Slashdot Mirror
Tom's 46 Video Card Roundup
Hoagie writes "Tom's Hardware has posted (12/29) a huge 46 video card roundup. Included are a few generations of nVidia and ATI chipsets. Along with the newcomers/return of XTI, Parhelia, and S3."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
My GeForce2MX (64 MB) runs Max Payne 2 and Tron 2.0 reasonably well. Why should I upgrade?
HAD
Obviously, the desktop cards are always going to be ahead of the curve considerably, but does the 4200GO perform similar to the 4200 cards? For everything I do, this seems to be a pretty solid card, but I always wonder what kind of power I am giving up by going to a laptop only setup.
A bit off the subject, but interesting news for sure:
MPlayer has XVMC support (with mpeg1/2). That means any videocard, with an XF86 driver that supports XVMC, can now do MPEG1/MPEG2 playback entirely on the card's processor, so no CPU load at all.
NVidia's binary drivers support it on the Geforce4, and Intel 810/815 cards have open source X drivers that support it as well. ATI's driver don't support XVMC just yet, even though the hardware has the capability.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The GF4 Ti4600 comes out at or near the top of their "Fbucks" rating, which is fps/$. They show a price of $65 for the card, based on what bizrate.com reports. If you go to bizrate.com and look at the Ti4600's available it does appear there are some for $55-65.
If you dig a little deeper and follow the link for the Jaton 3DForce4 Ti4600 for $54 you'll find all the retailers listed are actually selling the MX440, a lesser card.
If you follow an $89 link (still a great price) you'll find half.com is offering the PNY Verto GEFORCE4 TI 4600 for that price (according to bizrate). Click the link to half.com and hey! you can get a new one for $319 or a used one for $180. No $89.
While I respect Tom's hardware I think fact checking is a much larger task in these bulk reviews and is something they need to pay a little more attention to.
You are the only one.
Recent advances in video card technology may not be blatantly obvious from the gaming side, although certainly the difference between half-life 2 and half-life will make all of that clear.
The real changes are from the programming side. Pixel and vertex shaders allow a programmer to use the hardware in un-foreseen ways, unlike the fixed-pipeline cards of the past. A lot of graphics programming on the fixed pipeline (GF1) came down to playing with parameters that OpenGL or Direct3D would expose to you -- as in how to look up textures, how to transform your geometry, etc. You say the GF2 came out, and it was "boring". In fact, it's the first generation of slightly programmable video hardware, because it supported hardware bump mapping -- a huge feature used by every modern game, although at the time it was still playing with pre-existing settings.
Nowadays (since the geforce3), a programmer can invent his own parameters to tweak -- a huge step. You say things "dissipated" after that -- completely untrue! With every new generation of video card, the vertex and fragment programs can be longer and more complicated. The next-generation games (hl2, doom3) already use all of this technology, and next-generation consoles (xb2, gc2, ps3) will undoubtedly integrate all of it.
-S
When will VGA board makers will compete by price
They already do. Both nVidia and ATI have high end and low end chipsets, and they're very price competitive. They also segment them for sub-$100, sub-$200, and high-end (for which the price limit keeps going up).
not for hundreds of FPS that no one uses (because they're over humam eyes limits)
I'm sorry you have such poor eyesight. Have you considered seeing a doctor about it? I doubt they can do anything though -- it's probably neurological. Did you stare into the sun as a child?
I wish people would quit spouting out the crap about "above human eye limits". There is no such thing. We don't know what the maximum frame rate that the eye can see is. Don't go talking about movies or TV -- they're not the same. All video capture methods (be it film or digital) capture motion blur, which our brains happily interpret when shown at a somewhat adequate frame rate. But that doesn't help a bit for somethings -- like fast pans (move the camera horizontally). Throw in some vertical definition (like, oh say, a white picket fence) and you'll wind up with a headache because what comes out on video does not look good. It's doubtful that it even looks like a white picket fence.
Games don't render motion blur (3Dfx was working on this when they went tits up, but nobody has revived the work -- it wasn't well received at the time either). They render individual frames with static content. You CAN tell the difference between 30 fps and 60 fps. You can tell the difference between 60 fps and 120 fps too.
And, of course, this doesn't address the minor issue that what the card is rendering still isn't photorealistic. Or truely 3D. When we get to ~300 fps of photorealistic 3D holograms then we can start talking about where to go next.
Hey, go check out the benchmarks for the high end cards on HL2 or people's impressions of Doom3. IIRC, none of the cards were breaking 60 fps in HL2 at 1024x768. And those weren't even in intense firefights.