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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."
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.
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.
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..
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!
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.
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