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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.""
This is why I'm still playing games like Steel Beasts, Civ III, Counterstrike and Combat Mission. I don't need to spend ludicrous amounts of cash.
Falcon 4.0 for life, yo
I mean, honestly. I used to overclock because a 300MHz CPU just wasn't enough. I mean, it helps that a celeron 300A was so damn easy too - but now that they are getting better with speed-sorting, and things are getting so fast and cheap, I really sees no need and it's not worth the trouble for that 10% increase.
Heck, I play UT2k3 on my LAPTOP, which is a measly 1GHz with 64M video ram.
A 459 video card just so I can pluck down another 70 dollars for D3 collector's edition just seems unjustified when you can get a whole computer for that much (I'd know since I GOT ONE for about 400 - and not even the walmart Lindows ones either - 1.8P4; half gig RAM, etc).
I mean, this, yes *THIS* is the true definiton of compensating for something, because there is absolutely no need for it. (especially since the game isn't even out yet). It's like buying a Ferrari and let it sit in a garage for half a year before I get a driver's license. - or possibly a more adequate analogy is buying a same car to drive in the parking lot for half a year before they build a road on which I can properly have fun with it.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Did the day of release of Quake 3 cause a surge in video card sales? O_o
No it didn't, but Doom 3 'requires' graphical processing power far ahead of the current average users graphics card, Quake 3 was pushing the boundrys but not nearly as hard.
It's not just that Doom 3 will/may be the benchmark for the next few years it's that a lot of games are going to be released using its engine, so buying a card that can run Doom 3 sweet now means you're pretty much set for the next generation of games produced using the D3 engine.
I did research under a professor who specializes in bioinfomatics. One particular goal of his research group is in visualization. Specifically, how the f*** do you graphically represent gigabytes of genetic data in a meaningful way? And how do you do it so that you can get useful information from it, like repeated patterns and whatnot?
The answer to the above is to do it in 3-D. One of the (mad-skilled, overachieving, indian) grad students wrote a program which renders DNA base sequences into a 2D plane, and then looks for important sequences (such as functional groups). When it finds one, it raises it out of the plane. All of this could be shown on our ImmersaDesk, but not everyone has an SGI Onyx. For that project, having a lot of processing power on individual PCs was a life-saver.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
It's like buying a Ferrari and let it sit in a garage for half a year before I get a driver's license
Maybe not with an actual Ferrari, but 13 years ago, I collected 300 music CDs before I got around to actually buying a CD player. I was gonna do it when I had 50 of them, but I kept procrastinating. I couldn't bear to part with my much listened to 8-track collection and player.
But regarding the ATI, well Papyrus has put out their last game in the series, NASCAR Racing 2003 Season. The developers claim (to enhance the staying power of the title) they threw in more GPU intensive graphics options than usual, that there isn't a system available at the moment that can run the game with every option turned on to the max. I believe it, I can't turn on 2/3 of the options with my Athlon 1 gHz/Ti200 128MB combo.
That's why I'm still playing NetHack...well that and because it's still the best game out there.
Seriously though, can these super cards be used for anything other than the generation of display output? As they are doing so much 3D processing so much faster than any CPU can, I'd like to see the ability to use these GPU's as coprocessors for rendering images back to software/files rather than just to display output. Something like using it as a hardware accelerator for POV-Ray or Renderman. Does anybody have any insight into potential non-traditional uses of these super cards?
Is it possible to use the processing power of these super graphics cards for math computations? They use simd instructions. I would think they could compete with regular CPU's in floating point.
Considering the marketing dollars spent on consoles (X Box, PS2 etc.), not to mention the rental availability of games for these (but not for PCs) it strikes me as odd that so much effort goes essentially to the PC Gaming field when there must be similarly valuable enhancements geared to home, business, digital video, mobile users etc. Myself, I toggle between an array of different video adapters via KVM switch, and in general use other than games, cannot visually tell the difference between a Radeon7000 and Radeon9700 (always 1280x1024x32). There is so much horsepower on these top cards we ought to see (visually observe without benchmark hair-splitting) the results in a wider range of everyday uses. What I would like to see the video card manufacturers deliver: 1. Easy driver upgrades (Hint ATI...you guys ever let Windows Update update your drivers??? ) 2. Wider range of screen sizing/positioning options in driver utility.(Big help for KVM users) 3. Better TV output adjustment options and ability to read the info in the broadcast overscan areas (even the ATI AIW8500DV delivers a poor screen geometry at the edges compared to other signal sources...tuner is great though) 4. Incorporate monitor .inf in driver utility in an editable format to allow closer match than with the typical "Default Monitor" Perhaps "User Settings? Let user set min/max refresh parameters from owners manual or even a series of tested configs such as GAME, PHOTO COLOR, TEXT, SPREADSHEET which can be toggled between.
