Best Gaming Video Cards for the Money 208
Tom's Hardware has decided to take a step back with their latest video card review. Instead of wowing their audience with in-depth benchmarks they head right for what someone reading a review really wants, an opinion of the best bang for the buck. From the article: "So if you don't have the time to research the benchmarks, or if you don't feel confident enough in your ability to make the right decision, fear not. We offer a simple list of the best gaming cards on offer for the money."
ATI VGA Wonder ISA (Score:5, Funny)
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However, I think you meant to say "as buck tends to zero from the right, the bang for buck tends to infinity"....however, I doubt I would want to use this free graphics card
Commander Keen (Score:3, Insightful)
http://orangetide.com/vgadoc/ati.txt [orangetide.com] for register settings on your VGA Wonder, incase you want to access any enhanced features.
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Re:Commander Keen (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, those games are pretty good. I enjoyed playing them when I was younger. And just like the later games from id Software, they were very advanced for their time. Previously, making a side-scrolling platformer with decent graphics had required hardware support, so they had only been seen on games consoles and arcade machines.
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in theory, we could power a space ship out of donated remaindered copies of "Tek War."
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we require more minerals (Score:5, Insightful)
What they missed though, was a comparison of all of those with at least one average on-board video implementation. Most of which nowadays are pretty damn good. (at least for things like Warcraft III, starcraft, non-bleeding-edge FPS games, etc). To really gauge "bang-for-buck", you need to measure against spending no extra money at all.
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I don't think even today's integrated chips have to worry about starcraft.
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Starcraft only ran at a 640x480. Just like warcraft 2. Blizzard didn't put out a game with 800x600 resolution until the Diablo2 expansion.
Yeah, it could use some updating, but I'm sure Blizzard would sooner put the starcraft theme into a whole new engine.
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It's 2006. You need a video card.
sarcasm (Score:2)
It would be great, if, say, someone had done a video card shootout, and included onboard video as a control group. Then you could link to it to support your statement.
Re:sarcasm (Score:4, Informative)
No, I can't play Quake IV on it, but I do have wobbly windows that stick to each other.
Take that, integrated graphics naysayers.
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On a slightly lower end machine (with the 945GM video), 83 fps [hardwarecentral.com]
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You have a laptop with a video card in it. Lots of laptops come with nvidia or ati video cards built in.
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Maybe I'm just hanging around here too much
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Yeah, we had to write the calculations with our noses, because we couldn't afford sticks. My mother would wake me up to start doing the calculations at 1 in the morning, an hour before we went to bed, and spent all day and night doing those vertex calculations. And then, at night, right before we went to bed, our mother (there were about 16 of us living there, in the lake) would kill us and dance on our graves. And then 1 hour earlier, we'd have to get up and start it all over again.
With apologies to Mont
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Starcraft and warcraft 3 (with a sufficiently beefy processor and mobo, ie anything in the last 2 years) will run on any video card with even the most minute 2d and 3d acceleration c
Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Geforce 7300 GT GDDR3 (second choice/tie?)
Best PCIe Card For ~$140 - Geforce 7600 GT
Best PCIe Card For ~$200 - Radeon X1900 GT
Best PCIe Card For ~$250 - Radeon X1900 XT 256MB
Best PCIe Card For ~$340 - Geforce 7900 GTX
Radeon X1900 XTX (second pick)
Best PCIe Card For ~$500 - Geforce 7950 GX2
Best AGP Card For Under $100 - Radeon X700
Geforce 6600
Best AGP Card For ~$125: 3 Way Tie - Radeon X1600
Geforce 6600 GT
Radeon X800 GTO 128MB
Best AGP Card For ~$130 - Geforce 7600 GS
Radeon X1650 PRO
Best AGP Card For ~$175 - Geforce 7600 GT
Best AGP Card For +$200: None (Honorable Mention: Gainward Geforce 7800 GS+ silent 512)
It looked like nearly every card one at whatever price they sell at. A category for $125 (a three way tie there) and a category for $130? It's ridiculous. 7 pages worth.
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How about those spelling errors? Sounds like teach, looks like speech? Interestingly enough, I *never* used to make those kinds of errors. You can check back through my posting history and you'd be lucky to find an odd typo. However, these days I catch myself making h
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nacturation wrote:
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Does anyone have a good reccomendation on a cheap dual PCIe card to be run in a 4 monitor setup? I've got the 4 monitors (1600sw) but need to upgrade the hardware to run them.
