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."

Comments

So?

[rafael_es_son]

My GeForce2MX (64 MB) runs Max Payne 2 and Tron 2.0 reasonably well. Why should I upgrade?

Re:So?

[Trashman]

Simple answer: If your current hardware does what you want acceptably, then there's no need to upgrade.

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

My Atari VCS runs asteroids and lunar lander reasonably well. Why should I upgrade?

Re:So?

[rafael_es_son]

"Have you ever seen one of those robosweepers, which you link as "useless technology", work? I have, and it seemed to work rather well (somewhat to my surprise). How is it useless to have an autonomous device clean my floors? Am I wrong for wanting clean floors? I mean, they are my floors, but I don't particularly enjoy spending my (limited) time cleaning them. I might (but haven't) spend some of my (less limited) money to have a device that cleans them for me. Your author (and presumably you as well) somehow think that's a bad thing, and I don't understand why."

If you are content with current, high-quality "robosweep" technology, be my guest. For the time being, and for hygiene's (and my also-limited time's) sake, I preffer to contract human cleaning services.

From my perspective, you have missed the whole fiddling with the parts, literally, while reading this essay. Honestly, do you need two-speed power windows on your car? I cannot find any refference to what you propose.

My point is that too many people consume products with features/performance they don't really need, won't use or simply won't make a difference proportional to the amount of capital invested. If you need get a new video card, don't let me stop you. Cheers mate!

Wow, 46 video cards at Tom's!

[sharkey]

At an estimated 7 pages per card, plus 4 pages of exposition on the front and 3 on the back, plus a big chart: a whopping 330 pages of ads estimated! Go Tom!

Prices

[Via_Patrino]

I think those benchmarks would have prices in, the boards would look much less atractive :)

When will VGA board makers will compete by price, like AMD started to do few years ago and not for hundreds of FPS that no one uses (because they're over humam eyes limits)?

Re:Prices

[Tim C]

It probably doesn't make a great deal of difference if a card can "only" run Q3 at 200fps rather 300.

The card that can run it at 300fps, though, stands a better chance of running a new game at an acceptable frame rate than the slower card does. That's the point, really - chances are if you're a gamer, the last card you bought was benchmarked against Q3, so when shopping for a new one, you can do some comparisons based on that. Of course, the system used now is completely different, so you can't really compare, but I digress...

The point is that a card that can run, say, UT2k3 at high settings at 50+fps is going to have no problems with Q3. One that only gets 50fps on Q3, though, is probably going to struggle on UT2k3 or similar. The problem is not so much the card manufacturers, as the tests used to benchmark the cards; Q3 really ought to have been retired long ago, imho.

Re:Prices

[Zathrus]

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.

Fbucks

[Anonymous Coward]

That Fbucks chart at the end is fantastic, I hope they make extensive use of it in the future.

But be careful when you type Fbucks!

long in the tooth

[GerbilSocks]

6 years ago I could get excited about these roundups but lately, it's becoming a real yawn. Who cares anymore? Fine, give me a -100 flamebait, but I although I hardly play games now that I'm in my late teens, my old nVidia GEFORCE 2mx with 32MB RAM is more than enough for my daily computing. My enthusiam for video 3d accelerators died about the same time as 3dfx.

Why u/g the GX card, just

[Anonymous Coward]

go out and buy a Dell with an ATi 9800 Pro in it.

That's what I did. Buying a full machine from a supplier impacted on the price of the LCD screen and the GFX card enough to make it worthwhile. The reason it's a Dell is cos they seem to be the only mainstream supplier that gives you a decent choice over the matter. There's no way I'd ever buy a GFX card for 250 or an LCD for 500, but when I can get them inclusive in a PC for 1000, that's too much of a bargain to pass over.

Generally, I find I can get through a PC every 2-3 years. If I'm buying machines with cutting edge stuff in them, why should I ever need to buy a GFX card upgrade? I'll just wait that extra 6-12 months and upgrade the whole caboodle...

Re:Why u/g the GX card, just

[RicoX9]

One thing that you should be aware of is that you are NOT (usually) getting the same 9800 Pro that you'd get from ATI.

Dell has the power to bulk order graphics cards to thier own specifications. They can say "leave off this IC" or "use this cheaper (ie slower) memory". It is standard practice to do this. They may actually just license the design and have them built by their own fabrication contractors using their modifications to cut costs.

Either way, it is RARELY the same card. You are frequently limited to using Dell drivers, not ATI drivers, as they've modified the firmware somehow.

I would be very wary of doing this as a method to acquire a cheaper card. I have found that the old adage "You get what you pay for" is almost always true in the computer world.

Re:Why u/g the GX card, just

[juhaz]

You may have a decent job with a decent salary, but some of us are still students.

I'd get distressed by a mere thought of spending thousands for new Dell if I can upgrade a few years old system for 400e or so to a relatively modern beast. That's helluva lot of beer and pizza.

