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Massive Graphics Card Review
Brian Tonka writes to tell us that rojakpot has posted a pretty comprehensive graphics card review including over 240 different desktop graphics cards. With each of the vendors given their own section and using 15 different points of comparison this should be quite a starting reference for the enthusiast and casual buyer alike.
It's a fricking table of all the cards and their specifications. It doesn't review a single card at all.
This might be helpful to some people, but it can hardly be called a review. It is just a list of specs. It doesn't even have benchmarks.
Follow-up: can Red Hat or Novell or somebody please offer a certification logo program for some of these cards? You know, a sticker that you can find on the boxes in CompUSA or something, which says that it's not going to be a stink to get running on Linux?
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Two slashdvertisements from the same Adrian's "hit the monkey" Rojakpot on the same day - that must be a true boxing day today here =8X
My other Beowulf cluster is... er...
GeForce 6800 GT 350 MHz 5600 MTexels/s 256-bits GDDR3 500 MHz 32.00 GB/s
$ nvclock -s
Card: nVidia Geforce 6800GT
Card number: 1
Mode GPU Clock Memory Clock
Coolbits 2D: 370.000 Mhz 1000.000 Mhz
Coolbits 3D: 370.000 Mhz 1000.000 Mhz
Current: 11.903 Mhz 1002.375 Mhz
Mine is BFD nVidia GeForce 6800 GT w/256MB ram.
So with all these benchmarks lately when do we get an extrapolating database where you and build a virtual system and get an estimate on what its proformance will be?
In what ways does the article constitute a "review"?
How does the compilation of a bunch of specification numbers help anybody in deciding what card to buy? How does knowing the specification of some 10-yo obsolete PCI graphics card help shoppers today?
The summary is total BS.
As mentioned above, it's not a review. However, nobody seems to have mentioned that it only seems to cover ATI cards. It's nice to see the improvement of the various cards as far as speed/texturing engine/etc, but it doesn't show an cards from NVidia or others (which given the years of some of these ATI cards, there were other good manufacturers beside ATI/NV).
Still, interesting but not really useful for deciding what card to go for next, unless you're trying to see if a new ATI is better than your old in terms of speed (stability not mentioned).
Replying to myself, I didn't notice the "NVidia" link hidden at the bottom (I looked, I swear!), which leads to XGI, etc.
I'm not sure if mega-texels shows true performance. I have a ATI 9700 Pro and Geforce 7800 GT, both can run games at high resolutions at the same speed, but the 7800 can run with AA/AF enabled without a performance hit.
_ viii/page18.html_ vii/page4.html
It is nice to see where GFX cards rate in games, and Toms hardware has the best link per game. Thats why I picked a GT over a GTX for 200 dollars less.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/02/vga_charts
and
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/07/05/vga_charts
.. but this is a type of story I expect to see on Digg.com.
This isn't a review, there are no benchmarks, there are no nVidia cards even listed and the site formats crappy in IE (just so happened to be using it because of CSS design issues). This has no place on Slashdot and the editor posting the story really should have read through the listings more carefully to see that this doens't extend past ATI cards.
Hagrin.com
Can somone give the useless and ad-ridden articles at rojakpot their own section, so I can filter them all out automatically? If I wanted a graphics card review that actually gave useful information, I'd visit a site with real content in that area, like Tom's hardware.
I was hoping to read up on some massive graphics cards, as I recently purchased a massive motherboard. Imagine my disappointment when I find this is merely a massive review of normal sized graphics cards.
"Massive Graphics Card Review" doesn't mean the same thing as "Massive Review of Graphics Cards".
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
Which cards are well supported for Linux. I use to think that my GForce 2 was until NVIDIA decided that it was too old to bother with anymore. 3D stopped working in Suse 10.0 because of it. I am told that I need to install the older NVIDIA drivers. What a hassle.
Let's hope that NVIDIA will be kind enough to open source their old drivers. But not wanting to hold my breath I'm looking at going with a card from a different company that does have open source drivers.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Don't wanna boosts Tom's too much but are there any better reviews on the net then this?
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http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/02/vga_charts
It's titled COMPARISON, not REVIEW, whoever posted it to /. got it wrong, not the adsense crazy Rojakpot.
Share your Knowlege - Kung-Fu Geekery
A while ago I was trying to build a machine that could run my 30" cinema display at full native resolution (2560x1600) in 3D. Surprisingly difficult to figure it out partly because of the terminology. To run at that resolution, the card must be 'dual link' which is different from 'dual cards in SLI configuration' and they may actually be mutually exclusive features.
