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?

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

[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.

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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ;)

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.

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.