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I know. But I still don't understand what the confusion in sound has to do with written language. I see this kind of misspelling on /. every day and I'm really curious as to where it comes from. It's as if people spoke the words aloud, then forgot about the meaning, and parsed the spoken form back into written text.
I take that as a compliment. Muhahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Re:Summary (Score:5, Informative)
I like toms hardware video card graphs to help quickly show how a card stacks up.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/02/vga_charts
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What they dont say, an Nvidia 7800 GT is twice as fast as an ATI 800, 140 bux or 100 bux, 40 bux buys a lot more power.
Makes for a for an affordable screamer of an SLI rig, too. Also, I'm convinced Nvidia's drivers are so much better. I've regretted every ATI card I've ever tried, usually due to crappy drivers. Highly recommended.
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video card price vs performance.
http://shsc.info/PCPartsPickingGuide#titelanker13 [shsc.info]
Even more interesting is that their chosen graphics cards seem to
scale -- more money gets you proportionally more performance.
However if you scroll up to the cpu section, it doesn't scale so well.
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Can you imagine if Tom's Hardware said "THE DEFINITIVE BEST VALUE CARD RIGHT NOW IS THE
Someone at Tom's Hardware would have lost some important friends at nVidia. Which is why we have 7 pages of fence-sitting instead
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I just did a month of research and bought this exact card about 1 month ago, put it on an older i3.2ghz/HT w/1GB ram, and it does acceptionally well. The PNY unit I bought runs most games at the highest or near highest settings (HL2, etc) and have two dvi out,
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Then what they should do is put each card on its own page, talk about how that particular video card is the best one ever, and fill the rest of the space with ads for that card and links to purchase one. Then they can throw out all pretenses of reviewing the hardware and objectivity.
Re:Summary (Score:5, Informative)
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See here...
http://forums.vr-zone.com/showthread.php?p=2400829 [vr-zone.com]
If somebody could tell me why the 7600GT is more deserving, I'd like to hear it... and yes, I'll take the card that's a bit more power hungry for almost a 30% increase
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I can't seem to find a retailer who actually sells this card. Does it actually exist for the AGP bus?
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sigh - I need to upgrade soon - I'm jealous of my dual 3GHz's at work (with an extremely crappy GPU that actually does affect
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You are paying a huge penalty for AGP. So huge that if you have a recent rig, you will have to spend a fortune for a GPU which is better than your current one. So the best general advice is really: Stick with your current GPU and save the money for later or buy a new PCI-e rig and finance most of it with the saving on the GPU.
Example:
For the price difference between a 7600 GT PCI-e and a 7800 GS AGP you can buy an AMD Athlon64 3200+ and a motherboard w
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(A dual-core CPU, motherboard, 2GB of RAM is currently running around $500.)
I don't know why... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm currently using the 256MB AGP version because I'm extremely cheap (and don't want to reinstall Windows -again- when I get a new motherboard), and I can attest to how greatly it performs.
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Read the reviews.
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You really shouldn't complain about reduced performance when you somehow managed to break 6 MB of RAM off of your card :P
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I've kept the same system across 3 different mobo's with different chipsets and processors - not a glitch.
HTH
This won't work if you change processor arches (Score:2)
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You said yourself you'd only reinstall on a test machine.
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And this my friends is the main problem the rest of us have with linux. Its not different ways to do things, it's not too hard to work with, it is the fact that linux has "no interest in playing games" that keeps linux off the desktop. Build it, and they will come.
Boring boring (Score:2, Insightful)
I can still play Baldur's Gate on my PC - that's all I need. Good enough graphics and great fun.
Waiting for the Wii, waiting for the Wii...
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Now I have a notebook (3.06 Ghz, 1GB ram) which is great for my PhD student needs (darn, a P3-800 would be ok for latex-pdf-opera-linux combo... but I use Eclipse/java to run MAS simulations) and I believe a
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someone wanting £160 for two tickets to see the killers?
lot of money for a gig. You can see them at a festival next summer for that...
yes i know it's not as `intimate`
Just another example of people not buying tickets to see bands anymore but to sell on Ebay.
I wish the fuckers at Ebay would stop allowing the re-sale of tickets but they're making too much money off it.
Video cards (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be nice to have such a list for that type of usage.
I want to run X with the usual apps, and to play video. At HD resolution.
I think many "typical Linux users" are in the same boat: not too interested in playing games, want good performance for normal 2D and video.
But the market is more focussed on gaming than on this, and when you get a low-end gaming card (I have an Nvidia 6600GT based card) you end up wasting a lot of power and generating heat, and still not have perfect video playing.