I got dual nvidia 7800 GTX KO's in SLI configuration and it works great(even though the builder said it probably wouldn't)! I can run games like GuildWars and *upcoming beta product* at full resolution with excellent frame rates.
Just an FYI.
Ok seems I am the only one to see this usefull.
My application requiere shaders v2.0 and it's really boring to always type radeon radada in google to hunt for the specs to reply to questions from customers.
Also even if it will not tell you for sure that your engine will run faster on this one or this one it will at least give you a hint.
Having the OpenGL version supported from the driver would also have been nice.
In cyberspace nobody knows you're a cat!
This is the third or fouth post from someone who did not notice the link to the next page buried in the ads. Earlier on I read the compression comparison, and it took me about 5 minutes of searching to find the link to the next page. Looks like another Roland Piquepaille like page that just lures in unsuspecting slashdotters to gain ad revenue. Useless content drowned in a sea of ads, the site aint called jakpot for nothin.
a gfx card that can draw not only polygons, but also natively draw round objects (i.e. circles).
"Where the best in technology gather."
Let me finish that.
"Where the best in technology gather, overload a server, then leave still wondering how the hell this constitutes a review."
A bit wordy, but accurate.
A table of specs, so very exciting :)
.19 or .16 micron.
Really all a review needs is separate the brands in price/target market groups and review the quality/features, price and speed of each one in a sentence or two.
I for one can't care less if it's
In world where Nvidia does not exist.
RebateFX.com - Spread rebates for Forex traders
I want this monitor.....can somebody please help me figure out what is the bare minimum agp nvidia card required to run it at full resolution over DVI??? Is a plain ol' 6200 good enough to take advantage of that massive screen real estate??? Any forums that answer this question would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
grndslm
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/ 20/1912221&tid=126&tid=137
Yeah, thought it looked familiar...
They have massive graphic cards now? I must really be behind the times.
I was looking forward to a proper review, instead I get a poorly arranged specsheet for ATI cards dating back to the Bronze Age!
If you have nothing worthy to mention - don't mention it and waste our time, please.
Kind of besides the point since people just want to bitch, but install adblock, and filterset G updater, and you'll rarely see another "normal" ad. As for the article, rojakpot always has a drop down menu at the top, as did this one, that you can scroll to the required page. Not to mention the fact that the "Nvidia" link was at the botom of the page, (at least the page I was looking at) It's not exactly rocket science.
Here are a couple of actual "reviews" comparing a broad sweep of video cards:
Digit-Life's 3Digest
Tom's Hardware's VGA Charts
Anyone know of any others? One of the big problems in the hardware review site industry is that they all review the same stuff and duplicate one another's work 100 times over (for various reasons which I won't go into), while you'd be hard pressed to find a single review of many low-mid range cards. Even if the purpose of such reviews would simply be to inform people about how poorly they perform, it's a major oversight. There is still a heavy bias toward high-end stuff in the above linked reviews, but at least there are a few low-end and mid-range cards chucked in.
P.S. Another pity is slashdot's poor editorial standards, accepting the description of the linked article as a "review" being the latest example. I guess I could just stop visiting, but then I'd miss out on all the insightful comments from visitors who actually do produce some worthwhile content. So I just block the ads, so as not to reward the editors' laziness.
Frankly, I don't consider PCI a real option for high-end gaming.
No, shit? Duh.
Who said anything about "high-end gaming"? No-one? Then why do you think someone talking about PCI graphics cards is interested in high-end gaming?
I guess digg was right. Slashdot is dying.
"...over 240 different desktop graphics cards...15 different points of comparison this...a starting reference for the enthusiast and casual buyer alike."
240? 15? A "starting reference"? To buy a graphics card? This proves there is something wrong in the industry. That or Slashdot's concept of the 'casual buyer' is horribly flawed. Come to think of it, expecting a casual buyer will want to even look at this might explain the low take-up of linux on boxes post-purchase.
Modelines! $5! Get yer modelines!...
Here's a question I never get answered...
Suppose I have a bunch of images of the same size already in ordinary computer memory, and I want to display them at 60 images per second. The image format is whatever is 'best'--a texture, whatever.
Given card X, what is the largest (width x height or bytes) image that can be displayed smoothly?
