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Graphics Card Comparison Guide
JaniceZ writes "These days, there are so many graphics card models that it has become quite impossible to keep up with the different configurations. Therefore, we decided to compile this guide to provide an easy reference for those who are interested in comparing the specifications of the various desktop GPUs in the market as well as those already obsolescent or obsolete."
I started (or attempted to start) using Linux with a modern graphics card a few years back when I started university, just out of plain curiosity. My buddy and I downloaded the ISO images of Red Hat Linux 8.0, and from that point forward, it all went to shit.
I figured it would be no problem, I used Sun's Solaris quite a bit so I understood the shell at least. Install went well, even though I was confused why I needed seven million partitions which I had to allocate manually and to have a root password since it was a single user machine. After my install, I restarted my machine, saw a bunch of ugly crap being spewed to the screen, and before you knew it, X Windows loaded up and I was in Linux. "Ooh, this looks neat, just like Windows. Let's see if I can surf the web!"
This is the point where I discovered the 'magic' of Linux. It couldn't find a driver for a simple ethernet card. So I got onto another computer running Windows, and found some type of driver for it. All right, I'll just burn it to a cd, pop it onto the Linux machine, and we're good to go. I started looking around for the CD ROM icon...where was it? Apparently I had to mount it manually, luckily I know UNIX. Then it asks me for root password. Okay, so I enter it. Then I can see the CD ROM, great. Oh look, the driver is in the form of source code, I have to compile it. So I tried to compile it with the configure script that came along. Oh wait, I need some !@#$ing stupid C library. All right, so I download that as well in the form of a RPM, which luckily worked, and then I was able to compile the driver.
Okay now what? According to the instructions, I had to recompile the kernel making the driver a part of it. 'Recompile the kernel?' I thought, 'What kind of sick operating system makes you recompile its kernel...' Apparently I didn't know what kind of twisted people designed Linux. Oh wait, it wants the stupid root password again...good God. So after about 5 hours, I had Internet...given that I knew how to use a UNIX machine. Four days later I tried installing something else, it asked me for the same stupid C library but version 1.2.3.4.5 instead of the version I had...God forbid...1.2.3.4.4 (oh what a fool I was for not updating every 10 minutes!) Within an hour, my drive was formatted (twice out of spite) and running Windows XP.
A few months back I was inspired again to run Linux. If you read the tech news, there's no doubt about it, it's taking over the server market. A Linux sys admin will make 20 grand more than a Windows sys admin (Makes you wonder if 20 grand is worth eventual suicide), so I felt I should pick it up. Of course now I was more prepared, I've read books, admin guides, worked as a student UNIX operator, 3 years under my belt as a computer science student, two internships, and had studied the Linux kernel in depth.
I decided I would try a whole bunch of distributions, I tried Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 2, SuSe 9.1, Debian, and Mandrake 10. All special in there own little way...like retarded children. As soon as SuSe loaded up, I was like..."nice nice, very sleek...", then a hissing came out my left speaker that wouldn't go away. Nice autodetection for the sound driver. Bye bye SuSe. All right, let's try Red Hat 9...oh look Red Hat won't give any more automatic updates because now that it has a little bit of money...!@#$ open source, let's become the next Microsoft! Oh Debian and Mandrake, just plain ugly and slow.
What about Fedora Core, Red Hat's latest method of getting code for free rather than having to pay programmers in India $0.85 an hour to do it. Why pay someone when you can have some idiot from GNU or some grad student do it for free, then sell it for 400 bucks a pop. It was surprising though that that experimental piece of crap worked better than all the other distributions, even though its autoupdate some how corrupted my kernel and I had to overwrite it.
But what I find most stupid is the philosophy behind it. Why make something so complex for free? I'm an excellent software engineer
they'll be obsolete in 5 minutes anyways....
