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The Fastest Video Card You Can Buy
Mack writes "OCAddiction takes a look at the fastest video currently on the market. Here's what they say."With the release of Doom III pending, both ATI and nVidia are scrambling to show their very best product on game day, this we can count on. But as it stands now, the OCSystem Enhanced Radeon 9700 Pro Level III SE is simply the best card your money can buy today.""
Is here.
I suppose $459 price tag doesn't warrant the additional 10-15% performance increase...
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Marketing, basically.
The speed of the card and the speed of doom III won't be affected by when the cards are released, but if they're out there when DIII comes out, one of the first things mentioned in the hundreds of reviews of the game will be the best hardware available to run it on.
Getting a very good mention there puts the card in VERY good light in the mind of Mr & Ms Gamer.
first, their rating on resellerratings.com is pretty abysmal. basically, the product you get may or may not what's been advertised.
be doubly cautious of buying anything from them that isn't the $500 model. like any other chip the gpu on the radeon has some variations in their yields. as every overclocker knows, some just run faster than others out of the box. what these guys are doing is to try overclocking each card they get from ati, and sell those that will clock higher for significantly more money. throw a fancy heatpipe on it, and charge lots of cash. if you just buy the plain vanilla 9700 pro from them, you can be absolutely certain that it's the "bottom of the overclocking barrel". but don't take my word for it, check the user reviews from people that actually purchased it as opposed to models shipped for free to overclocking websites for promotional purposes.
..and worst drivers!
"With the release of Doom III pending, both ATI and nVidia are scrambling to show their very best product on game day"
Geez, this is quite rediculous. Anyone inferring that this card release has anything to do with Doom III really needs to quit accepting pocket-money from NVIDIA and ATI. id recently announced that Doom III won't be finished until 2004, meaning that there will be at least one, if not more iterations of graphics chips in the meantime.
This article is praising six-month old technology as if it were a godsend. Yes, there seems to be up to a 15 to 20% increase in performance over a generic 9700 Pro, but when compared to the advancements that will be made between now and when Doom III is actually released, I don't think that it makes a lot of difference.
The hype machine rolls on.
ATI has started providing a Linux driver with full 3d support. Unfortunately, it is closed source (Linux drivers for ATI have traditionally provided somewhat limited functionality but open source)
If Tenebrae catches on it may be the next hit game.
It has similar functions to Doom3 with dynamic lights etc. And it is GPL'd and based on the the Quake1 engine.
Tenebrae2, soon to be released, will even work with Quake3Arena maps.
Check out the screenshots!!!
as long as I live, no freaking way. I went through
a living hell with them over some ram. They sell
this ram called "Expeditious Gamer". It looks like
something fabulous. I read a few very positive
reviews on hardware sites. Whether they are paying
a fortune for false positive reviews, or cherry
picking samples for reviewers, I have no idea. All
I know is memtest for the first stick of pc2700 I
got showed more errors than the early 90's era
dumpster printer ram that the assholes at computer
shows sold. And that was at pc2100 speed because
the ram refused to run at pc2700. I figured it
might be a fluke and tried a second stick and
it actually tested WORSE than the first stick.
It was more than a little interesting that the
ram comes with copper heat spreaders installed
with stickers over the links that say your
warantee will be voided if you remove those
stickers. It's obviously so you won't remove
the heat spreaders so you can see what kind of
ram it actually is. After a ton of phonecalls that
were never answered, and emails that were never
replied too, I ended up sending them a bunch of
faxes. I got my RMA numbers, but was still charged
a restocking fee. So in the end, I was out 20
bucks and had absolutely nothing to show for it.
If you don't believe me, try reading the reviews
for this "company" here:
OCSystem's 3.77 rating out of 10
These guys are consumate rip-off artists. Do not
trust them. Also, seriously doubt the quality and
ethics of ANY company that gives ANY product of
theirs a positive review. There is a lot of
money changing hands for positive reviews.
