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Tom's Hardware: Win, Lose or Ti - 21 GeForce Titan Tests
msolnik writes "Got a huge wad of cash burning a hole in your pocket? Why not spend it on a fancy new video card... Uncle Tom has reviewed 21 different cards so you can make a well educated decision. This is by far the most best Geforce comparison out there. A definate read for all you hardcore graphics guys."
I'd rather have the ATI All-In-Wonder 8500DV. Sure, it might not have the performance of some of the GeForce3, but for Video capture and playback, it is great (even under linux soon, given the track record of the All-In-Wonders of the past). Of course, there isn't really any card I know of with *good*, well supported TV-out (yeah, there are tricks to use the framebuffer and unhooking the monitor, but that's ugly).
nVidia isn't the only game in town, particularly not for those of use who do video playback and editing more than play games.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The article whines a lot about inadequate tv-out capabilities for these cards. Call me crazy, but why would somebody blow the big bucks on something so high-powered as a Titanium, and then hook it up to a crummy TV? Seems like anybody who'd buy these things would rather use a big quality monitor instead. Even if you're going to use one of the nice big plasma flat panels from Pioneer or Sony, they come with VGA inputs anyway. You certainly wouldn't want to use TV outputs. What am I missing here?
What's your damage, Heather?
"This is by far the most best..."
most best?
1 / As usual, see the most powerfull, Expensive and complete video card (which specs look slightly like my last computer, btw)
2 / As my parents doesn'nt budget me anymore (Alas !), stop daydreaming and get a Geforce 2Mx, which is MORE than enough for now (ok, let's say enough)
=> I mean the day you have more than 2 softs that can use Geforce 3, maybe then...
Until that date, Ge2Mx is more than enough for Quaking.
I mean, for the price of a GE3Ti, I could buy a Desktop computer 8| This isn't the rat race, it's just a game race...
Hoping to Frag you Soon 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
I suppose the Quake 3 numbers are some indication of OpenGL performance for these mass karket cards, but I was curious how these stacked up against the traditional high end OpenGL cards (Oxygen, FireGL, etc. or even a whole SGI system) so that a price/performance comparison could be made. If CPU's are any indication, the market size for these cards could drive their performance to almost acceptable levels in more professional OpenGL applications and certainly at a lot less cost.
Any references?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
First, some of us haave the money for the card, but not for the Trinitron 22" Monitor.
Second, Do you prefer you DVDs on TV (with armchair and Family) or on Monitor (on the bed with a coke) ?
+ Bleem (RiP)
I know. But Tekken 2-3 are still Very Good Games
As are most PS1 Games.
And you can play Tekken at a reasonable speed, with Friends, (I mean dual PIII - 1Gig + small Ge2-64DDr IS overkill. But I never played so fast 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
When compared to my 512k Trident VL-bus video card, I've had less problems with that than my Geforce256 DDR. Go figure.
Technological superiority? Try fraud. They name their boards the "Ti500" when it has the regular Ti, and NOT the Ti500 chip, then call their Ti500 board the "Ti550". If I was reviewing that, I'd certainly point that out a little more plainly than as a "technological superiority" attempt.
Uncle Tom has reviewed 21 different cards so you can make a well educated decision.
Uncle Tom? Am I missing something here? Can these video cards only display black and white?
I find it pretty interesting that some of these cards (according to the review) are being bundled with LCD shutter glasses... the glasses are synchronized with the screen to darken the screen over one eye while your monitor displays the view for your other eye. Refresh that at 120Hz, provide a slightly parallaxed view for each eye, presto, it's better than Jaws 3D.
I used to work with these things a while back... it's ok as long as you don't move much, but if you like to move your head around you'll get headaches pretty quick, since the view doesn't change based on where you're sitting. We used head-tracking to accomplish this, but none of that stuff here. Another problem is screen distortion, which doesn't mean much when you're playing Quake, but if you're thinking of a really nice interface for Blender or Maya, this can make a big difference in being able to actually point the mouse where you think it's pointing.
