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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."
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.
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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
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
Bits??? you have bits??? Why in my day we only had one bit, and it was a 0! kids....
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.
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
"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.
in a
so a gf4mx will run doom, but it won't be pretty.
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
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.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
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..