That is, each image is read from memory and sent to the screen at scale 1.0 with no shading or other modification, but it is synced to the monitor display rate, and doesn't ever (or hardly hardly ever) drop frames.
It doesn't even have my card...Nvidia 5500-OC
--
Get your Free MacMini here
Readers will want to know "micron manufacturing process" in order to determine which cards are most overclockable.
Wow, really? Way back when, my Celeron 300a - a 0.25 micron chip - could be easily overclocked to 450Mhz. A 50% improvement just by setting some jumpers. So 0.25 micron chips can be overclocked 50%?
Of course that is complete nonsense, and no one can use a micron guide to determine how overclockable a chip is. That depends upon the complexity of the chip, the weakest link, and how aggressively the vendor clocked the chip to begin with. Given a micron guide is just space filler with easily accessible information, and it has no usefulness to consumers.
What does matter to consumers are actual performance results - the end result of the fab, the texel units, the pixel shaders, and so on. This particular page has zero actual performance metrics that are usable to compare cards.
I have no idea where the subject line to that reply came from.
holy crap dude, it's not 1995 anymore. Everybody who's bought a PC in the last ten years has an AGP slot.
Next you'll be wanting game reviews of Commander Keen and Rick Dangerous.
$
There are a couple things you may not have considered with your hunch. First, if you are doing 3D textured graphics, then transfer speed to texture and vertex memory is key to performance, and PCI is many times slower than AGP. 10x is not "barely an improvement" in the real-time 3d graphics world. Secondly, there typically isn't just one bus in a system, and that PCI bus is typically on the other side of more than one bridge relative to the CPU, where AGP is typically only one bridge away.
Finally I just don't understand the obsessiveness of your argument. Who cares about PCI? Do you think it costs that much more to manufacture an AGP card? The $$$ are in the GPU and memory, not in the bus interface. A PCI card wouldn't save you $$$ other than being not in demand and therefore cheaper because no one wants them. Are there really mainstream motherboards with no AGP slots? Haven't seen one in years.
"This mission is too important to allow you to jeopardize it." -- HAL
The systems I purchased in 1996 and 1997 have only PCI and ISA slots (AGP did not exist at that point in time).
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Stop posting articles from that crap website, including them brings down what credibility /. has.
so are you still using these systems from 1997 for gaming?
Thought not. The point is, nowadays ppl only need a PCI graphics card if they flash their Radeon X800 VIVO wrong, and need to recover. Everybody with that need prob has a few PCI cards lying around the place already.
it would have been useful to see the Nvidia Quadro cards in this list, even if they sometimes share chractaeristics with the GeForce cards.
Did you read the grandparent? The question wasn't about gaming, you dumbfuck. It was about the best pci card for general use.
I'm using a Diamond branded Radeon 9250 PCI with the Dell 2405FPW right now. I'm pretty sure it is capable of driving two 2405FPWs.
Yes, I'm still using those systems from 1997 for gaming. A 64MB PPro/200 with a 12MB Voodoo2 plays the original UT at 800x600, Tribes 1 at 640x400, and Total Annihilation, and those are all games I still play on those boxes.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Where are the reviews, etc for the "really high end" graphics stuff? Not that I would be able to afford them (I am currently running a GeForce 2 for crap-sake! Meets my needs under Linux, tho), but I would be interested in what is really coming down the pipe. I remember seeing reviews and such (long time back) on graphics processor "boxes" fed via a SCSI channel or such from Evans and Sutherland, which was meant for flight simulators - $25,000+ high-end graphics subsystems, which of course by now have been easily surpassed by common graphics cards.
So, where are these high-end graphics systems now? Do they have some wack card(s) out there that has like quad HDMI outputs, each delivering some ungodly resolution, with textured and lit polygons out the wazoo? Whatever happened to hitting and surpassing the "polygons per second" limit that defined "real world" interaction (this was a big "buzz" to acheive in the VR realm back in the mid-1990's - I don't remember what the limit was off-hand, but it was a pretty big number)?
Lastly, whatever happenned to these old high-end graphics boxes? People had to eventually upgrade, were they just scrapped? I have seen some formerly "high end" VR gear on Ebay, but I have never seen any E & S or other graphics subsystems, beyond old cards like the Wildcat and such. I can only assume that they were too niche-market devices that not many were sold to appear on Ebay much, if at all (similar to 3D position tracking systems from places like Polhemus and Ascension - though even those I have seen and bought off of Ebay before)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon