Slashdot Mirror
SMP-Oriented Video Card Round-up
Jason Mitchell writes "I just noticed that 2CPU.com has posted a rather large video card round-up. They ran game and application benchmarks on a dual Athlon MP and Xeon workstation and also did some unique qualitative testing pertaining to s-video output quality. It's a good read."
Why only the older video cards no 9700pro/gffx?
will work for Karma
That's a bad combo if you're going to sit down and review graphics cards...
Although, as I've gotten older I've lost my interest in the computer games market and thus, my video card isn't quite so important. I just like my consoles, where I can just pop the disc in and start playing (after significant load time.) Having to worry about and, for that matter, consider if I have the right drivers is something I just don't have time for these days.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
This puts my Banshee to shame.
... of course, what I really want is some Matrox eTV card ... :)
If I had some actual money, I might grab a Radeon 7500 VIVO
another video card roundup.
Anything we haven't heard a bajillion times?
and the ATI vs nVidia fanboy flamewar rages on...
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
...a dual Athlon MP and Xeon system...
One of each, or what?
Great to see some comparison that's more than just framerates in quake
Quality for video output into different devices other than a standard monitor are important. Television is a lesser technology than say a trinitron or LCD monitor, but still there is a great difference from a good card to a bad one.
Getting the most out of hardware is sometimes difficult when you dont fit the standard gamer user profile. I hope to see more reviews like this
note: slashdot user 'danamania' is a transexual. be careful talking to him
My STB 128 isn't there either...
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
Too bad they didn't mention one of the bummers about the Matrox G550: It only supports video playback to the S-Video output when you set your whole desktop to 1024 x 768 16-bit color. This is a major disappointment if you're used to running your display at 1600 x 1200 24-bit.
Yeah, I know what he meant (ie: The highest resolution that could be downconverted to NTSC was 800x600.) but most people won't, and that's the whole point of a review.
Next time you want to compare s-video outputs, use the proper tools and terms.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Anyone else notice that they link to slashdot with the word "Freak" in the svideo round up?
Repeal the story!
video smart with s video...
that didn't really work... did it... hail to the king baby
-You're wasting your time. Alfador only likes me.
"Not all of them are the newest and swankiest on the block (some are actually quite dated), but we wanted to at least include analysis of cards from all the major players in this industry"
Good to see this...I hate only seeing reviews of the latest $300+ cards, since I'm not THAT rich
"Furthermore, we will hit you with a smorgasbord of benchmarks on both a dual Athlon MP system and a dual Xeon workstation."
And here, they lost me. How about some AVERAGE systems to go along with the average cards... I don't know how much of a difference 2x processing will make in most games, and I'm certainly not likely to even consider that route for a gaming system.
Chaos, panic, disorder...my work here is done.
My experience from my geforce 4 to my friends ATI radeon is that radeon's svideo out is much better than geforce's offerings but neither are that great. I also have a external scan converter (iMicro avermedia) which probably beats them both, but still has issues with filling the screen properly and vsync issues. Are the manufacturers just being cheap on s-video out or is their some technical hurdle that makes it impossible to have a video out that can rival a dvd player?
My personal preference as far as hardware review sites is Tom's Hardware Guide (formerly http://sysdoc.pair.com). He gives much more insight into testing methodology and has access to a greater variety of hardware than the article linked to in the story. He also does more testing than game framerates, like Solidedge and 3D Studio Max benchmarks.
In addition, Tom sorts his results! The results in the story's article aren't sorted by performance, so if I want to find the card that performed the best in any specific benchmark, I have to scroll up and down the chart to see which number is highest.
Admittedly, your mileage may vary on a system with multiple processors, but in the end, this is a video card test, isn't it?
Overrated Moderation: This posts sucks... because.
... or minesweep perhaps. Maybe for chatting in a REALLY fancy font.
I recently (well, 2 months ago) upgraded my workstation to a P4, and had the pleasure of trying to set up a dual head system under RedHat 8.0. I tried the following cards, in order:
Matrox G450 DualHead (Cost: Rescuing it from the trashbin at work):
I loved Matrox cards under Windows, and they had a good rep with the Linux crowd, so I gave this one a whirl. I got the dual head working with the Matrox drivers without too much fuss. However, artifacts from one screen would just appear on the other screen, borking my display. For example, any time I used a pull-down menu on the second screen, the fly-down would apear on both screens. Couldn't fix that for love nor money, so I decided to part with some $.
