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Budget Graphics Cards Compared
EconolineCrush writes "Tired of reading reviews of high-end graphics cards that cost several hundred dollars or more? The Tech Report has a round-up of three budget cards that cost $80 or less. ATI's Radeon X1300 Pro, NVIDIA's GeForce 7300 GS, and S3's Chrome S27 are compared in an array of gaming, video playback, power consumption, and noise level tests against not only each other, but also a typical integrated graphics solution. As one might expect, the budget cards offer significantly better 3D performance than integrated solutions. What's even more impressive is the fact that even with newer games, the sub-$80 cards still have enough punch to deliver respectable performance."
OK, the article tells us about 3dmark, quake 4 specs, video playback, etc etc etc.
But, they don't tell us which one (if any) has a vendor supported OSS compatable driver.
Since XGL, etc (and I'm sure I'm not alone here), I've been on the lookout for a cheap & good 3d card, that doesn't give me 'kernel tainted' messages when I insert the driver.
Does anyone know if any of these have good open support (I'm going to presume patchy [at best] for ATI, closed fast drivers from nvidia & good drivers [but crappy hardware] for the s27)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
If I can't do 27,000,000,000,000 triangles a second for under $80 I'll not buy one!
What's even more impressive is the fact that even with newer games, the sub-$80 cards still have enough punch to deliver respectable performance.
No, what's impressive is that most gamers have been successfully brainwashed that they need a $500 video card to play a modern game, while the low range has been excellent for the past 3-4 years.
At the same time, people are shocked about PS3 being $600. I wonder what the hell happened to common sense, where we lost it and will we find it again any time soon.
Will any of them give me more than 10 FPS during "Breaking Siege of Kvatch", "Battle for Bruma" and the final fight in Imperial City in Oblivion?
That should be current benchmark method. All the budget cards I know of simply can't do it.
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I find it humorous that there is such a push for budget cards using a fairly new interface. Where are the AGP versions of these cards? You know, for people who really are on a budget and can't afford to buy a new motherboard to use with a new budget card...
This guy's the limit!
But will ATI, nVideo, or S3 provide documentation so we can write drivers even for these much less than flagship models? When they release a card (even a *much* less than cutting edge card) and the documentation to write a 3D driver for it (so I can expect to use it to potention on whatever operating system), then I will be impressed and interested in the bargain.
You are right, $500 card is way too much. But an $80 card is gimp. If you are going to make the upgrade do it right and get a mid-range card that has withstood the test of time, something like a nVidia 6600 or 6800 GTS. It'll set you back a few bucks more than these cards - 30-50$ more - but you will get a whole lot more value.
Does anyone know how significantly onboard video chips with no dedicated memory (like the 6150) affect the performance of machines under Unix?
I need to build some machines (Linux and Solaris) and I dont care about 3D performance. However, I care about application performance a lot (getting the most of the machines). Must I purchase extra add-in cards if the machines will mostly be on the login screen or even at the console while working hard under the covers?
thanks
Your comments comes across as if this is something new. High powered video cards have always been expensive. Back in the "good old days" I remember paying over $300 for a Matrox 2D solution let alone the $299 Voodoo 2 days where a lot of gamers bought 2 cards.
Comparing console pricing to PC video card pricing doesn't make much sense. The difference your ignoring that most PC enthusiast expect $300 and higher video cards, console buyers do not expect $600 consoles.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I am! Every flippin' week there's a new graphics card.
What are you selling and what is it going to cost me?
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I'm not much of a gamer but - well - my current Radeon 8500 looses it on most modern games (though I'm still happy with it in IL2 and GPL, that I mostly play). So I thought for some about a new video card (and a bloody new MB apparently since they decided to kill AGP, bastards). Nothing over $100-150 - just something with support for modern features and reasonable performance. Nice article for me....
But hey!! Check out power consumption figures! They state 85 watts in idle and 145.6 watts under load for their "winner" card (Radeon X1300). W.T.F.?! That's like three times more than my 90nm AMD64 CPU, right? You know what - go to hell. Call me back when you have something reasonable with passive cooling.
First, I'm damn impressed. An S3 card beating an nVidia? Actually... an S3 with a decent performance? I'm not much of a gamer, and considering I would pretty much BUY only budget cards... this is looking really good, especially when put together with the FREE OSS LINUX drivers.
I know what I'll be putting inmy AMD64, whenever i make that. Nice.
Budget video cards almost always suck. You're better off buying the best of the previous generation or, even better, buying refurbished or open box hardware from sites like Newegg. I was browsing their open box section the other day for a friend, and came across a Radeon x1600 Pro 256mb for $90. A little bit more money than their target, but for $10 you get a card that's not intentionally crippled.
... just consider buying one of yesterdays "mainstream" cards. An X800 GTO will wipe the floor with any of the crippled budget cards, while being in the same price range (assumed you can find the version with 128 MB GDDR1 memory, the slightly faster GDDR3 versions cost a bit more).
Why would I buy that? Well, cost wasn't the concern. At the time, it was the best card on the market that was passively cooled. No fan = no extra noise!
So I clicked the link to TFA, and jumped right to the end, and it turns out the quietest card is 44 dBA. No thanks! Not after the low noise power supply, an after-market super-quiet chipset heatsink/fan, and installing 120 mm low-rpm fans (20 dBA), and the quiet Seagate drive. Even worse, from TFA:
So does anyone know of better cards that ARE passively cooled, and will work inside a case with scant airflow due to using large but very low speed fans.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
It's not covered because it's simply not possible to achieve acceptable performance/compatibility (especially on low-video-memory budget cards) without infringing on patents such as those on S3 Texture Compression (which is licensed by ATI and NVidia). Those patents have (at least historically) required the chipset vendors to only provide closed-source drivers, and not provide the information needed to implement patent-covered features in the open-source drivers.
In short - you're not going to see a card with acceptable performance when combined with OSS drivers any time soon.
You can get a 7900gs for AGP.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Sorry, but a machine with AGP isn't what I'd consider "budget". I don't have ANY PC's with AGP in them. I need a regular ol' PCI card. That's "budget".
I've worked in the 12 volt industry for quite some time... mainly installs, and helping out with sales when needed. The same logic applies there. People buy the cheap radios that we all that work here know are going to crap out and are cheaply made. (Mainly jensen). The eclipse units are amazing but people still only go by the price. Yet these same people who can't see past the price savings are also the ones who have those $$$ Nike Shocks on. Ok... buy a nice radio that's going to be inside of a car, more or less out of the weather.... or buy some expensive ass shoes (cost as much as the entry level eclipse headunits we have) that are going to be walking around in dirt, water when it rains, etc.
Same can apply to any consumer electronics... get the cheap DVD player, the cheap receiver, but I'm gonna spend that cash on them shocks!
7800gs. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?N=20 10380048+1305520548+106790717+1069609639&Submit=EN E&SubCategory=48
There are a lot of people running linux on these platforms, especially Apple laptops, and the intel/amd binary drivers do nothing for them. It's not just about graphics, either. You can't properly suspend a laptop if the driver deoesn't support the card's secret power management functions.
Why don't they ever compare graphics cards to slightly older cards? I have an ATI 9200 but have not a clue if these cards are the worse, the same, or better than the card I already have in my box...
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
Their conclusion? The best budget card is the most expensive one they looked at, the Radeon X1300 Pro.
If they only made $80 video cards because they're "good enough" then what is the incentive to spend on R&D for better technology?
To make a better video card than the other companies making $80 video cards.
What you're saying doesn't make sense -- there are lots of products that have basically fixed price-points, but yet still have a lot of competition and R&D going on. It becomes a little different kind of research, perhaps; instead of sending the engineers out with a blank check and telling them to build the most ridiculously fast card they can, instead it becomes a question of "how can we get better performance, while still only costing $80?"
Frankly, I think the latter approach leads to better products in the long run anyway.
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With only main memory in an "integrated" system, the CPU loses significant access while the video is being refreshed/calced.
Or, if you don't have $300, you can spend about $150 on the 6800 AGP, which is still a hellva card.
I would recommend spending as little as possible on graphics upgrades right now, as DX 10 is going to require a new card for everyone anyway.
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
What's the point in reviewing budget cards if the require investing in a top computer?
All of the cards require PCI express and consume extreme amounts of power requiring motherboards and PSU less than a year old!
One thing that has pushed the card market along has been changes to Direct X. I figure that DX10 will push the market along further too.
