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New 3D Cards On Slower PCs
risotto writes "There's always that dilemma of whether to upgrade your CPU or your video card first. There's a useful piece that shows some of today's fastest 3D accelerators but on lower end systems like an Intel Celeron 700 and a AMD Duron 700. There's some pretty big performance jumps to be had by throwing a T&L capable Geforce 2 GTS into a low end system in Quake III and the like."
Wow what would you call my P120?
Are YOU listed?
We had a debate where I worked many years ago (late '80s) about how PCs, generally, had crappy overall designs than some of the other systems we were using. The PC folks would crow about how their system was better than our VAXes because it had a faster CPU clock (stupid criterion most would agree). Meanwhile we'd ask the PC bigots why our software ran faster on our slower-clock-rate VAX than it did on their PC. We were careful to write code that could run on either the VAX, PC, or the behemoth IBMs at the central data center. (The IBM's were, by far, the fastest boxes but were so heavily loaded that they were everyone's last choice.) The result of our debate was the conclusion that the VAX (and the IBMs) had a more balanced design and better software. Our in-house benchmarks showed our ``lowly'' VAXen beating the latest Intel boxes; the balanced system was clearly superior for what we needed to do: software development, number crunching, and for most of us, documentation (using TeX). I'd rather have a slightly slower system with software built with a great compiler.
The PC vendors spend much of their efforts putting a very fast processor in a system with fairly pathetic I/O subsystem. For a single user system this seems reasonable. Systems that were designed with multiple users in mind had to take into account the possibility that multiple processes would be performing I/O and you saw features such as elevator seeking in device drivers that are only recently coming into vogue on the PC. I.e., some effort was going into addressing real performance problems instead of merely figuring out how to get the latest, fastest processor into the system.
Software bloat is part of a continuing problem. When your word processor needs more RAM in a single PC than we used to have on all the PCs in all the offices in our department, something's really wrong. Not a new problem, though, and it's not all about unneeded features (although that's a huge problem lately). I once obtained a piece of software from COSMIC which stated that it would need 512KB of memory in order to run. Using the MS FORTRAN compiler this was true. However, we stuck the source out on our old PDP-11 (remember, I'm talking about mid/late '80s) and the compiler was able to generate an executable that ran in under 128KB on a system using I/D space. Since no one was willing to tie up their (or any) PC for the week or so that it would take to run the simulation -- at least not after we ran it the first time -- guess where it wound up being deployed? No code changes were made so, apparently, DEC's F77 compiler could optimize rings around MS's (no surprise to me there). The balanced system running superior software wins again.
I see some strange tradeoffs being made in the PC/Windows area that don't make sense to me: write crappy, inefficient software and throw hardware at the resulting mess in order to get it to run. Now that PCs are being used for multiprocessing and multiple users, the need for quality software is beginning important again.
Hardware-wise, I'll always prefer to do my homework and choose a vendor that addresses all the aspects of the system and bypass the folks that think they're state-of-art by dropping the lastest hot motherboard into a box. Since so many PC vendors change components without notice I've been opting to build my own systems for a long time now. Last year's processor with 256MB of RAM would be preferable to this year's smoker with only 64MB. Before they became nothing but 200-page advertisement collections, the PC rags used to do decent benchmarks that could show the strengths and deficiencies of various vendors systems. You don't see those any more. Pity.
Sorry if I got into rant mode. This is just one of my continuing pet peeves.
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
When Hemos stated lowend, he wasn't referring to the number of cycles per second the CPU was able to do. Rather, he was talking about the low cache Duron and Celeron CPUs. Good writing doesn't make you think like the author before you understand the prose, and this post was not good writing.
However, what the hell do you think you are all doing by correcting him?
Michael Labbe
Bah. I spent $0.75 and bought me a pair of 3D glasses. My computing experience has never been the same since.
someone was smokin' some rock when they posted this. The article in question is about "value" systems, not lower end ones.
right now, i own a P-III 300 and a K6-2 400. The only reason i consider these low end is because i'm a geek and more Mhz means....well, a bigger penis i guess...
Anyway....AMD K6-2/400 with a Voodoo3 3500 and 128Meg of ram plays Counter-Strike just fine...and, in the end, isn't that really all that matters?
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume