Slashdot Mirror
Cheaper Video Cards Compared
An unnamed correspondent writes "For those of you that can't afford to spend $600 on a video card (like everyone!) there's a really thorough comparison of different the best 10 value (meaning $150) 3D graphics cards, using chips from Matrox, NVIDIA, 3dfx and ATI. The authors show off benchmarks on an AMD Duron 700 for 3D and then look at DVD as well as 2D."
I'm wondering what the need for such reviews are. These are all older vid cards (with the exception of the GF MX and Voodoo 4x00) running on older processors. When these cards came out and were the best, the processor they're running it on was also the best. So, they're just rereviewing something months later and slapping the "Value card review" label on it.
On PriceWatch, the GeForce 2 is selling for $169, just $10 more than the ATI Radeon DDR, and $30 more than the Radeon SDR. I don't think the Radeon DDR fits in the "value" range, and the SDR is arguable.
Last I checked, the GeForce 2 is the second fastest card on the market, right behind the GeForce 2 Ultra (which is still insanely expensive).
Oh, and the Voodoo 5 goes for $234. Go figure.
------
This article needs more pages. hell, there were some pages that contained multiple paragraphs. I am positive I missed out on some important banner ads on this site by the efficient consolidation of actual information.
Since I couldn't stick around, did they say if any of these work with Linux, or *BSD ?
I don't know if this counts as "value", but I've got a Voodoo 3 3000 (picked it up for about $150, I think they're less expensive now) and it works flawlessly with XFree 3.3.6 and Q3A.
I've heard the drivers aren't the best, but I haven't had to deal with it - when I switched distros, the new one picked up the card and threw the drivers in for me so I didn't have to set anything up.
-Denor
I've only got 5 slots in my machine. One has a sound card, the other 4 slots have network cards. eth0=static IP #1, eth1=static IP#2, eth2=DHCP addr, eth3=Internal LAN.
If I need a colsole for administration, I can ssh or remote X display one. I can even use a serial port in an emergency.
Sure, I installed a video card to set up the box. After Linux was running, the card was gone.
Video cards are for the weak!
This Page sez the winner is the ATI Radeon DDR 32MB card. Although it didn't score _that_ much higher than the others. Just a couple of points.
3dfx, Leadtek, and the MSI card have the best price. The Radeon DDR is the highest in performance.
The lamest cards for performance: The 3dfx and the Matrox G450.
There are 28 pages in total, FYI.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
www.pricewatch.com (I'm too lazy to do a link, shoot me).
It was said above, and the price for a GeForce2 was given.
Pricewatch shows prices for a GeForce with 32 MB for ~$100. That's value. Oh, and it's made by Elsa, who have a 6 year manufacturer's warranty on the entire card, and they include diagnostic software with the drives so you can measure card temp and overclock it easily (and hopefully safely).
Off topic, on pricewatch and AMD Athlon 750 is the same price as a PIII 500.
Moller
I have worked in places where the 'average' system would have Elsa's and Oxy's in them for CAD and Rendering/Animation work on real nice 21" monitors. The high end market is way overrated IMHO. Before you flame me hear me out: Consider this the average user in a production environment sets the resolution at what? (drumroll:1024x768x24b) Why is this? I am not sure. Maybe they never figured out that you can change the size of the fonts as they are drawn to the screen, whatever. I am not trying to be funny but when I walk by workstations and see machines set like that I go nuts. Just seems like mad money wasted. Personally I prefer to view at 1600x1400 or better if the monitor can handle it, possibly giving up a little color depth for the higher res. Most of the boards in the 'low end' can handle 1024x's just fine and cost a fraction of that GMX with 96megs on it that your boss lays out 2 grand for. An Oxy (just an example though I really, really like 'em) is capable of much higher res and greater color depth but it won't speed up your render times considering there is not much talkback between your card and the cpu. Screen refresh is indeed faster. Antialiasing finer. A kick ass CAD jockey or modeler will benefit from the combination of a good monitor and card but does it really justify the expense? Take that extra few hundred dollars and throw it into memory. You will benefit much more performance wise. Heck, for the price difference you could build additional boxen for your render farm. Take an office with 30 workstations, put in a good 'low-end' board in say 28 of them and you can build a nice sized farm just with the money saved.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
"you would think they would at least be attempting to develop drivers that they do have control of."