Why include older cards if they cannot even run some of the tests?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
No, because some user would just like to have *plain graphics*, but are out of luck, because they use something other than Linux (*BSD, Solaris, whatever...) and/or some hardware different than x86 (PPC, Sparc, SuperH, whatever... even AMD64 was problematic until recently).
Example : Currently, there's no support (2D or 3D) in DRI for Radeon X1n00 cards.
Users in those communities understains that company doesn't have ressource to build drivers for every exotic OS / CPU combo out-there. Those communities even have developper that are willing to build those drivers themeselfs on their own ressources, but there's no way because th GFX card makers are keeping the necessary information secret.
(Those days you won't be able to see a new OS - CoyotOS, SylablOS, ReactOS... - emerging like Linux did before, because it won't be usable on these new "secret" Gfx cards beside some basic VESA support. And that's only as long as VESA will still be offered on GFX cards).
Also GFX card maker could drop support of their older products, so user will be force to upgrade to more recent products (if such products exist with same OS / CPU combination support). You won't be able to keep your old graphic card even if you happy with its modest 3D capabilites. (That happened with PowerVR chips on Kyro I/II cards : driver developpement was dropped and there's no supoprt for 2.6.x Linux kernels)
Graphics drivers are not only about getting L33t frames-per-second on the latest first-person-shooter. It's also about just having some graphic ouput and still having choice with OS and GPU.
Linux binary aren't as usefull as full open-source implementation, because your stuck with the limited choice of plateforms that the manufacturer decided to support. Even if it now covers most common Linux platforms and most common users are now happy, it only marginally expands the possibility beyond the "Windows-only" state. You still have no freedom to choose how to use the different hardware *you* all bought legally, not because of real incompatibility, but just because the manufacturer doesn't want to give out the necessary informations.
So nVidia binary drivers *are* wrong. A tiny bit less wrong (you can use them on a little bit more than just windows), but still wrong.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
With a CRT monitor, all of the supported resolutions display equally well. Unfortunately, as gamers upgraded to fancy, new 19" and 21" LCD monitors, they only look good at a single, native resolution - which is usually much higher than people ran their CRTs at.
This translates to needing a beefier graphics card to get the frame-rates you expect, vs. the "old way" of just playing all your 3D games at a lower resolution like 800x600.
...and if you've got an SFF with a non-standard MB size, you can't even readily replace the motherboard. It's still way too early to replace my XPC SN95G5, but I'll have no choice if I can't get an AGP vidcard. So far, my 5900XT is holding up just fine but it was all I could afford _at the time_ and I'd love to get something with more than 128MB RAM sometime in the near future so I can see a little better detail at hi-res.
why is it I should spend $80 for a crippled "budget" card that will need to be replaced in a year, or a $300 card that will need to be replaced in two when I could go buy a xbox for $200, and enjoy it for a while yet?
PC gaming has gotten ridiculous.
I do agree that slashdot did a great job comparing theese cards. They are derfenitnly better than the integrated solutions. However, I feel that theese cards are Perfect for photo editing and very light gaming. But unless you want to run qauke 4 at 800 x 600 on the lowest settings for ever then you gonna have to buy a car that will cost you at least $150. I have a ATI 9600 PRO* that's been overclocked. It does a great job. I can run Counter Strike: Source At the very highest settings just fine. This card only cost me about $175 at the time.
> *note if your wondering what the rest of my setup is: 2GB of RAM, 3.1GHZ proccessor with 1600Mhz of FSB.
It's not -1 Flamebait! It's +5 Funny. You just didn't get the joke...
Will any of these cards even work in DirectX 10? Tomorrows games will all require it, so unless you want to replace your card again this time next year, why bother? What cards currently support DX10, anyways?
Does the S3 have open drivers for the DVI interface? I'm looking to ditch Matrox.
Seriously, for those of us who have laptops, does anyone have an opinion or link on which budget graphics cards exist that are USB plug-ins, so that people with laptops (where the graphics cards are not normally upgradeable, unless someone knows how to upgrade an eMachine laptop) can get better video and graphics performance?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I've been looking for decent graphics card in the under $200 segment. I don't be using it for any gaming, but it has to be rock solid under linux, and offer good performance for 3d molecular visualization. Does anyone have any recommendations?