This article does not provide benchmarks, just things like "transistor count" and the number of pixel pipelines. Check out http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20050705/ index.html has the same information and benchmark charts.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I want to replace my radeon 9700 tx with a comparable or better nvidia card for the cheapest possible price, (due to driver issues under linux with certain bleeding edge functionality) but I couldn't even begin to find out how to properly grade cards. Hopefully this will actually help me.
free advertising *yawn*
Let's say I didn't know anything about graphics cards. How does this help me?
If the manufacturers didn't go out of their way to completely confuse the issue to the point where there are no definitive answers to the question.
I'm still using a 3dfx card - not my game machine but its running XP and does full screen TV & DVD's ok.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Anyone else that accidentally bought an ATI Radeon 9250 knows what I'm talking about.. Why is it acceptable to rename the 8500 to 9250, just to make it sound more "relevant" in the modern market? The fact is that if you're going to buy a vidcard you have to do a crapload of research. Period. You can't stand in the PC store and say, "I dunno, what you got for $50?" anymore. You'll end up with a pile of junk. Another good example is the Geforce 4mx, basically a rebranded Geforce 2.
Each processor would proceed sequentially as if it had been better for them not to rise against Saul.
If you want Linux compatibility, you want nVidia. Yes, nVidia's drivers are closed-source, but they're at the same level as their Windows drivers, right down to the overclocking controls.
If you want a fanless, low-power GPU that can also do light gaming, get a GeForce 6200 with as much onboard RAM as you can find (ignore the TC "TurboCache" crap).
If you want a midrange, not-too-power-hungry card, get the 6600GT. This is my favorite card.
If you need a high-end GPU, get a 7800GT. If you have money to burn, get the GTX version. Check to make sure your power supply is up to snuff (Seasonic S12 series is my favorite, highest efficiency I've found), especially if you did something silly like buy an Intel P4. If you can afford one of these you can afford a proper AMD 64-bit processor to go with it.
There, everything you need to know. The 6200 was a pleasant surprise to me. I put one in my parents' Shuttle SFF box (Athlon 64 3000+), replacing a Ti4200, and the lower power consumption was enough for the main system fan to slow down to its minimum 1000RPM most of the time. It's still good enough to play UT2004 Demo at full detail at 1280x1024 res.
I hear video cards being rated in FPS(frames per second) in certain video games all the time. If person A can get 100 more FPS out of Doom 3 using an ATI at the same cost as a Nvidia, usually they are going to go for that.
So my question is why didn't they include this in there? They have a lot of good data but I just wish that someone would run all the video tests on each card and check out the FPS data on certain popular games and produce them in a nice chart similar to this one.
Wait... on second thought that wouldnt be cool at all.
Is that commensurate with how well it performs in games?
the web picks up the slack. Back in the day when I bought computer magazines (at least 2 years ago), I've always wanted comprehensive charts of the latest graphic cards listed in magazines. Occassionally, if they were doing a graphics card special issue, there'd be maybe 7 cards compared.
However, this comparison guide is hardly a "easy reference". It's on the web, so give it some features. I want to sort, filter out columns, have side-by-sides comparisons, comments/ratings by users (or staff), etc.
I live in Japan now, where I can pick up a monthly computer magazine, and they have a section dedicated to charts on the latest CPU, Video, HDD, Motherboards, and Chipsets. The video chart, for comparison, has 14 different specs, all listed on one row, making it far easier to compare than this site.
The only advantage to the charts at the site in this story is that it will/does include old cards. But, as with other commenters in this thread, I say this story certainly feels like a cheap ad.
Yea, let's list graphics chips from 5 years ago, without any explanation of what is what, filled with google ads, on a slow server, and with no navigation to the END of the article (where I assume the actual text is, i never got there the server is halfdead now), and no actual useful data to speak of?...
And why is this on front page?
I'm using a docking station with an old Dell CPTv Celeron laptop as the base for my car computer that runs Debian Woody. The interface I'm working on runs on PerlSDL
Anyone one to suggest a good PCI linux friendly card for the dock? Tried doing some research but PCI video cards aren't exactly popular anymore. Hard to find any hits that aren't after 02.