5. Continuous micro-adjustable refresh rate slide bar to optimize flicker reduction (no Apply necessary until you hit the one you want to keep)
6. Landscape/Portrait/Invert/Rotate/Mirror settings
7. Color calibrator hardware option (Print out a test pic on your color printer, scan corresponding paper and screen areas and make screen reflect what your printer is going to generate)
8. DVD direct-connect mode...ought to be able to watch a skip-free DVD on a $300 card if you can on a $45 Apex DVD player..we already plug the optical drives to the sound cards)
9. A new connector that doesn't stick out so far (Gotta love the size of those DVI-Analog adapters)
10. Temperature monitoring output (either to a front panel display or to an unused chassis fan header on the mobo)
11. Despite all my wishes for more features, I'd love a huge crate of these cards to fall off a truck in front of my house!'
This is more of a question out of ignorance, so please bear with me: The article compares the R9700 Pro to the OCS R9700 Pro Level3 SE with Unreal Tournament 2003. At 1600x1200, the results recorded were 81 and 101 FPS, respectively, higher with lower resolutions.
And then there's your monitor... unless you want to get quite spendy, there aren't many monitors that does 85Hz+ at 1600x1200.
May be I am completely wrong, but I thought the "refresh rate" of a monitor refers to how many times a second the screen is redrawn from top to bottom.
So, given my ficticious monitor can go 85Hz at 1600x1200, does it matter if my card dishes out 101fps all day long?
Yes - but with your TV at sub-30FPS - are you controlling the display in any way? Games at 30FPS are noticeably choppy to the average twitch gamer - we can process visual input and turn it into mouse output at a rate higher than 30FPS, so to a point - increased framerate = faster reaction time.
Remember 6 years ago when ATI was just another company marketing driver promises that never happened? Does anyone remember the ATI RAGE line of products?
ATI Rage
ATI Rage II
ATI Rage II+DVD
ATI 3D Rage
ATI 3D Rage Pro
ATI 3D Pro Turbo
ATI 3D Pro Turbo + PC2TV
ATI NimbleCannuxFuckfest
Don't receive this as flamebait...i'm watering my pink flamingos as I dictate this to my garden gnome...
Now that ATI is king of the hill, we will see nothing but crappy products from now on. Why? Because ATI has clearly scaled the Radeon to the maximum potential and we will now hear all kinds of product releases with exaggerated features masked under marketing hype and the same stretch-marked graphics technology...for a whole 'nother product lifecycle because nVidia its only competitor is having difficulty competing on *feature-biproduct-waste*. Why do we need unnecessary framerate and why haven't we seen any awesome low-power full-featured graphics chipsets? Speaking of HIGH-power, nVidia is obviously meeting the ceiling of their design too; the technology scales by power usage: pump-up the power, sell it as an *advanced* product.
A real innovation would be somthing as low-power and with clever drivers (PowerVR's Kyro2) that yields highest performance (ATI's Radeon) with most precision (nVidia's GeForceFX). Yes, here comes 3DLabs' VPU...Oh, and look...3DLabs continues its legacy as the cadillac of graphics accelerators by-their graphics accelerator weighing as much and is equal in length to: a CADILLAC!
The world has no shame...give me efficient power usage or give me death. Just because some of us are on a nuclear reactor doesn't mean we need to operate at full capacity of the nuclear reactor.
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
Anyone notice that this article is more of a plug than anything else? Also, the poster is mack@ocaddiction.com (OCSystem's reviewer and parent company).
it's so sloppy that it had to be accidental
yeah yeah i know, flamebait. but i thought it should be said.
I find it interesting that mack@ocaddiction.com
is the person that submitted this story. Makes you
wonder what ocaddiction gets out of it. I find it
interesting that ocaddiction appears to have a lot
of very positive gushing reviews of ocsystem
products, including claiming they are using
the "Expeditious Gamer" line of ram in some of
their test systems. I "personally" would take about
anything that ocaddiction has to say about hardware
with a grain of salt at this point. YMMV
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
Since when does bleeding edge equate to 'best'? Perhaps 'buggiest' or 'shortest life span'. I am an owner of a Radeon 9700 Pro and the bugs are yet to be worked out of this card and the AGP 8x implementation.... so overclocking it will make it better?
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
Anyone have any reccomendations?
If I'm correct the Amiga was able to use its graphics unit for computing. I think it was a hack or something that coders did. I read once about a sound dsp used for manipulating graphics on the amiga. You know add fancy effects to the image.
Just saying it has been done before. To bad all that knowledge is getting lost now.
-- I don't buy it, I grow it.