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

Why?

[floamy]

Why only the older video cards no 9700pro/gffx?

Re:Why?

[403Forbidden]

We're not all rich momma's boys, you know. I'm still running a Ti4400, and I consider it to be very good :)

Re:Why?

[teamhasnoi]

I have a 4 meg Voodoo, and a 4 meg S3.

Ha! My cards SUXXORS the most!

Re:Why?

[sould]

*I* have to read the bits of the bus myself & manually fire off the CRT laser.

You guys with your fancy-schmancy video cards indeed!

Re:Why?

[b96miata]

Bits??? you have bits??? Why in my day we only had one bit, and it was a 0! kids....

Re:Why?

[be-fan]

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...

Beating boredom

[blurfus]

From the site

If you're bored and feel like sifting through 20 pages of analysis,click here

However, if you are really bored or at work, click here

Worst quote ever in the Graphics section

[teamhasnoi]

Also known for his tremendously anal and picky nature...

That's a bad combo if you're going to sit down and review graphics cards...

Re:Worst quote ever in the Graphics section

[Edgewize]

Also known for his tremendously anal and picky
nature...

That's a bad combo if you're going to sit down and review graphics cards...

Yeah, no kidding. I hope he washes his hands.

Steve Jobs Is My Cousin

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

Hmm, my good ol' Voodoo 3 isn't listed. Maybe it's time to upgrade?

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.

Good to see

[amigaluvr]

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

Re:Good to see

[threephaseboy]

Television is a lesser technology than say a trinitron or LCD monitor,

I'm sorry, what was that? I could'nt hear you over my trinitron TV exploding into a puff of logic.

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.

Re:s-video

[Jeff DeMaagd]

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%.

Freak

[vandel405]

Anyone else notice that they link to slashdot with the word "Freak" in the svideo round up?

Repeal the story!

Re:Interesting mix

[mvdw]

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.

Errr, that was the whole point - to look at video cards from a non-gamers point of view. Not all of us use our systems for gaming, you know.

If you want gaming reviews, go to a gaming site...

Quality of S-video outputs

[McQuaid]

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?

Re:Quality of S-video outputs

[MBCook]

A standard NTSC TV only has 525 lines or so (I think it's 625 for PAL), but that includes the VBI (where closed caption stuff is sent, among other things, IIRC). So if your watching DVDs using some software DVD player, then what's going on is this:

1. DVD Video is usually about 480 lines high (I think)
2. This gets convered to 600 or 768 or some other resolution for display on the monitor
3. The TV-Out hardware has to take that number, and turn it back into the resolution of the TV, whatever that may exactly be

So basically the problem is that you're blowing it up, then shrinking it back down, and you lose a little quality each time.

Now if your card is good (or if you have a hardware DVD only card like a ReelMagic (great cards)) then things are different. When you use the TV out on such cards (or if a normal card can put the DVD out directly to the TV skipping the middle) then you only have one scaling, the same scaling that a DVD player would do. This gives you a much better picture. My ReelMagic Hollywood+ rivals most standard DVD players (up to about $150 maybe?) in my eyes.

So basically the problem is that it's much easier (I think) to simply decode the DVD onto the framebuffer and output that (the first method) than to bypass the framebuffer and output directly to the TV (the second method). And let's face it, while it was great to watch DVDs on your PC and hook it to your TV years ago, you can now get a decent new DVD player for under $80, so it's not a feature in high demand.

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:Interesting mix

[WiPEOUT]

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.

Dual Head on Linux

[Soko]

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

Re:Dual Head on Linux

[MBCook]

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.

MX?

[dolo666]

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. :)

Re:MX?

[Edgewize]

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.

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.

Ati is a *lot* better in 2003

[Whitecloud]

While the author qualifies his conclusion with "Unfortunately, due to the rather long, and, I'm afraid, unavoidable delays in publishing this article...The video card market has simply advanced too far", he then goes on to say "On the other end of the spectrum, there's the erratic performance of the ATi cards. Whether it they were limping along behind even the G550 in Solidworks, or taking 75% performance hits with dualhead enabled in many of the SPECviewperf tests, we were left shaking our heads. There's no denying that ATi's drivers have come a long way in the past few years, but it seems as if they have yet to reach nVidia's level. "

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.

zerg

[Lord Omlette]

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 :(

Re:zerg

[Jim_2CPU]

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)

That sucked!

[Lurgen]

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!)

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.

From the article

[sawilson]

"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.

Clearly, he's been here before

[The Tyro]

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!)

SMP Video? Must be the 3Dfx Voodoo2 SLI!

[-tji]

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!

http://www.hwupgrade.com/skvideo/voodoo2_sli.htm l

This prooves their moto:

[AntiBasic]

Two cpus are better than one! The box is in the middle of the slashdot-effect and is handling like a champ.

What about FireGL?

[qa'lth]

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.

Re:read the article asshole

[Lurgen]

I read the article you fool.

Q3 featured strongly in their list of benchmarks, especially when they measured the impact of anti-aliasing and dual-head setups.

2D performance is almost irrelevant, and if you understood most of their benchmarks you'd know that despite them not being 3D games, they were still mostly 3D related.

Appropriate moderation

[Rui del-Negro]

Any message that suggests THG is insightful, reliable or even remotely credible deserves a +5, Funny.

RMN
~~~

Lucky bastard

[GunFodder]

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.

What about video fidelity?

[adolf]

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.]