ATI Radeon 9000Pro (Cost: $229 CDN):
Bleah. This card worked OK on single screen, but even there it just "felt" a little shaky for some reason. Dual head just would not work at all - X would panic each and every time. After 4 nights of mucking about with it, I gave up and exchanged it.
Pine XFX GeForce Ti4200 128Mb (Cost: $349CDN):
I had this card in, running X and set up in dual head in under 2 hours. 2D is crisp, fast and the dual head works as you'd expect. It's a keeper (esecially after trying out the UT2K3 demo). Updating the kernel causes a re-compile of the drivers, but I wrote a script to do that so it's no hassle now. OK, they're closed source drivers in reality, but I don't care - my card works as I want.
In the end, the drivers that a video card uses are just as important (see ATI) as the hardware itself. Think about that before you buy that dual head card for your workstation.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
I'm fairly happy with my Geforce 4 MX, which is a big step up from my old Geforce 1 ddr. I've been utilizing the video capture feature of it and you can download a movie of me outrunning cops in Vice City, HERE.
:)
I'm just curious... what is so bad about MX that it only cost me $112 Canadian dollars to get the card? I find that it gives me pretty good fps in Quake 3.
But Doom 3 will be another story, methinks.
Freak?
Moi?
well newsflash they have skyrocketed past them with the r9500. Anyone who has been following the release of GeforceFX knows that the seven month ati card holds its own against the nv30, which Nvidia have decided to stop making before it even hits the shelves as the performance gap is so stunning.
Do you need a website upgrade?
You know how I know these guys are keeping it real? Look at the author's video card: Matrox G550! (my card, w00t!) Reason he won't get a new card? He has no cash! No one's paying him to do reviews! He has no conflict of interest!
:(
And that's why I might be inclined to take this seriously, if I could actually afford hardware made after 1999
[o]_O
It's not a "Good read", it's a bloody lousy read!
Nothing new in there, the hardware was either old or uncommon, and I didn't see a single detail that was unique to them.
What the f&#k were they thinking, including an antique Matrox in the list? And that Radeon 7500...? OK, they were nice a year ago, but who cares! I mean really, if you are going to invest in a dual-CPU machine you obviously have a clue about performance. Why the hell would you read a review of crappy old cards?
They skim over dual-head results, which was the thing I was really interested in, since despite having a dual-monitor setup at home I have yet to find a game that makes use of it in a nice way (except FlightSim 2003, which really benefits from it).
Come on editors, wake up and post something relevant! (or at least have the decency to read the review before putting it on the front page, duh!)
My P3-500/640-PC130_RAM machine kicks ass( except that CS FPS has been getting as low as 12fps.
It is all GOLDEN now.
"I would imagine a sizeable portion of the readership of 2CPU.com simply don't have the time or the desire to constantly engross themselves in games."
Up until recently, I would only run dual proc
systems. Part of it was geek pride and bragging
rights. I eventually got absolutely sick of dealing
with the hidden hassels involved with dealing
with SMP. I took my dual 1 ghz pentium III system
apart, along with my raid, and enormous server
case, and sold the whole thing as parts on eBay.
With the money I made, I put together a freaking
screamer of a system based on an overclocked
tbred 1700+. Know what I miss? Being able to run
xmms while playing quake3 or unreal. I can't do
that now. Sure, my fps is 4 times faster at
higher resolutions, and I can play ut2003 and
it's really pretty. But the fastest video card
in the world isn't going to make me able to play
quake3 or any other CPU intensive game if I have
xmms running, or even kazaa-lite open using wine.
I really liked killing a few hours waiting for
music to finish downloading (I'm on dialup) by
playing games. The next motherboard I get will be
dual proc.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
Goatsx links...
Penis Birds...
Natalie Portman dancing, covered in Hot Grits...
Soviet Russia...
3. ????
4. Profit!!
Don't get me wrong, I love Slashdot... but what about the above makes the moniker "freak" seem terribly unreasonable? (OK... the Natalie Portman thing could be chalked up to adolescent testosterone poisoning, but Goatsex? Cmon!)
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Tom does honest to gHod LINUX reviews! I almost
pooped myself the first time I found one by accident
using google.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
That's why if you are looking for hardcore gaming
performance, the best bang for the buck right now
is one of the geforce3 class cards. You can pick
up a ti200 for about 70 bucks at pricewatch.com.
You can then overclock it using the detonator
drivers on windows, or nvclock on linux. If you
can find the original geforce3, it's slightly
faster than the ti200. If you luck out and find
a ti500 like I did (65 bucks on eBay) get one of
those. They are only about 4 percent slower than
the geforce for ti4200, and a lot cheaper if you
can find one.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
It was about 2D performance and image quality, not q3 framerates. An 8 meg permedia2 card will suit most desktop users fine.
But he said their drivers need work, and they do for :)
the reasons he states. The hardware is pretty damn
impressive. It's a shame the drivers aren't. And
how can the performance gap be stunning if the
ati card holds it's own? From what I've read they
perform about the same when you average out what
each card does better. I'm willing to bet cash you
own one of these
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
They really missed the boat on this one. They need some real SMP video action.. Our friends at 3Dfx pioneered this with the Voodoo2, operating in SLI (Scan Line Interlace) mode. Two PCI cards, connected via a jumper cable, each handling half the scan lines for the display.. SMP at it's best!
m l
http://www.hwupgrade.com/skvideo/voodoo2_sli.ht
Two cpus are better than one! The box is in the middle of the slashdot-effect and is handling like a champ.
Makes you wonder why they weren't testing ATI's FireGL series cards - the 8800, and the newer line based on the R300 chips. Doing all those GeForce-based cards doesn't really give any valuable insight into what card might possibly be best - just which geforce.
Just found it today, via my gf, which is being showcased at the Softimage XSI Roadshow being the Matrox Parahelia which has a TRIPLE-HEAD OUTPUT....among other things
If only they could afford the $600 to benchmark it against all the other there, eh?
Later
Josh
I have a dual-P3 setup here for my main rig. Though it's starting to show its age -- a mere 1GHz with PC100 RAM -- I still use it for gaming. Unfortunately, while SMP seems to be a consideration among graphics card vendors (especially since Carmack made mention of threading in Q3A), sound card vendors don't appear to be quite as clueful.
I bought a Hercules Game Theater XP. I expected -- reasonably, I thought -- that such a high-end accessory would work solidly on an SMP system. Nope. Despite two major driver revisions since I bought the card, it is still horribly unreliable when all the HW accelerations features are turned on.
If I launch HalfLife with EAX/Sensaura enabled, the game will eventually crash. Leading up to the crash, the echo effects are completely botched. The echo sounds can be heard before the main sound. Sound effects are abbreviated -- the sound will stop before the sample has played out completely (especially true of footsteps). This suggests that buffers are being retired too early, which further suggests that the driver writer isn't locking access to the buffer queues correctly.
If I use the Audio Properties panel to back off HW acceleration one notch, then the card behaves reliably. Of course, I lose 90% of the cool sound effects...
It's vaguely possible that my motherboard may be twitchy (Asus P2B-D with ACPI fixes), but since it's never given trouble in Linux or BeOS, I'm not inclined to think so. So far, Hercules hasn't been very responsive on this issue. (Of course, I haven't pressed them very hard on this, either.)
So, yeah, having a sound card roundup for SMP systems would be a nice thing.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Any message that suggests THG is insightful, reliable or even remotely credible deserves a +5, Funny.
RMN
~~~
Take, say, UT2k3, which is incredibly fun and addictive. And I would never think of playing it without a mouse; nor zooming in w/ a rifle on TV resolution.
How about War Craft III? and if we want an un-arguable "good" strategy game: CIV? the due-out MOO3?
I mean, I tried Max Payne and MDK2 on a PS, and I am sorry but it's just not the same. Max Payne is about downright not-playable. MDK2 is bearable but suffers a great deal. a far cry from their computer counterparts.