So far peformance is ok, but moving up from a 8mb ATI rage mobility seems like a a cheap way to get more performance. Especially for some of the bells and whistles I'd like to implement. (Maybe writing it in something besides Perl might give me some more leeway, but that's not negotiable).
Any suggestions?
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
Gee, I must be a farking genius!!!!!! I've got a 7th grade education, and I'm having no problems.When I first started to use LINUX, I had a few problems.The worst problem I had was trying to get help from azzholes off of such irc channels as #newbie, #linux, etc. I found a friend in an entity named wesguin on a cheesy message board at chat.arachne.cz.He replied with these for simple letters, RTFM (Read The Farking Manual). I can tell you were born in the late '70's, early '80's as your education is on par with the instant gratification crowd,(my 23 y.o. lady calls them the 30 seconds and under crowd).Maybe you should RTFM and maybe even read the comments in the source code. Better yet, just stick with wind0ze, after all, it's easier to point and click.And it keeps me in business. :-)
NVIDIA's Quadro line of cards is meant for workstations (instead of consumer/gaming) purposes.
Works fine for me. Best of all it's passively cooled. It sits in an old P3/866 which is also passively cooled. Actually not a bad machine for a load of stuff pulled out of a skip after the company I was at went tits up.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
* I went to the latest review of VGA cards at Tom's Hardware.
* I chose the top 12 video cards from ATI and nVIDIA
* I created a spreadsheet which calculated the relative rankings of each card across about 30 different tests for a range of games/benchmarks. i.e. the top scoring card in a category got 100% and the remaining 11 cards were expressed as a fraction of the top score.
* I averaged the rankings for the 30 categories
* I used a local hardware search tool to find the current "buy it today" best prices for each of those cards.
* I divided the average ranking by the price to get a bang/buck ratio that can help to compare the cards. i.e. so a card that averaged 90% but costs AUD$600 would have a lower final score than a card that came in at 50% but only cost AUD$200
Unfortunately, the spreadsheet is at work but the 6600GT was a clear winner in terms of bang-for-buck.
All these 12 cards were good, and most of them were the only ones remaining in the extreme tests like high-res DOOMIII with AA sort-of-tests. So, even if a card only came in at 50% average, it was still able to work with all the latest games at reasonable frame rates.
Oh Boy! Yet Another Generic 3D Graphics Card Comparison! Like we've never seen one of those before!
How about something that covers new ground? How about evaluating the features beyond simple stats and 3D performance in various games I'll never play?
I want to see a comparison that looks at these characterstics without regard to 3D FPS...
1) Noise level, idle and under load
2) Heat level and/or power consumption, idle and under load
3) DVI signal quality when pushed to maximum resolution & refresh rate - i.e. how long a cable I can hang off of it at what resolution
4) Video acceleration - mpeg2, mpeg2 for hi-def, WM9, WM9 for hi-def, h.264 and h.264 for at hi-def resolutions
5) Video de-interlacing support and quality - 3:2 telecine at what resolutions, how about 2:2 telecine, etc
6) Video scaling quality -- how many taps for vertical, how many taps horizontal, any fancy algorithms, test-pattern measured quality levels
Anybody and his brother can put up a speclist of 3D features or run a set of semi-standard 3D benchmarks and they already have. How about somebody with some real tools - oscope, multi-meter, pattern tests, etc do something new and useful to the REST of us for a change?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
On the subject of Video Card RAM, the added onboard memory makes Little to No difference. (See Radeon X600 Pro 256/128 and 6200 TC32/64) As long as your card has at least 128MB onboard, it's not going to choke from memory problems.
I was referring more to the recent work on using the GPU for non-graphical tasks.
Tell me again when your kids are forced to be atheists and have to learn all about evolution in school. Oh wait, that's already happening.