And some people may actually like the very tinkering and tweaking you're so full of.

The problem with this super-duper video boards

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

is that normal ones, the cheapo ones witl 8M of ram and no 3D-XYZ and hyper-acme rendering, that work just dandy for word processing, spreadsheeting and other forms of work (oh the dirty word!), are disappearing.

Pricewise, that's not a problem in itself, I don't care if I have a super vidboard for dirt cheap and underuse it, but with all those bells and whistles that I won't use, manufacturers don't release their specs anymore, and so I have to install shitty binary drivers instead of using kernel-compiled ones.

In short, with my old Matrox Millenium, I could do 1600x1200x16 just like I do now, but I didn't have to fight with the nVidia drivers that belch on me each time I change something with libc, modutils or the kernel. And I suppose I could try out 2.6, while with the proprietary driver, I can't.

I reckon there should be a market for sub-$10 basic video cards with open specs, for those who care more about low-cost, driver support and not having headaches to do real work, than playing games.

Re:The problem with this super-duper video boards

[juhaz]

I'm not sure where did you got the idea that nVidia cards need their binary drivers if you only do 2d - because they don't. Never (or at least for a loooong time) have.

And the same is probably true for ATI, even though I'm not quite as sure because lack of first hand experience.

One of the reasons I got an X-Box...

[Channard]

.. was that working with PCs every day, coupled with the hassle of upgrading my own PC to play the latest games got on my nerves. Currently, my PC does all I want it to do - can be used to go on the internet, play most older games, and so forth. I may upgrade at some point when I'm not dealing with PCs every day, but at the moment I prefer just being able to get a game, slap it in my console and know it'll run at a decent rate.

Is it me or...

[JFMulder]

... has video card technology have become pretty much uninterresting in the last 1 or 2 years. I mean, I can remember being in awe when the first GeForce came out, reading everything about what made it great and how it worked. It introduced us to a whole new world of possibilities. Then came the GF2, boring. GF3 raised my interest for a while with it's vertex and fragment shaders, but it dissipated pretty quick. Then GF4 and GF5 FX. I don't even look at card comparisons anymore. It's been a while since I've been anticipating new video card technology. Am I the only one?

Re:Is it me or...

[sklib]

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.

Re:0 FPS?

[knightPhlight]

Obviously, you failed to read the story but posted as soon as you had the chance. Would you happen to be a Slashdot editor in training?

Laptop Video Cards

[AssClown2520]

It would be nice to see a review of this extent at least mention a few laptop video cards. Laptops video cards have really progressed, but how do they compare to their desktop counterparts?

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.

Re:0 FPS?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

I noticed there were about three cards that produced 0fps in a number of the games tested. Isn't that just a little bit low-quality?

You can view gorgeous hi-res truecolor high-quality tiffs at 0 fps ...

Don't waste your money

[MicroBerto]

The biggest mistake I ever made when building a new computer was buying a $300 graphics card. Unless you game 24 hours a day, don't waste your money.

Instead, money is best sunk in a good set of speakers and monitor -- these things depreciate way less. Along with that $300 graphics card, I also bought a 19" Sony monitor and Klipsch Promedia v400 speakers with my athlon 550 back in dec 99 (yep, still using it!). While that graphics card has long been in the graveyard, the speakers and monitor are still rockin along.

My graphics card, however, was a 2nd rate GeForce2 for about 60 dollars that performs excellently for what I do.

My opinion? Look for a good price gap on graphics cards and processors, and go with something a bit older than the newest. But splurge on the stuff that won't depreciate as quickly.... unless you game 24 hours a day.

Read the article!

[poge]

He does include prices - and the last two pages of the article include a comparison of FPS per dollar - much more useful than a straight performance comparison, IMHO...

Toms is a stinking sales site anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

When I want facts on graphics, I go to beyond3d.

P.S. NV3x architectures can't do everything in 8x1 mode. Has to drop to 4 ops/clock with color operations.

A bit off-subject...

[evilviper]

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.

Flawed results

[Call Me Black Cloud]

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.

Underappreciated Value Card - Radeon 9800

[TrollBridge]

I don't know about you guys, but I thought that at ~$140, the Radeon 9800 scored pretty well for such a reasonably priced card. That was the first non-NVIDIA card I've bought since '99, and believe me it's worth every penny. No need to spend $400 on the PRO models or the latest NVIDIA offering. Ya can't beat the price/performance of the 9800, IMHO!

Re:Underappreciated Value Card - Radeon 9800

[faust13]

Most likely, you have the Radeon 9800 SE, which is grossly underpowered-marketing-named-it-to-cause-confusion video card. There is however, a real Radeon 9800, built only by ATI, which was never priced below $200. The real Radeon 9800 was killed by ATI because it presented too much threat to their Pro lines. The Radeon 9800 SE is priced in the $120 - $160 range.

