Tom's 46 Video Card Roundup 279
Hoagie writes "Tom's Hardware has posted (12/29) a huge 46 video card roundup. Included are a few generations of nVidia and ATI chipsets. Along with the newcomers/return of XTI, Parhelia, and S3."
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Tom's 46 Video Card Roundup
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The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.
So? (Score:5, Interesting)
My GeForce2MX (64 MB) runs Max Payne 2 and Tron 2.0 reasonably well. Why should I upgrade?
Re:So? (Score:1, Interesting)
True, I agree. I can still play games reasonably well with the aforementioned video card on a 1GHz P3 w. 512MB RAM.
This essay [critical-art.net] pretty much sums-up what these round-ups amount to
Re:Prices (Score:3, Interesting)
The card that can run it at 300fps, though, stands a better chance of running a new game at an acceptable frame rate than the slower card does. That's the point, really - chances are if you're a gamer, the last card you bought was benchmarked against Q3, so when shopping for a new one, you can do some comparisons based on that. Of course, the system used now is completely different, so you can't really compare, but I digress...
The point is that a card that can run, say, UT2k3 at high settings at 50+fps is going to have no problems with Q3. One that only gets 50fps on Q3, though, is probably going to struggle on UT2k3 or similar. The problem is not so much the card manufacturers, as the tests used to benchmark the cards; Q3 really ought to have been retired long ago, imho.
Laptop Video Cards (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously, the desktop cards are always going to be ahead of the curve considerably, but does the 4200GO perform similar to the 4200 cards? For everything I do, this seems to be a pretty solid card, but I always wonder what kind of power I am giving up by going to a laptop only setup.
Toms is a stinking sales site anymore (Score:2, Interesting)
P.S. NV3x architectures can't do everything in 8x1 mode [beyond3d.com]. Has to drop to 4 ops/clock with color operations.
A bit off-subject... (Score:5, Interesting)
MPlayer has XVMC support (with mpeg1/2). That means any videocard, with an XF86 driver that supports XVMC, can now do MPEG1/MPEG2 playback entirely on the card's processor, so no CPU load at all.
NVidia's binary drivers support it on the Geforce4, and Intel 810/815 cards have open source X drivers that support it as well. ATI's driver don't support XVMC just yet, even though the hardware has the capability.
Flawed results (Score:5, Interesting)
If you dig a little deeper and follow the link for the Jaton 3DForce4 Ti4600 for $54 you'll find all the retailers listed are actually selling the MX440, a lesser card.
If you follow an $89 link (still a great price) you'll find half.com is offering the PNY Verto GEFORCE4 TI 4600 for that price (according to bizrate). Click the link to half.com and hey! you can get a new one for $319 or a used one for $180. No $89.
While I respect Tom's hardware I think fact checking is a much larger task in these bulk reviews and is something they need to pay a little more attention to.
Underappreciated Value Card - Radeon 9800 (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting comparison at bottom (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Is it me or... (Score:4, Interesting)
Recent advances in video card technology may not be blatantly obvious from the gaming side, although certainly the difference between half-life 2 and half-life will make all of that clear.
The real changes are from the programming side. Pixel and vertex shaders allow a programmer to use the hardware in un-foreseen ways, unlike the fixed-pipeline cards of the past. A lot of graphics programming on the fixed pipeline (GF1) came down to playing with parameters that OpenGL or Direct3D would expose to you -- as in how to look up textures, how to transform your geometry, etc. You say the GF2 came out, and it was "boring". In fact, it's the first generation of slightly programmable video hardware, because it supported hardware bump mapping -- a huge feature used by every modern game, although at the time it was still playing with pre-existing settings.
Nowadays (since the geforce3), a programmer can invent his own parameters to tweak -- a huge step. You say things "dissipated" after that -- completely untrue! With every new generation of video card, the vertex and fragment programs can be longer and more complicated. The next-generation games (hl2, doom3) already use all of this technology, and next-generation consoles (xb2, gc2, ps3) will undoubtedly integrate all of it.
Re:Prices (Score:5, Interesting)
They already do. Both nVidia and ATI have high end and low end chipsets, and they're very price competitive. They also segment them for sub-$100, sub-$200, and high-end (for which the price limit keeps going up).
not for hundreds of FPS that no one uses (because they're over humam eyes limits)
I'm sorry you have such poor eyesight. Have you considered seeing a doctor about it? I doubt they can do anything though -- it's probably neurological. Did you stare into the sun as a child?
I wish people would quit spouting out the crap about "above human eye limits". There is no such thing. We don't know what the maximum frame rate that the eye can see is. Don't go talking about movies or TV -- they're not the same. All video capture methods (be it film or digital) capture motion blur, which our brains happily interpret when shown at a somewhat adequate frame rate. But that doesn't help a bit for somethings -- like fast pans (move the camera horizontally). Throw in some vertical definition (like, oh say, a white picket fence) and you'll wind up with a headache because what comes out on video does not look good. It's doubtful that it even looks like a white picket fence.
Games don't render motion blur (3Dfx was working on this when they went tits up, but nobody has revived the work -- it wasn't well received at the time either). They render individual frames with static content. You CAN tell the difference between 30 fps and 60 fps. You can tell the difference between 60 fps and 120 fps too.
And, of course, this doesn't address the minor issue that what the card is rendering still isn't photorealistic. Or truely 3D. When we get to ~300 fps of photorealistic 3D holograms then we can start talking about where to go next.
Hey, go check out the benchmarks for the high end cards on HL2 or people's impressions of Doom3. IIRC, none of the cards were breaking 60 fps in HL2 at 1024x768. And those weren't even in intense firefights.
My new ATI RADEON 9800 PRO (Score:2, Interesting)
Things to do to reach Nirvana
1.) catalyst 3.10 driver was the best there is, and I had to completely reinstall windows xp to get it working flawlessly.
2.) The key components I had to update was RAM (from generic to Kingston) and powersupply (from 300W to 600W). I know it sounds irrelevant but I cannot tell you how many mod_errors I got in games until these were updated.
3.) I now run completely open cased on BOTH SIDES! They mind as well call it ATI OVEN 9800 PRO. I still get the occasional overheat and get spotty dots on the screen if I leave my computer on 4-5 days in a roll.
4.) I disabled fast write and also the VPU feature in the catalyst software.
5.) I also reshuffled the PCI cards next to the agp slot so that the smallest cards were next to the graphic card to give it more air space.