This guide is useless, it doesn't have any benchmarks for comparisons
It seems like Matrox kind of got swept under the table over the years. They always made great cards. Not necessarily the best for gaming but they had some cool features before any one else.
Seems like they haven't really introduced anything new in quite some time.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
includes...
Didn't we already slashdot this server once today?
What if all you want is just to display some stuff on the screen, and dont care about having the highest FPS on the planet..
I remember when 25 dollar cards were plentiful and DID THE JOB...
Not everyone that owns a PC is a gamer.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You do realize you totally missed the sarcasm, right?
I've always referred to this excellent pcvsconsole table of PC video card specs for a very concise overview of the specs and performance of the various video cards. It really is worth a look if you want to see how much more horsepower is in the newer cards as compared to the older ones.
Then you're still probably well off with Nvidia's quatro.
Does anybody maintain a decent chart of brand comparisons? I always find it difficult to sort out which specific package is the best or most appropriate.
Limina.Log
I got a response about 20 minutes later which included a patch for the Linux kernel I was using. I recompiled my kernel with the patch and it fixed the leak.
It is too bad their drivers are closed source, but I have to say that their Linux support is outstanding and on a par with the best support I've experienced.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Yeah, I've always had good luck with nVidia drivers/cards and Linux - although not sure I'd say they're exactly "at the same level" as the Windows driver counterparts.
On my MythTV box, using a GeForce 4Ti 4600 card, I've run into lots of issues of nVidia changing around little details related to the card's ability to output in HDTV resolutions, to properly select or auto-detect which port the card is connected to (s-video, composite, or DVI/VGA) and other such things. It generally works well... don't get me wrong. But some of the optional parameters nVidia says you can specify in your XF86Config-4 file seem to shift around from version to version in their driver updates, and things that work fine in one release are broken again in the next. (Lately, I've had issues where the option to specify some "overscan" for composite or s-video output with an integer value between 0.0 and 1.0 seems to have no effect at all on my card.)
6600GT "infinite loop". 7,900 hits.
--
If you support dishonesty and violence, don't say you are Christian.
You forgot the way to tell the Intel eXtreme Edition ones apart: the more Xs the better! Wonderful Intel Marketing, what will they think of next?
if you can't handle the slashdot!
did you forget to take your meds?
I think you will want one of the newer PCI-e cards.
The older AGP standard transmitted data to the card very fast but could only read it slowly. This worked well for the things that graphics cards traditionally do.
The newer PCI-e cards can read from the graphics card at a much higher rate.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
The chart would be a lot more useful if it had a column listing compatibility with the various flavors of Linux/BSD/etc.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
Same experience. I have a wireless lan card which I would like to run on linux but find it difficult to make it work. I also tried different distributions with madwifi drives and still failed to make it work. Need to do some more research.
As far as I can tell, the Diamond branded 9250 is the best fanless PCI, dual display video card on the market. Niches are everything.
Is everything on Saturday night posted by ScuttleMonkey?
Don't miss the little dropdown at the very bottom of the linked page.
One simple rule for its versus it's
I mean, sure, it wasn't the fastest thing on the block, but it had triple-monitor support and some other really nifty technologies in there (par for the course from Matrox). I know, not exactly a gaming card, but if you're going to include the G550, you can't leave the Parhelia out. Then there's the Px50 series too...
It's a useful reference for people who have graphics cards that are a year or two or more old
If people *do* care about older ones, the chart in the article is is incomplete (for example, it lists the Radeon 7500 but not the Radeon 7250).
This link contains both a more comprehensive set of graphics cards and more extensive information on each.
And it isn't covered in ads, as the one in the article is.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I must have missed that press release from Intel. What are you referring to?
I personally applaud and support AMD for bringing competition to Intel and dropping the retail cost of processors to a fraction of what they used to be, but on the other hand, I would like to know if they are truly some nefarious company?