Without calibration to your personal interocular distance and eye-to-screen distance, and good correction for screen distortion, you can use these for max 30 minutes before getting eyestrain or just a plain headache. Add poor head-tracking and you can get seasick, too!
Last thing: there is more than depth cues to seeing 3D: good lighting and shadow effects, _accurate_ perspective views, and use of color all come into play. These glasses are a lot of fun, and if a lot of folks have them then maybe the state of the art will go forward a bit.
Uncle Tom
...most best...
definate
Get a friggin' copy editor.
Uncle Tom is just wrong on a lot of levels
...most best... WTF does that even mean?
definate perhaps in several hundred years the word will be spelled the way it is pronounced by dullards but for now it is definite. The opposite of infinite.
Guys, use Word... it will fix things like this automatically.
This
It's mo' better!
I have a website. It's about Macs.
I have a 2+ year old (in tech terms) ATI Rage 128 based card (AIW-128) running under XP and with the newest ATI drivers and the games I've played with it (most recently the Medal of Honor demo), performance is just fine by my eyes @ 1024x768 and 16 bit color.
I've seen nVidia GeForce2 cards going for $100 but I just don't see the point. There was a time when moving from a 2D card to a 3D card like the orginal Voodoo was really worth the $300 or so it cost -- performance and quality skyrocketed. Similarly the move from the voodoo I to the II, and from the II to that card's next generation (the ATI 128).
Past that point, unless you have some specific non-gaming application that really needs the 3D performance it seems like kind of a waste. 3D performance has been pushed beyond the point where it matters, even for gaming and the features being added seem trivial -- just TV out?
All new cards it seem should come not only with good 3D, but video in and out, TV tuners, and the ability to do hardware MPEG2 compression of full-frame video at zero cost to the CPU. At that point the video card arms race would make more sense..
I've never understood why there's so much interest in the latest and great high-end graphics boards. Probably 99% of users would be quite comfortable with a $60 board and stock drivers. Yes, I know, there are hardcore gamers out there who "need" every last fps they can get, but why spend more for a board than either a PS2 or XBox costs? Why not just buy a console and use your PC as a PC, not as a gaming machine?
I want a card that is able to output high-quality video to my tv while my normal monitor is showing my desktop in another resolution and higher refresh rate.
to get me a most bestest video card for crissmas. Geforce am a very goodest chipset for me to play em my bestest games.
For Great Justice!
Ok.
Thanks Razzlefrog, you just answerd the same I'd have 8)
I (also) have that TNT2 Ultra +Tvout, and I'm still using it to this day... on a PII350 that makes DVD+Divx+Mp3+TV Net browsing (It was such a fad at the time 8)
I also put Logitech Radio Kb + Mouse, and those are nice remotes (104+Keys remote ! Wow 8)
But back to the point...
I took that old PC because turning it to a DVD player cost me less than a standalone, it can do all the thing a DVD does+the rest (Divx, Neorage,Browsing, Porn on Tv 8)
Also, some people (me at the time) have the budget either for Pc or for DVD. This allowed me to take both, with some problems (drivers for DVD card, W98 stability against How The F**K Do I Get Linux on TV Out ?)...
Today this is a W98 box (simpler) stable (=> so hacked that MS wouldn't recognize it's Registry 8) and Ghosted.
I have no concerns, it works flawlessy, I play DVD all zones, Games (BroodWar : old; slow; thousands of players online, and VERY nice on TV), I have Internet And Mp3 on the HiFi, and I'm thinking about the Videoprojector and 5.1 speakers.
Of course definition IS terrible, but my TV is the student model (Big&Cheap) and can accomodate without problem 800*600. It's even better than regular PAL, so 8))
Sorry for the 22" Trinitron, I got carried away 8|
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
For the sake of someone who couldn't pass 3rd grade spelling or grammar, I sure hope you aren't in the market for an expensive new grapics card...