Are you serious? C'mon! The latest Detonator drivers kick some butt. The team at Nvidia has their collective shit wired. They produce a tight set of drivers for the best consumer level video cards on the market. Other companies have toyed with their own releases and they pale in comparison. (Creative Labs comes to mind, I own a 3D Annihilator, and the switch to the Reference drivers gave me a 15% performance increase) There is nothing wrong with Closed Source Projects, and until the worlds economy adjusts to the dynamic created in an Open Source environment, They will be the "Norm".
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
Cost of 4 10/100 PCI NICs: $40.
Cost of one 4 head 10/100 NIC: More than I care to think about.
"How do 3dfx work as far as multiple-heads and so on go?"
I haven't tried a multiple monitor setup personally, but a friend of mine has one under W2K using a Riva128 AGP plus a V3-2000 PCI, with no problems.
You are paying the price to have the latest and greatest when you buy a card at $600. Give it 6 months and save $400 or more. If they can afford to make these cards at $150 dollars now (and most are still in production) then that means they could afford to make them at $150 then.
People don't want to hear this though and that is what the video card manufactures are betting on. Same thing sony is betting on with the PS2, matter of fact it is what the guys auctioning PS2 consoles on ebay for $1K are betting.
I am not saying don't buy it, but think about it this way. if you earn $8 an hour you would have to work for 75 hours to get that card. But if you wait 6 months then you can have it for 25 hours worth of work. So when you see that hot item on the shelf ask yourself this , is that "neat" item worth the 50 extra hours you will have to slave at your crappy job (by definition of the word work all jobs are crappy, otherwise they would be called fun) to have it RIGHT now. If not don't get it, but if see your life comming to an end without it, then get it.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
I'm only interested in Linux gaming, and I'm not a super-fast speed-freak gamer, and I don't have an infinite budget. These cards look nice, but which ones have Linux drivers, and what versions of XFree86 do they support?
I was pretty happy with my Matrox Millenium G200 card until I tried to load Q3 Arena ... figuring out which drivers to load where and how to configure them was more effort than I could afford. I would like to replace it, but I want something that works with XFree86 3.3.6 and Q3A. Recommendations?
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
We call it art because we have names for the things we understand.
I'll only point out, as a point of interest, that the cards tested in this review are, in fact, the absolute latest. Not the greatest, but the most recent releases.
I myself would be very interested in seeing a test of true value cards, including older cards, done on a cost benefit basis.
Anything over $100 bucks is hardly a value card, except with reference to the very cutting edge.
$150 for "cheap" video cards...
I can hear the console gamers laughing.
--------
"NVIDIA dont want to support open source drivers, so i honestly dont see why any open source supporter would use any of there cards."
The answer to this is simple... even an Open Source Zealot on a tight budget likes to play Quake.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
Well, this is not an advertisement for Ubid.com. Well, I have been buying stuff from these guys for quite a long time now. I bought a Visiontek GeForce around an year back for only 119.00 and a couple of months back bought an Visiontek NVidia Geforce GTS 32 DDR for a measly 159.00. I am sure there are not a place on the Internet where you could find something cheap as that. Its not Ebay, so you dont have to worry about some jerk posting something he doesnt have. At Ubid, you buy directly from suppliers. So your butt is pretty much covered. These cards were new, and recently I found 3dFX 5500 64MB DDR cards going for a cheap 269.00.
Well all I am saying is not to go and buy something from there, but when you dont have that much moolah to buy the high end cards, you dont have to settle for a TNT2 or a GeForce for 150 or more from some site like EBay or any of those B2C sites. You just need to know where to look. And in my experience this site has it all. Check it out guys.. And ahem.. it runs on ASP/IIS, so dont flame them for that. All it matters is whether they are able to deliver. Well in my experience, they have done more than that.
my two cents..
Rapid Nirvana
Well, there are people who only play 'value' games to go with their value video cards. Some games arn't even frame rate dependent. C&C II for instance, or. . . chess, go, etc.
Games are not equal to first person shooters.
I play N3 a lot, and my V3 maxes it out, and at least until next year this is the newest, hottest racing sim.
