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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 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!