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."

Comments

Re: SMP-Oriented Video Card Round-up

[Dunark]

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.

s-video

[Mononoke]

The resolution of the s-video output was limited to 800x600...

I'll bet the s-video output was limited to 400 lines of NTSC video. There is no XXXbyXXX measurement of NTSC video.

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.

Video Card Reviews

[argmanah]

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?

Re:MX?

[htmlboy]

It's reasonably fast at what it does, so it will run Doom 3 at a decent framerate.

in a .plan update from a few months ago, john carmack said this:

Do not buy a GeForce4-MX for Doom.

Nvidia has really made a mess of the naming conventions here. I always thought it was bad enough that GF2 was just a speed bumped GF1, while GF3 had significant architectural improvements over GF2. I expected GF4 to be the speed bumped GF3, but calling the NV17 GF4-MX really sucks.

so a gf4mx will run doom, but it won't be pretty.

Re:That sucked!

[Arandir]

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!

Okay, time to burn some of my limitless karma...

Since when is one year ago ancient? Just because something is older than the last time you changed your underwear doesn't make it ancient. I'm getting pretty sick and tired of you munchkins running the video market. It makes it tough for the rest of us who want a solid stable video card instead of whatever the prepube crowd wants this week.

These aren't "crappy old cards", they're superb modern cards that have been around long enough to prove their merit. Maybe you should go read some reviews about last months cards. Or are those still too archaic for you? Maybe you need to wait till next week to read about this week's cards.

Some of us have better things to do than to buy a new video card everytime the industry says "jump". Some of us has dropped out of the constant upgrade rat race that you kids insist on playing.