So, I would love to see a test that tells me what my best bang for the buck for playing N3 and Age of Empires II is.
Value cards for value games. If you want max frame rate in UT, buy a card that's designed to give you max frame rate in UT, but that won't be a 'value' card.
Buy an 810e motherboard. It has integrated video, and you can pick one up (sometimes) for less then or equal to $150. A whole motherboard for the price of these "budget" video cards.
ATI has the worst support i have ever seen. I was going to buy their new cards until they totally dropped support for the card i had. When I got the all-in-wonder v1. they decided they weren't going to make new drivers for it when windows 98 came out, so i had to screw around with it forever. And guess what, with their drivers it was slower. Now the same card is only supported to work as a video card in win2k. I have other cards for my linux box, but they just don't care.
Wait, that's my typewriter...
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
If you're like me, the fact that Sharky Extreme doesn't use hyperlinks to their best extent is driving you insane. Although their info is always sound.
Make you life easier and get straight to the goods you want:
Enjoy!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Actually, I just got myself a Radeon. It's nice and fast, so far.
By the way, if ANYONE out there gets this, make sure you get the updated drivers, especially if you have a KT-133 chipset on your mobo. It hangs if you don't. Yes, firsthand experience tells me so.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
3dfx may be falling behind the times, but it looks like they give you the most bang for your buck under Linux. The Vooodoo3 has possibly the best driver support in Xfree86 4, and should be sufficient for playing Q3 Arena, and fun Mesa 3D stuff. For this reason, I just purchased myself a slightly used Voodoo3 3000 w/ 32 megs of RAM from a guy on ebay for $69 !! (how's that for value?) I'm just hoping it gets here in one piece and works as advertised.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Why in the world would someone spend $150 on a video card? When I read the title, I expected affordable video cards to be in the $10-$20 range. Why do you need to spend $150 on a card for a CLI?? My old ISA 1 meg SVGA card works fine.
Manufacturers probably hate such reviews since they get most of their profits from the latest and greatest hardware. So, everything that tells smart shoppers to avoid wasting money and be happy with a bit older hardware that is still perfectly capable deprives them from the stupidity tax enthusiasts and ignorants pay (I know that some folks MUST have this hardware for CAD, but they are minority and usually don't pick the tab themselves, leaving it to their employer).
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
I already have a reasonable AGP video card (a GeForce DDR), but I'd like a second (and perhaps third - I have spare monitors) screen since both OSes I use now support it (Win2k and XFree86 - on FreeBSD currently), but this support seems to have arrived just as hardware manufacturers have given up completely on PCI!
What I really want is a G200/G400 dual-head PCI, but you can't get them anywhere! Someone could do really nicely making a decent-spec PCI video card specifically to be a second head - not super-fast, but reasonable. Re-release the PCI TNT. Make a GeForce NotSoUltra (same capabilities, 1/4 of the bandwidth). Whatever. I think there really is a market for second-screen video cards.
(of course, I'd also like nVidia to support 3d on other Xfree86 implementations rather than just provide a great big linux-only binary hackup, but that's another story. I don't use GL on X too much, although partly because of this)
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
Why hasn't any company taken this info and made a card that runs at 72fps no matter what the conditions. Put the greater processing power to work doing something important. Jeeze
Dude, the V4 sucks. Check out benchmarks on any hardware review site like Anandtech, FiringSquad, or Tom's Hardware and you'll see that the GeForce2 MX owns it in everything for a lower price. (Sure you've got hardware FSAA but your card isn't fast enough to do it and still be playable)
"What about decent PCI cards? (no, really)"
3dfx still makes decent PCI cards. They're widely available, and you can sometimes find the V3-2000 PCI for $60 or less. Image quality and performance are actually quite good, and the V3 overclocks well (if you're into that).
If you're looking for something a little newer, the V4-4500 PCI and V5-5500 PCI cost a little more, but still perform quite well compared to their AGP counterparts.
All other things being considered, the Matrox cards continue to have the best output quality, bar none in this price range. From the Matrox Millenium II on forward, this has been true.
If you want a card that really holds up to high refresh rates at high resolutions for your 2D work, the Matrox deserves extra consideration.