I am interested in any evidence that you have to backup your statement but I am afraid that I will find that I have just been feeding another troll. Oh well.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
Apparently that's not a straightforward question to answer. The gpgpu.org hardware features forum would probably be the best place to ask.
The last time I bought a graphics card with extra features I wished I'd spent the 100 or so pounds on something more worthwile like a new bike for my son or a necklace for the wife, this time I won't be so quick to dump my current GeForce 5700 as apart from a slightly faster FPS it seems like my Radeon 8500 hasn't gone away... but that was a special card was it not?
Resident of Skara Brae since 1985
As a long time Matrox fan I first skipped to the Matrox page, only to find out G550 is the last on the list. Now come on.
And other than that, it's just yet another chip comparison.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Be warned, I got one of those "heat pipe" cards, and it fried right away. I'm going back to fan!
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
With a transistor count list this certainly makes it easier to understand the differences between the graphics cards!
Seriously though, what use is this sort of "stats" comparisons?
In general, newer is better, but at the moment I'd go with nVidia, since their shader pipelines have much better branch support in the latest generation than ATi - something very important for non-graphics work.
AGP might it might not be a bottleneck, depending on what you do. You can get data onto an AGP card a lot faster than you can get it off, but if you're streaming data in and only want an cumulative result then AGP will be fine (render to target extensions in modern cards are great for intermediate results).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I've just sent them an email 11:30 am Monday, asking why they don't release the source code... 20 minutes to go...
I can't see the reason they don't. I can't imagine the code would be much good to competitors (ATi), and releasing it would greatly increase prestige and sales amongst a certain market. ATi would probably realise they've made mistakes in ignoring Linux, and then would try and catch up so as not to leave all the spoils to nVidia. Everyone profits!
(Ok, maybe I forgot a ??? step)
It would be nice if it would which version of AGP (min & max) these cards support. I have a dual P-3 850 and I want to replace the graphics card. It's only got a AGP 1x slot. Most of the AGP cards these days don't support 1x, but require something like a minimum of 2x or 4x.
Some OSS developers try to get the newer ATI cards to run anyway. http://r300.sourceforge.net/R300.php
By now, they claim success for the Radeon 9600, but the 9800 still locks up sometimes.
Unfortunately, this example also shows the timeframes for doing it without manufacturer support:
My two year old Radeon 9600 might now be usable under an open source driver.
C - the footgun of programming languages
this article was completely fucking pointless
?giS
Kinda hard to compare one card against another if it's not in a spreadsheet. It's even harder if it's spread-out across a dozen different web pages. Here's the spreadsheet version because MSOffice rocks and all: http://www3.telus.net/cspowart/boing/vidcards.xls
What about taking the top cards from each manufacturer and comparing those? Or allowing the viewer to select which manufacturers they would like to compare and laying it all out?
"It is better to keep your mouth closed and have people think you a fool than to open it and prove them right." M. Twain
At the end of the day, for most home users buying licensed MS software isn't that expensive. XP Home comes with most machines and probably adds a $30 MS tax to the cost (the retail price is significantly more, but most large assemblers probably pay around $30.) Works (a generally lousy program, except it includes a full version of Word) adds about $30 to the purchase price. If you need to step up to full office (Word, PPT, Excel & Outlook) the student/teacher version is available for $100 for a three-pack. Add $50 for anti-virus software and whatever you want for games and you're set.
As much as I'm not a fan of MS, it's pretty easy for most users to get the system up and running...no incompatible drivers and no need to install or compile anything.
If your average user doesn't modify the software or attempt to upgrade drivers it all works out of the box.
Anyone know where to find a comparison including workstation graphics cards? Those beasts are often available dirt-cheap secondhand AND tend to outperform several of the desktop graphics cards.
Not to mention that (working) Linux support would be a nice thing to know about as I never found drivers for the IBM RC1000 chipset since ATI buried it in sand after purchasing them out of the market some >3 years ago. Oh.. the card? Diamond FireGL 2. Would be nice to have drivers for it on any recent (post-2001) OS.