But on the other hand, I agree that video cards has been less of a concern as of late. I run UT2k3 on my laptop w/ a mobile radeon 7500. not highest resolution (1024x768), and "normal" features - so while the framerate is not tops and the picture quality is not super-fidelity, (and I have to admit that I do have some texture problems every now and then) - it's playable and I deal with it. For all liklihood I will not touch desktops again, unless some serious disposable income comes my way.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
" I've never had problems getting nVidia cards to work under Linux. It even works quite well with the "unsupported" development (ie 2.5) kernels, with just a tiny patch that they actually seem to promote. Alot of companies could learn from nVidia, IMHO."
Well I did. For several XFree86 and kernel versions. Finally! got it to work without locking up the machine hard. The Nvidia vs ATI issue is similiar to the choice between candidate A who slept with his entire campaign staff, or candidate B who slipped campaign documents from candidate A during the night. You wished you had voted for candidate C, if he wasn't such a Woody Allan look-alike.
Keep the 4mb Voodoo for games, but replace the 4mb S3 with a 2nd hand G200 if you've only got PCI, or a 2nd hand G400 if you've got AGP. You won't believe the difference in visual quality; old S3 cards were truly awful in that department.
Publicly admitting to pirating software. I never thought I'd see the day!
Uhmm, wouldn't Woody Allan have been Candidate A? ;p
-- vranash
My computer outputs all display info to COM1 which is attached to an automated asskicking machine. That machine proceeds to kick my ass right in the head until I refresh my whiteboard with the next frame using nothing but dry-erase markers. And the black pen is shit out of ink.
So I am getting ready ot build a new(er) box to make a PVR setup work...who has good recomendations on:
1: A good TV-capture card ( low $$ a plus )
2: The best TV-out (S-vid/that yellow cable)
People say "just go buy one", but I would really like some experiences....
--rowan
'Jim'
Gabe
Very odd.SON. Fuck you and your bullshit. You know dick
about how my system is set up, and you presume a
lot. You obviously didn't read the post at all.
Heaven forbid you actually try to read a fucking
post instead of going off half cocked with some
pathetic AC post in some pathetic attempt at
cutting someone down. Nice is nice, but it's not
going to work with CERTAIN drivers with CERTAIN
cards. Fuckers like you should just die.
The Parhelia is insanely priced for a home system.
By the way, multihead from XFree86 version 4 was greatly enhanced.
If you want a cheap multi head display on Linux, Fill all the available PCI slots with all the video cards you still have at home; configure Xfree properly (Basically add or configure the relevant Device, Monitor and Display sections, giving also the correct BusId option) and voila. You don't need at all a multihead card.
Thanks for the report. It is interesting to learn what doesn't work so I can avoid it. For those of us who want to run with only Free Software loaded on our systems, any suggestions on which card(s) to buy? I'm chiefly interested in running a dual-head system at 1600x1200@85Hz with a pair of Mitsubishi 2040U monitors (if the monitor make and model matters).
Digital Citizen
I don't need no stinking high-spec display card in bash. This is not flame-bait but:
I use a computer for what it is intended to do. I use my PS2 on the other hand for what it is intended to do and besides, if I want to play games , I want it to run in a stable environment like the PS2.
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
There's a question I asked myself at christmas but didn't find the answer and given that we are talking about S-Video here it seems not too inappropriate to discuss it here.
Friends of mine recently bought a laptop with a DVD drive and a S-Video output. Given that they don't have a home DVD player I tried to hook up the laptop with the TV (which has got S-Video input) and got as far as getting the desktop displayed on the TV.
However, the Video displayed black. Since then I have come across information that indicates that it is because of using overlay (the video is overlayed directly on the output to the VGA port and not on the S-video) but I am not sure how to turn it of. The information I have got said that I had to turn of Hardware acceleration and I understand it to be:
Display Properties->Settings->Advanced->Troubleshoot->Har
Unfortunately, being on holiday I haven't been able to test it yet, and, given the topic I thought I would ask the Windows-using
Note: I am also interested in how to display on the S-video port with Linux.
Anyway, even if I cannot help them here at least I managed to switch them from an unregistered Office with 50 tries left to Open Office for Windows and so far they seem happy with it.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
What troubles me about video card reviews in recent years is that they harp on at length about the ins-and-outs of antialiasing, and framerates, and memory bus bandwidth, but apparently nobody bothers to look at the picture on the fucking monitor.