...or it could be the fact that BF2 is a bloated pile of festering code. I have the game, and my clan has fought on it many a time (I am a gunny sgt). If I can play Doom3/HL2 maxed out on my system and yet have the same BF2 video issues that you seem to, it tells me that it is the game not the card.
That's funny, because I'd say that Battlefield 2 gives me far more visual impact than Half Life 2 / Doom 3 (HL2s scripted little world is laughably simple compared to some of the environments of BF2. D3 scripts it to ensure that you fight maybe one or two enemies, lest it overload the poly count). Both of those games very, very heavily rely upon sticking you in tight little areas, where your view of the world is heavily restricted, limiting the number of polys. Then they feed you enemies in nice controlled bunches, ensuring that the poly count is always limited.
A game like BF2, on the other hand, has unbelievably complex environments (some of the city environments in SF are amazing), coupled with up to 63 other highly defined other people, in up to 63 other military vehicles, along with all of the static vehicles and scenery, all interacting with the environment, with huge vistas, where players are scanning close to a KM away through sniper rifles.
Comparing D3 or HL2 to BF2 is laughable, and it discredits your argument from the outset.
The arm-chair game programmers out there number too many, and their ridiculous analysis of "good" versus "bad" programming provides some good humor. You kids stay with your Virge 3Ds, complaining about the "bloat" of modern games, and I'll happily upgrade to take advantage of some of the amazing new functionality.
holy shit, you really are a fag. Giving up your freedom because you need to use a closed-source driver? Your perspective is bogus. Kill yourself for the good of mankind.
On most 21" (4:3 AR) LCDs, the native resolution is 1600x1200. I think you should be able to set your 3D game at 800x600, then stretch it to full screen. Each 800x600 pixel would then be simply traslated to four 1600x1200 pixels, right? If this works, then setting your 3D game at 800x600 (with some AA) would be a better experience (decent FPS and quality) than setting your 3D game at native 1600x1200 (bad FPS).
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Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Subject says it all. Seriously. There are two kinds of video cards: quiet, and high performance. You're not going to get both.
If quiet is your goal, buy a new motherboard with on-board video. You get:
- low heat & silent
- speed on par with a "budget" video card
- no slot taken up (which is not a big deal, unless you're using a mini-itx system, which often only take half-height pci cards)
On top of all that, the new motherboard will probably cost you less than the budget video card you were looking at anyhow.
It's weird, but I find some resolutions look much better than others on my 1280x1024 monitor. 1280x1024 looks good, of course; 800x600 also looks good. However, 1024x768 and 960x600 look abominably awful. Strangely, 1152x864 looks very nice indeed. Is it just me?
Trouble with Linux ATI Drivers is that they hardly ever work.
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The following is a quote from an ATI Drivers installation guide at:
http://linux.coconia.net/general/ati-md2005-suse9
"I have tried to install many revisions of the ATI drivers on Mandriva 2005 and SuSE 9.3, but only one has ever worked. That is the ATI 8.14.13 driver. The ATI 8.14.13 drivers do not appear to work with either Mandriva 2006 or SuSE 10. The problem with all later drivers (that I have tried) is that when you run fgl_glxgears the cube spins as usual, but is totally lacking any cogs on the faces, the faces being instead, various shades of blue."
A lot depends on your monitor's ability to scale the output from the video card. Some monitors have algorithms that are good at this, and some do very poorly. One monitor I have (20.1" Sony) seems to do very well at non-native resolutions, while another (19" Gateway) looks like crap. I have also used a 19" Viewsonic which seemed to do a decent job, and a 17" NEC which was kind of in the middle. I have also found that overall, most laptops look terrible at non-native resolutions. Some monitors (like the Sony) have multiple scaling algorithms and let the user choose which one works best for them, though I haven't messed around too much with it since the default seems to work good enough.
If you have an LCD screen, you better have a card good enough to run the default resolution at good framerates for all games. Turning down the resolution on an LCD screen looks like crap, even with new marchitecture to make it look pretty at non native resolutions.
Some would say that if you could afford an LCD, you could definitely afford a card to drive one. I would argue otherwise. A $200 screen could last you 5 or 6 years. You'll be lucky to get 2 or 3 out of a $200 video card if you want to keep native resolution gaming.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.