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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."
We're not all rich momma's boys, you know. I'm still running a Ti4400, and I consider it to be very good :)
GeForce3 Ti440! Luxury, luxury! And you call him a rich momma's boy?
I've only got a $50 GeForce2 MX for crap's sake!
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!)
"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.
I just spent the last two weeks to get the TV out on an ATI All-In-Wonder Pro 8mb AGP (old :) to work under Linux (which incidentily is pretty bad, though it was great under windows), and it was a major pain. To get it to work I have to run a driver from the GATOS project that is from their CVS, patch it heavily so it supports things like XV, and run it on a bleeding edge copy of XFree just to get the semi-crudy TV out to work. It's the worst time I've ever had getting X to work correctly in years and years. ATI seems to think they support Linux, but they don't really do anything, as far as I can tell. They won't even tell people how their cards from 5 years ago work so those can be made to work flawlessly, even though they make no money off them at all. nVidia may not have opensource drivers, but their closed source driver works great. 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.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
Any message that suggests THG is insightful, reliable or even remotely credible deserves a +5, Funny.
RMN
~~~
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..