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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."
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.
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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
Worse yet, a lot of cards by default won't let you use the overscan area on the s-video output, so if you have a small overscan margin, the picture is surrounded by a huge black border, and the image has some downscale blurring even on a 640x480 setting that I don't appreciate.
I understand that it is to make sure that the entire desktop fits a typical screen, I would like to have easy access to how it is set. I actually try to see as much of the actual video signal as I can so I've adjusted my overscan to about 1%.
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?
As the site's name implies, the review is oriented towards examining the video cards on current SMP (two-CPU) systems.
There's hundreds of non-SMP reviews out there, but here's one that's useful for those among us that have duals. You know, to actually do things as well as play games, to be able to really multitask, and to develop for SMP (read: server) environments. Add improved stability, and you've got a case for improved productivity despite the increased cost.
It's just as shame they didn't include the high-end cards.
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
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.
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Heh. I could afford something faster. I just don't feel the need because I game about once a year at this point in my life. If I feel like gaming, I use the Mobile Radeon in my laptop. (I wish I was joking, but I'm not)
The Geforce 4 MX isn't really a Geforce 4 at all. In fact, it isn't even a Geforce 3. It has a core very similar to the Geforce 2 series, with only fixed-function pipelines. In other words, it is a DirectX 8.0 part and cannot run programs that rely on vertex programs or pixel shaders. It can't do any of the really cool things that programmable pipeline cards can, like per-pixel environment reflection mapping, motion blur, or special lighting effects (saturation/desaturation, color warping, etc).
It's reasonably fast at what it does, so it will run Doom 3 at a decent framerate. But it doesn't support the expected features for a card of its generation, so it will be running at low detail with no special effects.
Two cpus are better than one! The box is in the middle of the slashdot-effect and is handling like a champ.
I really wish people would stop making jabs at people who need CPU power. Yes, I shell out a couple of thousand every few years to keep my hardware up to date. But I'm an engineering major that needs to run CAD software, I do scientific computing projects for work, run Mathematica for school, and my hobbies include C++ programming (gcc eats my CPU alive) and 3D modeling. I don't even do gaming, and I still find myself needing more CPU. Hardware freaks aren't all hardcore Quake'ers you know...
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