Slashdot Mirror
Affordable Modern Graphics Cards
EconolineCrush writes "If graphics cards that cost more than a mortgage payment make your wallet quiver, it's worth checking out ATI's Radeon X700 and NVIDIA's GeForce 6600 series. Both are based on cut down versions of latest and greatest graphics chips, but at under $200, they sell for a fraction of the price of high-end cards. What's more, these $200 wonders outperform last year's $500 cards, sometimes by embarrassingly large margins. The Tech Report has in-depth reviews of both the GeForce 6600GT and Radeon X700 XT if you're in the market for a next-gen graphics card that's a little more affordable."
Almost two years back, I picked up a Radeon 8500LE for under $100. (actually, about $80) At the time, the Radeon 9700 and 9500 were top and second tier DX9 cards. The 8500 was a third-tier DX8.1 card. While it didn't have the latest features, it *was* feature-complete to the previous set.
These are good $200 cards, no doubt. But it looks to me as if the sub-$100 cards haven't made as much *relative* progress as the more expensive ones.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
(From a rejected story I submitted)
This Inquirer story says that ATI will be beginning a big "Linux driver push" in the next couple of weeks - a driver based upon their Catalyst drivers, supposesly giving a speed boost to DoomIII.
Personally, I'd just like drivers that don't segv under Xorg 6.8.0
www.eFax.com are spammers
Yes, but on VIVOs, the pipelines are simply disabled, not nonexistant. I know, because I've flashed many of them and they all work fine. Its because of how ATI handles their chip fab process--chips that can't handle XT speeds but have 16 pipes are clocked down to Pro speeds and 4 of the pipes disabled through the BIOS. And a flash re-enables them. All VIVOs have these chips--most regular X800s don't.
The little "wires" connecting things inside a chip are called "traces", and are the thinnest things you can draw on a chip. So "trace size" is used as a yardstick to compare chips for how small their various parts can be. (You will often see the word "process", as in "90 nanometer process" instead of "90 nanometer traces"). The smaller the trace size, the less power dissipation. Both of these new chips have a small trace size, although the articles didn't say exactly how small.
If you make a chip, and then you improve your chip-making technology so that you can draw thinner traces, you can perform a "die shrink": you produce a similar chip design, using the smaller traces, and the whole chip takes up a smaller amount of space. You can buy some graphics cards that are basically an older GPU with a die shrink; they dissipate very little heat and are inexpensive. A GeForce4 MX (budget card) was basically a GeForce 3 with a die shrink, IIRC.
Chips are made from silicon wafers. One whole wafer is "fabbed" (made in a chip fabrication plant), then cut up for individual chips. The more chips per wafer, the cheaper each chip is. (This is all the more true because flaws can happen during the fabbing process; if one flaw means one dead chip, then more chips per wafer means a similar number of flaws results in a lower percentage of dead chips made, and thus lower costs.)
A smaller trace size makes it easier to push the clock rate higher. But GPUs are definitely clocked lower than CPUs, so that helps them dissipate less heat. If you are pushing a Pentium 4 at 3 GHz, and the GPU is only doing 0.7 GHz, clearly that helps the GPU dissipate less heat.
Smaller trace sizes make it harder to make the chip work right; the smaller the traces, the more problems you might have electrically (I don't fully understand the details). Also, you need to be more careful with cooling; a hot chip with a tiny die size needs a really good heatsink, and there is less margin for error. The old, relatively large chips like the 486 family were easy to cool in comparison with today's chips.
Summary:
Smaller trace size means less heat
Lower clock rate means less heat
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely