it is incorrect that fraps has better performance. Shadowplay has a negligible performance penalty when recording or streaming. It is not an essential feature, especially since the i7-3770 is powerful enough to handle software recording without too much trouble, but on weaker CPUs Shadowplay is a great feature that allows you to record with almost no performance drop.

I made a thread at HardForum asking about Shadowplay and they told me that if I grab the i7-3770 then there'll be no need for it, since the CPU's got something called Intel Quick Sync that some apps can use to do rapid video compression. I'll probably stick to an AMD card.

Also, I don't overclock nor have any plans to do so. I'm gonna spend more time working on cooling solutions since ambient temperatures in my hometown can get around 110 F (or 45 Celcius) in the summer. o_o;;