I hope this helps someone. Read some of those
reviews. Read how they have seriously fucked a
lot of people out of a lot of money. After you
get screwed, order from a REAL company like
newegg.com or mwave.com that actually cares about
their customers. In closing, let me state
emphatically that you are OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND
if you order anything from these bastards.
Thank you.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
Your reasoning is sound, but then comes along the issue of minimum frame rate. Yes, your game might be averaging 101 fps, but there is a certain variance that accompanies an average. At times your game may run faster, and as well run slower at times. Even with an average this high, it's every easy to drop into mid-40's or upper-30's during a big cluster*uck.
When your screen is redrawing this slowly, it can make aiming more difficult, hence the need for increased graphics power.
i think the problem with today's technology lies in the bus; the agp bus can deliver the info to the card, but the scenes it renders is an order of magnitude larger in size (uncompressed) than the bus supports. 60 images of 1600x1200 at 32bit color per second across a bus, continiously forever... that's alot of data one way. more than the agp bus was designed to send back to the system. there was a slashdot article about this a ways back.
moox. for a new generation.
You can read from the frame buffer in OpenGL with glReadPixels() so you could render a scene with way beyond real-time complexity and then read it out and write it to disk.
However, if you are not constrained by speed, and are after quality, you are better off doing ray-tracing, which you do on a CPU.
Yes, there is graphics programs for video mixing post production and visual effects that use the OpenGL card to render output.
Here is one, particle illusion:
http://www.wondertouch.com/default.asp
There are also just starting to emerge programs for VJ's that use OpenGL or direct X to do realtime video mixing by treating movies as a texture stream mapped on polys.
Search www.audiovisualizers.com or www.vjcentral.com and you'll find lots of info.
FYI for those looking to buy this card, there seems to be a known issue with refresh rate distortion. I recently purchased the 9700 AIW but cannot seem to clear up this problem even with the work-a-rounds:
Google
Google
The firegl 4 is using the same chip as the ATI Radeon, it's different drivers and marketting.
The wildcat is definitely slower than all game cards. Only the driver was better in the past, and it supports OpenGL overlays well. These companies do not have the volume and money for the R&D cost that it takes to develop chips.
For the more expensive cards, they simply put more of their slower chips in one card. And you pay the higher price for that.
In other words, the 3D labs cards are not better, they simply are more expensive because they have many chips (2 to 4) duck-taped together. nVidia could do the same if they wanted, by making a card that has two geforce and split the screens like 3DLabs cards do. They would beat 3Dlabs (which own the Wildcat line now) simply by virtue of having their individual chips being much, much better.
This is a bit of a stab in the dark but you may want to check out that Tom's hardware article that was posted on /. yesterday. I didn't have the patience to click through the orgy of graphs he posts but from what I understand he benchmarked unreal with 65 different cpu's using modern hardware (e.g. radeon 9700). Those benchmarks may have just the answer you are looking for. Good luck!
It is not enough to succeed, others must fail. - Gore Vidal
You are wholly uninformed if you think that 3d gaming at 1600x1200 involves transferring every image at 60fps over the agp bus to the AGP card. Texture and bump maps are loaded in advance and updated regularly, model geometry is loaded, and then the camera position and position of the various models is updated for every frame. The scene is wholly rendered within the video card itself, stored in the memory of the video card, and sent out to the display without ever going back to the CPU or main memory. In fact, the main reason that AGP is helpful is to speed the loading of new objects into the card's memory from the system memory as you move through a scene or prevent a horrible bottleneck if you run short of memory on the card and have to actively use the main system memory (time to get a new card if this happens regularly).
Modern video cards get very little use of the CPU other than being told what to draw. It's quite easy to setup a scene that will bring the video card to it's knees, while leaving the CPU and AGP bus at less than 5% utilization. In newer games, the CPU is running AI, physics, user input and loading new models to memory.
I believe the article you are thinking about referred to the problem of rendering 3d scenes in real time at high resolution and recording the final stream to disk. The article stated that the rate AGP transfers data back to system memory is horrible relative to it's ability to take data in, and thus made gaming cards a poor solution for hollywood production needs.