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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
"With the release of Doom III pending, both ATI and nVidia are scrambling to show their very best product on game day"
Did the day of release of Quake 3 cause a surge in video card sales? O_o
I can understand Doom III being the standard benchmark, but why's opening day such a big deal?
Why do they sell this thing when winter is about to end? They're supposed to sell it by mid November last year... It would be a perfect time to play WarCraft 3 and keep yourself warm.
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Is here.
I suppose $459 price tag doesn't warrant the additional 10-15% performance increase...
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the best card your money can buy today
Shouldn't that say ALL of your money? Video cards nowadays are BLODDY expensive!
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
What is really amazing to me right now is that games are driving this huge industry of video card development. Both ATI and nVidia are scrambling to deliver faster frame rates pushing more and more triangles that appears to be developed for games. Now, I like a good game as much as the next guy, but I wonder if there is anyone out there that is using all of this triangle processing power for purposes other than games? Simulation of course was the original driving force for computer graphics with companies like Evans and Sutherland and more GPU power is great for moving around molecules and proteins as computers can model progressively larger structures, but I am wondering what novel uses out there are being implemented?
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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.
Modern GPU like R300 is very fast SIMD machine with great memory bandwidth. At last SIGGRAPH it was demonstrated doing realtime raytracing. You can harness its power to do video decoding, encoding and postprocessing or image filters. Audio processing seems doable too. I can also imagine you could use it for physical simulations. Its uses are unlimited.
I only wish that we had something to drive processors the way good games drive cards. You know, besides SETI@Home and corporate greed.
Gryftir
http://www.santacruzbynight.com/index.shtml Santa Cruz By Night Vampire Larp
that link almost crashed my machine. Way to much movement for one browser to handel :). Maybe if i bought the card it would work better eh?
Remember when you could veiw a web page on a 386?
(sigh)
We substituted the coffee Slashdot normally drinks with "Sandoz Crystals", Lets see if they notice the difference
I mean, really. With my GEForce 3 + P3/800 = I can play anything I want. Eg: Command & Conquer Generals, Unreal Tourney 2003, Warcraft 3, Battlefield 1942. Maybe not with all the options turned on and at a "mere" 800x600 - but still, so long as the game is fun... right?
Game makers know that the lower their system requirements the fewer copies they will sell - which I bet is why Counterstrike has been doing so well.
If you don't need one, don't buy one. Everybody has an addiction, and computers happen to be addictions for a lot of people.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It has been a while now since video cards became the driving element in box specs. HD's don't push....MB's don't push, and heaven knows USB2 isn't doing anything worth mentioning. High performance video cards push development of many other components. Much like a bigger engine in a car needs better handling and more fuel, etc.
The video card has been the alpha male in the component arena for some time, and I'm surprised to hear people proclaiming shock over a $500.00 price tag.
As usual some people would complain if their computer was free.
If you don't like it, don't buy it....if you can't afford it, don't whine...if something works better for you, smile and be happy.
"First you bitch about the baby, then you bitch 'cause we're not married!!"
I would wait until DOOM 3 is actually out. Test demo or full version. =)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Yep, its about "penis envy". A $100 or less card will run all the games you really want to play right now with essentially full quality (ok, so you might not be able to turn on every performance killing feature from the driver control panel but the increase in visual detail is negligible). Also, even when games do come out that finally use the power of a card more powerful than you have, they may not be games you really want to play. Take Unreal 2, for instance. While not a "bad" game per say...it was good enough for me to finish it...it certainly wasn't worth spending money on a video card to play it, if I didn't already have one. It offerred nothing new, basically the sterile non-interactive environments of Quake 2 (all you can do is shoot monsters and flip levers, and every lever must be flipped. Dialogue makes no difference, characters die in the plot but you cannot save any of them) dressed up with better graphics. I want more to DO in the game, like Deus Ex had. For instance, in the game there's an entire level of the inside of your spaceship that gets revisited periodically. You can wander around, even going into maintenance sections. But you cannot touch or interact with the environment in any way! Nothing you say to characters makes even the slightest bit of difference, and you cannot do anything but open doors.
Its rare that a game comes out that both has system destroying graphics prompting an upgrade AND is actually a game you want to play. While Doom 3 may look good, it is yet to be seen whether its even as good as half life single player. Also, its unlikely it comes even close to a classic like Battlefield 1942 or Half-Life mods for multiplayer.
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
Seriously, its ridiculous.
30 some posts, a dozen complaints.
People who are car aficionados will glady throw down 12,000$ to turbo their cars or 130,000$ for a ferrari. I know people with multi-million dollar homes and the house is all to themselves. Is it crazy to pay 800$ for a PDA when you can get one that does the same for 99$?
If people have the money then let them spend it on what THEY want and quit complaining because YOU have a problem with it. If you think it's too much money, then it's not for you.
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
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?
...they have terrible resellerratings. Also, the card ships with a nice and quiet Zalman heatpipe, which, though quiet as the fanless nature of it implies, probably cuts the life of the card to a year or so. I'm sure anything close to the heatsink is in serious danger of melting (be careful of PCI cards around it). Besides, this isn't anything you couldn't do with a retail ATI 9700 Pro which isn't very loud in the first place.
"OCSystem Enhanced Radeon 9700 Pro Level III SE"
This is too good to resist. They must've hired some Japanese marketers or something for this card. I can't imagine the NEXT release:
OCsystem Super Hyper Mega Ultra Happy Enhanced Radeon 9700 Expert Pro Level IVc SE XP 2.0 Edition
Is it too hard to simply notch up the model number by a few points?! Sheesh!
They had to pay the guy who named the thing by the word.
KFG
Wasn't there a test a while back that shows the AGP bus has little bandwidth back to the CPU?
The fact that the AGP bus was always intended as a one-way street will limit the options avalible to hackers.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
...the person who wrote the article is clearly a long-time /. regular.
...the GeForce FX, which is the fastest card you CAN'T buy!
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.
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.
"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.
Winter 2010: With Glowing Hearts
I don't mean to take my frustrations out on the poster, as this is a more general complaint. Is it "cool" to use words like "winsucks" and "winblows"? I have problems with MSFT too, but ff you're trying to get a point across, say something useful instead of resorting to childish cheap shots.
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!'
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)
A $10 FM radio will give you all the sound you need. Sure, fancy stereos have lots of buttons and knobs to twiddle, but the difference in sound quality is negligible--especially since all we really do with our sound systems is listen to talk radio, right?
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!!!
Is this a vid card or an aircraft carrier??? Good god thats huge!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The original posting being from an article in OCAddiction? Listen, I get my news for nerds from nerds, not OxyContin Addicts.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
Calling the card "OCSystem Enhanced Radeon 9700 Pro Level III SE" is certainly bucking the trend in video card naming.
Consider various past offerings: ATI Rage, Rage Fury, TNT, TNT2, Annihilator, 3D Blaster Annihilator, S3 Savage, etc.
We're kind of lucky the OER9700PL3SE wasn't called something like the Violator 3D Ultra Face Blaster Nuke Domination Rip-You-A-New-One 9700.
Any real geek knows that if it's not rackmounted, it's just a temporary solution.
Therefore, I think I'll wait until someone comes out with a 3U rackmount video "card" with its own dual hot-swap power supply and quadruple redundant cooling fans, linked to the AGP bus with a kind of fibre channel setup.
Let the LAN parties come to me, dammit!
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...
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
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.
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.