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But the market is more focussed on gaming than on this,
Or you could use Xgl....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xgl [wikipedia.org]
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This reads almost like an afterthought, but I think it deserves a +5 INSIGHTFUL. I can't count how many times I've read posts or articles on Slashdot concerning video cards and performance and wonder why I'm bothering to read any of it.
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More so now, in fact, since the advent of xgl. Since OpenGL acceleration is going to be used for conventional 2D operations, and 2D op
Compare 2D "workstation" cards, too. (Score:2)
I'm using the video card that came in the computer when I bought it, and have found it to be pretty good: it's an NVidia Quadro4 NVS 280. Allegedly it's a $200 card for the AGP version, but I think you could find it for a lot less than that, based only on the fact that I got the entire computer that it's in for about $280. (It's a HP Workstation from Retrobox; I
2D versus 3D cards (Score:2)
I guess I'm a little unclear as to the real difference between a "2D" and "3D" card anymore, then. The Quadro4 is advertised as being for 2D work, particularly CAD and graphics stuff: although now that I'm rereading the sales blurbs, it says "optimized for 2D performance..." So I guess that just means that it does do some hardware 3D acelleration, just not much, because it's o
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IIRC, 32-bit color quality only requires 16 megabytes of RAM, so any video card that has twice that can handle desktop surfing quite easily.
Well, unless you've decided to turn on massive anti-aliasing and layering like WinVista and such.
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Sure, but note I also mentioned HD video playback.
Re:Video cards (Score:4, Informative)
Those cards often cannot even drive monitors at 1920x1200 or 1920x1080, especially over DVI.
I had an nvidia FX5200 before, but it cannot play video at 1920x1200 fullscreen. Something goes haywire, probably because it is overloaded.
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It would be better when the MPEG decoding happened in hardware, including the postprocessing filtering etc. This would be similar functionality as found in DVB set-top boxes, DVD players, etc. MPEG in, video out,
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(strange effect that looks like horizontal line jitter not unlike the scrambling systems sometimes used with analog TV)
It only happens at fullscreen. Going back to a window only *slightly* smaller than fullscreen solves it.
(but of course this looks ugly on the TV)
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Maximum resolutions (per display)
Digital: 1280 x 1024
Analog, main display: 2048 x 1536
Analog, secondary display: 1600 x 1200
Missed target? (Score:3, Funny)
No time but looking for the best video card for the money? Here, let me shortcut you to 7 pages of options.
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Anti-aliasing at high-end (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, playing HL2 at a resolution of 1680x1050 with HDR, AF, all the fancies turned on, it played fine but with a (barely) noticeable judder when things got really busy.
So, I tried turning off Anti-Aliasing (this is one of the most demanding graphics features, as the GPU essentially has to treat each pixel as many pixels and work out the difference - it's to reduce the jagged, stepped appearance of diagonal lines). And d'you know what? I couldn't tell the difference at all. The frame rates went right up, but the appearance on screen was basically identical.
It occurred to me that when you're at a decent resolution AA really doesn't matter - the individual pixels are so difficult for your eye to distinguish that diagonal lines look diagonal, whether anti-aliased or not.
So basically, AA is an almost useless feature when you've got a good enough resolution. I can't find a game that will slow my card down - Doom3, Oblivion, you name it - and this card was less than £150. There's going to have to be a serious upping of the ante in games detail if anyone expects me to consider one of these £200+ cards to be of any worth.
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Anti-aliasing is basically sampling parts of the image at 2x or 4x the resolution. 4x anti-aliasing is similar to just rendering at 2x the resolution (samples go up by square of resolution), except for the video card manufacturers can pull some fancy tricks to make it actually faster than that.
When you are playing at a high enough resolution, you are already sampling at a high enough frequency that most artifacts will disappear.
I think at 1024x768 you can still notice a difference, and o
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I concur. I also just got a 7600 GeForce Go and I've been playing Half Life 2 with all of the settings maxed out. Wh
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But, yeah, if you are already running at 1024, turning on or off AA won't make a much difference in looks.
Sorry Tom, but you've got it all wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
Sorry Tom, but I have to disagree. What interests me is not your conclusions but your measurements leading up to it. I may have other preferences than you, what you consider barely acceptable performance may be more than I need, you may be able to accept more fan-noise than I, etc. If you provide me with the details, I'm perfectly capable of draw
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In which case you could read any one of the 87000 other articles and reviews that provide that additional depth. This article was quite clearly intended for those folks, and there are plenty of them, who don't want to spend more time buying a video card than than they would buying a car
Bangs per watt? (Score:2)
The one problem with this list (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, some fancier shading tricks are only supported in the Geforce 6800 and later (try running, say, the new Company of Heroes game on a 6600. You can get a great frame rate, but you're missing out on a lot of cool looking stuff).