Is your company running tools written by ma
That flaimbait, i'll bite:
If you read the article you would have seen a reference to this article at THG:
it resolves the Quake 3 "issue;"
also
offers SmoothVision FSAA; and, enables 16tap anisotropic filtering. On top of that, it improves performance.
in the conclusion it states:
Nvidia also has some work to do in regard to FSAA
My primary system is a Pentium I 233MMX, 64 MB RAM, Linux 2.4.14 box. It's based on a Baby AT format case, so any processor upgrades are a case + motherboard + processor deal, and I've been just too damn lazy & cheap to bother.
The graphics card built with this system was a Matrox Mill II - so no 3D acceleration to speak of.
Playing Quake and Quake 2 on this system was Just Fine, but anything more modern was just not possible. I tried playing the Quake 3 demo, but was getting something on the order of 1 FPM, so I've been pretty well shut out of all the 3D stuff.
Then the other day, I noticed that the price on an XTacy GeForce MX400 PCI card (no AGP!) was like $150 CAN - so what the hell, I bought it.
It turned out to be DOA (system would not POST) so I exchanged it for the only other PCI card they had in stock, an XTacy MX200 card (which was like $120 CAN)
They also happened to have Quake3 (in the tin box, no less) SoF, and Descent3, all the Loki ports, in the bargin bin for like $10 each, so I got those too.
Stick in the card, grab NVidia's drivers, configure XFree to use them, fire up Q3 - and bam! Playable! Just like that.
Things get a little choppy if more than about 10 people are in a room shooting at each other, and SoF and Descent3 (played in 800x600 with full textures) will "skip" once and a while, but for the most part, the game experience has been just fine.
Interestingly enough, when I turned on the frame rate display on Q3, I was getting anywhere from 10 fps to about 27 fps, with an average of about 15 - and the play experience is just fine. Faster framerates would be nice, but this IS old hardware, and really, it'd just be gravy. I don't particularly find myself wishing that the framerate was higher than it is - in fact, before I turned on the fps display, I thought I was making 30 fps. To see the average was about half that was a real suprise.
I can't help but wonder if the processor or bus is the bottleneck, or if the MX400 card had've worked the display might be a touch faster - but it doesn't really matter. The MX200 is "good enough".
So overall, I'm a happy camper.
.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Has anyone used the VGA-HDTV (component video) converter? That seems like the way to go if you are wanting to use your TV as a monitor. (You all have HDTV don't you?)
Barjam
I like mo' better comparisons.
And that's my $0.32 (adjusted for inflation).
I think this is a bit sad, really. Once upon a time, the test would have between between 21 different cards from 21 different manufacturers, with 21 different chipsets. Now, the vast majority of poeple just go for an nvidia gfx card.
A similar thing happened in the computing world - these days, most people just get an x86 PC - once upon a time, you cuold choose with relatively equal ease between Amiga, Acorn, Atari, Mac, PC, etc. Each had different advantages and disadvantages. Now we get generic boxes based on the mediocre x86 architecture that are differentiated by marketing and hologram badges on the cases...
And if you read this article (read through it now, dont just "skim"), you'll see that the tom-foolery that ATI has pulled with their mip-mapping in Quake3 has nothing to do with FSAA, and everything to do with cheating the user.
Me, on the other hand, has only been sea-sick one time and it was way back in my childhood... I was about 5 years old and was fishing with my dad about 15 miles out in the ocean; just south of the Catalina Island Channel. I blew chunks simply because I was angry at my dad, didn't want to fish, and was pouting in the cabin. So, I got sick because I didn't focus on fishing and mainly because I went into the cabin.
Now let me tell you about the ocean and a boat's cabin to keep from getting sea-sick... STAY OUT OF THE CABIN! STAY AS FAR AWAY FROM IT AS POSSIBLE! AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WHEN A SWELL MOVES UNDER YOU, AND THE BOAT BEGINS ROLLING OVER IT, YELL "YEEEHAWWWWW", AND YOU WILL NOT GET SEASICK. I think it has to do with not LOOKING at one object at any one time. A person who doesn't get sea-sick and has a great time will be a little dizzy when you get back on shore. That would be a good study... compare the amount of dizzyness of a person who doesn't get seasick, to a person who always gets sea-sick. It takes a good 30 minutes for your ears to adjust on land because they no longer have to compensate for the swells rolling and and shifting the boat.
without prejudice
So overall, I'm a happy camper
I fucking hate campers in Q3 -- douche!