Interesting comparison at bottom

[Millbuddah]

The fbucks feature was pretty interesting to me. Being able to see just how much performance you can get for the price for all these cards definitely helps to narrow the field somewhat. These newer cards just don't seem to be worth the money they're asking for if that's all the performance you'll get, not counting the quality cut from not enabling all the latest "features" like FSAA and Anisotropic filtering.

Re:Matrox

[jandrese]

The Parhelia isn't a gamers card though. It's optimized for professional 3D uses (whatever those are). That's what Matrox claims at least.

Newcomer... Prahelia

[faust13]

Um, the Prahelia is no newcomer it's been on the market for well over a year.

Re:What I'm sick of

[karnal]

What are you trying to do with the "extra" monitors?

I know that when I enable dualhead on my machine, you specify a "primary" monitor for games and overlays (on an nVidia card) and the secondary just blanks on these...

If you want all 4 monitors to have 3d displays on them, then MAYBE the pci bus would be slow for that. However, for what I'd use 4 monitors for (more code windows, more windows of slashdot, more terminals up at once, monitoring networks etc) PCI would be just happy.

Now, finding a deal on monitors and a new desk......

Summary for those with ADHD

[B5_geek]

#1) New cards are faster then old cards
#2) Old cards are cheaper then new cards
#3) Best bang for your buck = older cards

ATI 9700 pro

[BrookHarty]

I upgraded from a GF3-TI500 to an ATI 9700 pro, almost as fast as the GF4-4200 or ATI 8500. At the time (2002) it was the king.

I first tried the Nvidia GF4-4600 for 199, and it didn't even feel faster(took it back). The ATI 9700 Pro, Ati's main comeback into the game, really was impressive. It was worth every penny (39,900 of em).

Anti-Aliasing was the new kid on the block, and the ATI 9700 pro allowed all games at the time (and most now) with AA turned on. Toms benchmarks shows the ATI 9700 pro still to be in the top 10. With video cards not doubling in speed every 6 months anymore (i miss you 3dfx), I dont expect to see the speeds jump like they use too. This card might just last me another year, and in the last 6 years, thats amazing in gfx card releases.

The only problem I've seen so far, is Nvidia's CG code really messes with ATI's textures and shaders. And with lots of developers loving Nvidia SDK's. ATI has been good to fix most bugs with ever new Catalyst release, but I'm still waiting SecondLife to get patched. (Nvidia CG bugs) Such a work horse of an engine (Havok), should be interesting to see Havok2 engine used. (Also used in Max Payne2)

The benchmark had me wondering, why only a P3.2ghz? I'd like to see them also include a High End AMD, and both mid range (2.6hz P4, AMD 2600) to round it out. Always wonder how many more FPS a faster CPU will give me, so I can just if its worth the cost. BTW Save those pics from toms hardware, then you can compare hardware later. I had to search the tomshardware.de for the benchmarks I was looking for 2002.

Hey, lucky they didnt use a P4EE ;)

Fan Noise

[Slider451]

They really need a column for fan noise. My Gainward FX5600 Ultra Flip Chip has the noisiest fan by far of the eight in my case. And it's a high-pitched whiny noise, the worst kind, because it reminds me of my wife after I've been playing on the PC too much.

FEED ME, Seymour!

[Medievalist]

I agree with you 100%, and hope everyone else does too!

I get nearly all my hardware from dumpsters and recycling bins, so the faster you upgrade the better my stuff is.

My new ATI RADEON 9800 PRO

[superpulpsicle]

Ok, I bought a Sapphire atlantis ATI Radeon 9800 Pro just alittle before Christmas and it took a massive amount of effort to get everything working. These cards IMHO are excellent assuming you know what you are doing, but definitely not ready for the masses. Simple games like RTCW enemy territory, call of duty, delta force bhd, battlefield1942 all took an insane amount of tweaking and research to get working perfect.

Things to do to reach Nirvana

1.) catalyst 3.10 driver was the best there is, and I had to completely reinstall windows xp to get it working flawlessly.

2.) The key components I had to update was RAM (from generic to Kingston) and powersupply (from 300W to 600W). I know it sounds irrelevant but I cannot tell you how many mod_errors I got in games until these were updated.

3.) I now run completely open cased on BOTH SIDES! They mind as well call it ATI OVEN 9800 PRO. I still get the occasional overheat and get spotty dots on the screen if I leave my computer on 4-5 days in a roll.

4.) I disabled fast write and also the VPU feature in the catalyst software.

5.) I also reshuffled the PCI cards next to the agp slot so that the smallest cards were next to the graphic card to give it more air space.

How about Linux support?

[Jagasian]

Tom's charts list such things as DirectX version support... but it doesn't list Linux support. Anyone want to slap together an addition to Tom's chart that lists Linux support?