A lot of times going from one generation to the next (or from the consumer card to the once-flagship-card) will net you a lot more than just pure speed. I work for a gaming type company, and I know a lot of the features we use in some of our shaders just plain aren't supported on lower end cards, or are "supported" by the driver but are actually implemented in software, which means if we can't code around it the feature get disabled for that card, and your game won't look as pretty. It's becoming more and more of a concern with new games.
It's still a nice quick snapshot intro to the graphics cards available, though. The sort of run down I try to do for people when they're asking what they should buy.
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It doesn't really matter so much that they "support" a feature if it still kills your performance to use it.
I'm just saying that it isn't a linear scaling of speed because of the degree of support for specific features. There's more of a difference sometimes than just the clock speed or fill rate.
Or at least, there will be a practical one based on some games turning off features if they know you can't run them at full speed. Company of heroes
Why all the negativity? (Score:5, Interesting)
How can everyone criticize it so frivolously and heavily when all the thinking and research and careful consideration has been distilled down into a no-nonsense, 7 page go-to guide?
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I only noticed this characteristic after something that I have some connection to was treated with the scorn-stick.
Welcome to Slashdot. Leave your sensitivity at the door.
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I sent the triumphant mail to Don this morning to tell him he hit the front page, and he was crestfallen by all the poor behavior and negative remarks.
Prior to today, he was only vaguely aware of
XFX 7950GT (Score:2)
1) Passive cooling! My overclocked gaming machine is now quiet enough to sleep beside.
2) No catalyst control center. Good lord, what a horrible piece of crap software that thing is.
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That's not gonna insult anyone here.
Fact is, there's really a lot of games that only a keyboard and mouse can satisfy. FPS's and RTS games are those that come to mind.
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If you're reading Slashdot, you're a nerd. What's your point?
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Everything's transient, really.
Re:I like this one (Score:5, Informative)
Look at it this way: the current 'hot' CPU, the Core 2 Duo, has a bus connection that allows it to transfer 1066 Mwords of data per second. Typical applications require a complete refresh of vertex buffer data for each frame. Even for a really well optimised application that runs mostly out of cache, the CPU's likely to need to hit system memory several times for each vertex it outputs, so it's probably putting at most 400 Mwords of vertex data per second into the GPU's buffers (at 100fps, that's around 2 million vertices per frame, which is quite a lot).
The card quoted has 8 vertex shaders running at 650MHz, so it can already afford roughly 25 cycles per vertex, which is probably more than enough to perform any reasonable transformation on those vertices.
But then it's the pixel shaders and texturizers that get really stressed in most applications. This card has 24 of each. Per frame, that allows the same application 156 million pixel shader cycles and the same number of texturizer cycles. The highest resolution monitor I'm aware of [pcwb.com] has a max resolution of 2560x1600. That's roughly 4 megapixels, meaning that the shaders get 39 cycles per pixel. Given that these beasts are vector processors (i.e. they can process R, G, B, & A in a single cycle), that's just about enough to perform any realistic transformation on the pixels.
Yes, I think there are applications for faster GPUs. And certainly, improving the speed of the memory attached to the GPUs will continue yielding improvements for a while yet -- there's simply no way 1600 MWord/s memory access speeds can keep up with data transfer requirements to all of the 72x650MHz pipelines on this card. But I'm not sure how many generations of card we'll see before they match the performance of even the most demanding application current generation CPUs are capable of instructing them to perform.
And for gaming applications: there's already enough power in these GPUs to process as many vertices as the CPU can provide in any exotic way you can find a realistic need for, and produce high-resolution textured, realistically lit, bump-mapped, fogged, rasterized output overlayed with transparency over static controls, HUDs and background images at the highest resolution supported by 99% of monitors.
What more do you want?
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Faster FSB speeds and faster memory. More raw processing power will achieve little without either of those.
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That would explain why every modern game is so GPU limited that you see virtually no fps difference from the top Core 2 Duo to a mid-range AMD A64 x2 paired with the top video cards on the market...
I bet you'll find dropping the FSB speed on the CPU makes a significant difference. It's not about raw processor power. It's about communication between components; that's the biggest current bottleneck.