There's still not much out there that actually uses the vertex shader capability in the GeForce 3, anyway. NVidia's chameleon demo is beautiful, but that's about the only impressive vertex shader app. So the GeForce 2 technology is good enough for most gamers right now.
NVidia does a great job; their boards work well, the drivers are reasonably solid, and their ELSA business unit, which sells boards, offers a six-year warranty, rare in this industry. And they support OpenGL seriously. Now that they have the price down to a more affordable level, go for it.
How does nVidia fit into all of this between ATI and Matrox?
nVidia develops and distributes its own Linux drivers. nVidia certifies their Linux drivers as they do their Apple and MS Windows drivers. nVidia stands behind their development and offers excellent technical support over phone and eMail. nVidia and ATI don't offer resolutions and picture quality upto Matrox's level, however.
What about 3D graphics, performance, and stability?
Matrox is the best choice for 2D graphics performance and stability. ATI, their drivers being produced free and opensource like Matrox's, by the DRI developers, is the best choice over nVidia simply because it offers the most compatibilty, documentation, and tweaking ability among the many different platforms, CPUs, and Linux operating systems. ATI has more potential in 3D graphics than Matrox, but Matrox's chipsets offer more features that consumers will use on a daily basis. Matrox is available on other platforms and CPUs with ease.
Those companies are competing furiously for their own niche. What about the disbanned 3Dfx video accelerators?
3Dfx videocards are supported in Linux the best and nowhere else on earth as good. The Voodoo2 graphics chipset, when used in `SLI` mode, has 3D performance higher than nVidia's GeForce. The Voodoo2 is the best addition to a system with a Matrox videocard which lacks good 3D performance. The 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee, 3, 4, and 5 are all the best supported videocards for XFree86-4.1+DRI in hardware-acclerated openGL and are the most stable of all the supported videocards in Linux.
What about the 3DLabs `workstation` graphics cards for higher quality 3D modeling in Maya for Linux?
To date, all 3DLabs videocards using the Glint MX and Glint Gamma chipsets are supported in Linux for hardware accelerated openGL. By videocard model, off the top of my head, such videocards are the Elsa Gloria XXL, the 3DLabs GMX2000, and the 3DLabs GVX1. These are the best performing videocards for 3D modelling, higher than nVidia and ATI. The drivers are maintained by the XFree86 DRI developers and not 3DLabs. Driver support is complete and stable; no more work needs to be done so this makes the 3DLabs videocards the best choice for 3D modelling in Linux
What about a computer with two or more monitors at once?
Matrox's videocards are the best supported for using 2 or upto 16 monitors on a Linux system via additions Matrox "secondary" videocards. You can have more desktops in X Windows, configure each additional videocard to display a console login, or configure your system to allow multiple users on your system at the same time, each with an additional keyboard, mouse, and X Windows login.
The choice is yours. What can Linux do for you? Anything.
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
...did you not know that they changed that? You sir... are an idiot...
Your CPU/bus is the bottleneck. :)
To be competitive @ QIII you should be running at 100 FPS (some say 120 feels even better) 30-40 is the bare minimum. Check out The Upset Chaps Guide to get your framerate up.
For under US$ 350 you could have a Duron 850, mid range MoBo, case, AGP MX 400, & 256MB of PC133 SDRAM. For an extra US$ 100 or so, you could have a high end MoBo with an upgrade path & 265MB PC2100 DDR SDRAM.
Your kernels will compile a lot faster too
Full plate and packing steel! -Minsc
I could as well read an article about a g200. The firingsquad article is old news. you could as wel linked to the original article at hardocp. And also the firingsquad later had an interview with ATI about this.
The new drivers have NOW solved the "quack 3 issue".
And did you read my link to tom's? I did pull the fsaa out of context, but it was one thing the ATI card was better at that a geforce card. it does have plus points.