It used to be different. In the early-mid 90s, PC rags far and wide would rate video cards primarily on how good they looked. This is mostly dependant on the analog signal path of a specific card, and not tied to a given chipset - things would (and still do) vary widely between different implementations of the same chip. I'm talking about horizontal sharpness (limited bandwidth), image distortion (bad topology), contrast compression (shitty amps) and ghosting (poor termination), to name a few.
The physics haven't changed since then, and indeed have become more difficult. Resolutions and refresh rates keep pushing upward, and this makes the analog stage proportionately trickier to design properly. Designing an analog circuit for signals ranging anywhere from DC to 400MHz (a pretty common RAMDAC spec, lately) is quite non-trivial.
Despite this growing problem, even Tom's Hardware doesn't bother to tell you (subjectively, or otherwise) just how good, or bad the picture is on a given card/monitor combination. The closest they come is a note at the end of a Ti4600 review which states that all of the tested cards looked a bit fuzzy on their Eizo monitor, relative to whatever it is that they normally use with it (which they unhelpfully do not identify).
This German page has some very nice multichannel 'scope plots generated by the RGB output of a plethora of different cards, but offers no subjective interpretation of what they look like on-screen, as far as my English-trained eyes can see.
Even the most hardcore of gamers probably spend most of their time in front of the PC reading text and looking at porn. Are there any reviewers left in the world who actually make a point of evaluating image quality?
Here's my stab at it:
I've got a Voodoo3 3500TV. Works great in X, all features except vidcap working perfectly. Image quality at 1600x1200x75Hz is remarkably good, free of ghosting and pretty sharp on a 4-year-old 19" CTX VL950, though it could be slightly sharper. In terms of speed, it's about as fast with X as it is with XP, and handles all but the latest shoot-em-ups quite playably. The included 5/8"-thick, 6' snake makes for handy connections to the card's well-stocked array of inputs and outputs.
Its 3.3-volt AGP interface presents an insurmountable hurdle for modern use, however, when one is looking to buy an nForce2-based motherboard (none of which have 3.3V AGP sockets).
Thus, it needs replaced.
If anyone has any anecdotes on the fidelity of a current video card, please submit them below. Specifically, I'm looking at ATI-branded Radeon 9000 Pro or Radeon 8500, or who-knows-what-brand GF4 Ti4200. Preferably, the reviews will be more from the perspective of a graphic artist, instead of a gamer, and be based on what things look like at high resolution and refresh rates.
But at this point, I'll gladly listen to anyone's opinion about visual quality, even if it involves a Happy Mountain Computing Xabre400, plugged into a 15-year-old, fixed-frequency Sun display, and is written by a twitching 9-year-old crackhead who once lost eight teeth to an unfortunate hockey incident.
Anyone have some light to shed on the subject?
[I'll leave my tirade about the absolute dearth of modern CRT monitor reviews for another day.]
Kid-proof tablet..
From my experience, RedHat has not spent too much effort on supporting this level of technology. Upgrading was a bitch, some things in the choices could not be seen.
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
There's either a big glitch in this web site, or my computer here at work is seriously screwed. Twice I've tried to check out the benchmarks, and both times, both in different places on the page, IE starts saying Action Canceled, and then about 60 IE windows start opening up on their own, all saying Action Canceled. Wierd stuff.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
Actually, they pioneered it with the original Voodoos. Ahh those were the days.
I keep meaning to take my pair of Voodoo2 cards and try SLIing them in a machine. I've never actually done that with them.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
Ehh... I have an old HP P-Pro200 Netserver. The onboard video died and as I couldnt use the PCI slot (thats where the processor card is) I had to find an EISA video card. Trying to get an EISA video card working without having a resource config file is, needless to say, quite a challenge.
My workstation is a P166 laptop with with an onboard TGUI9660 and a 2.1GB HD.
Don't even think about mentioning Java to me. grr...
What's this Submit thingy do?
Boy that must be a nice rig. Your EISA is at least a 32 bit bus, I am on an 8 bit bus. But you know, it does what I need it to.
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
Here is a link to the (very short) discussion thread on 2cpu.com regarding being slashdotted. To quote one post, "Which just goes to prove: the Slashdot effect is negated by competent administration (and SMP of course :-))". Here is a description of their web-server.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben