Best Gaming Video Cards for the Money

Tom's Hardware has decided to take a step back with their latest video card review. Instead of wowing their audience with in-depth benchmarks they head right for what someone reading a review really wants, an opinion of the best bang for the buck. From the article: "So if you don't have the time to research the benchmarks, or if you don't feel confident enough in your ability to make the right decision, fear not. We offer a simple list of the best gaming cards on offer for the money."

Comments

ATI VGA Wonder ISA

[OrangeTide]

You can get them for free in a junk bin. It's a video card, and bang divided by bucks, as bucks approaches zero the value of bang doesn't matter.

Re:ATI VGA Wonder ISA

[log2.0]

Ahh, yes, but it depends from which side you take the limit. Not taking the limit at all means that the "bang for buck" is undefined!

However, I think you meant to say "as buck tends to zero from the right, the bang for buck tends to infinity"....however, I doubt I would want to use this free graphics card :)

Re:ATI VGA Wonder ISA

[dmjones500]

My God... we could have infinite bang!

Re:ATI VGA Wonder ISA

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

This is a new paradigm in interstellar travel! Infinite bang means infinite thrust.

in theory, we could power a space ship out of donated remaindered copies of "Tek War."

Re:ATI VGA Wonder ISA

[Lex-Man82]

I have a machine capable of creating an infinite bang I will sell it to you for an infinite amount of money as long as you don't use it from within one infinity of me.

Re:ATI VGA Wonder ISA

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that few modern PCs even have ISA slots, the bang will often approach zero as well. Then you'd have to use l'Hopital's Rule to determine bang per buck.

Re:ATI VGA Wonder ISA

[Anonymous Coward]

ISA gfx cards?

Re:ATI VGA Wonder ISA

[JonathanR]

I've got an Asus 6800GT 128MB that went bang in fine style (lots of smoke, almost as good as a Dell laptop battery). Does anyone want it for parts?

Re:ATI VGA Wonder ISA

[Criterion]

Yes, I have a few. Are you too young to remember them?

Re:ATI VGA Wonder ISA

[Glacial Wanderer]

My computer doesn't have an ISA slot so that means I have zero bang divided by zero bucks. So if we're assuming the this division is done following IEEE floating point standards I've got a NaN. I freaking hate handling NaNs in my code so I think I'll pass on this ISA suggestion.

Re:ATI VGA Wonder ISA

[jo42]

Eh, wot about a couple of 4Mb ATI Mach64 PCI video cards?

Re:ATI VGA Wonder ISA

[Drooling Iguana]

VLB FTW!

Re:ATI VGA Wonder ISA

[lymond01]

ATI VGA Wonder ISA? I think on a time-scale, the bang is approaching zero faster than the buck...

Re:ATI VGA Wonder ISA

[Nefarious Wheel]

"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." -- Yogi Berra

Re:ATI VGA Wonder ISA

[OrangeTide]

you could run dual monitor then. awesome!

plus the Mach64 has accelleration for drawing lines and doing bitblts. (just like an IBM 8514)

we require more minerals

[macadamia_harold]

Instead of wowing their audience with in-depth benchmarks they head right for what someone reading a review really wants, an opinion of the best bang for the buck.

What they missed though, was a comparison of all of those with at least one average on-board video implementation. Most of which nowadays are pretty damn good. (at least for things like Warcraft III, starcraft, non-bleeding-edge FPS games, etc). To really gauge "bang-for-buck", you need to measure against spending no extra money at all.

Re:we require more minerals

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

starcraft ran really REALLY well on my Voodoo Banshee.

I don't think even today's integrated chips have to worry about starcraft.

Re:we require more minerals

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

What they missed though, was a comparison of all of those with at least one average on-board video implementation. Most of which nowadays are pretty damn good.

Woah, woah, woah! Have you actually used an average onboard video card lately? I can testify that mplayer has issues at high resolutions, and google earth gets about 0.5fps. A simple X terminal will consume large portions of CPU if the app spits out a lot to stdout.

It's 2006. You need a video card.

Re:we require more minerals

[stunt_penguin]

I agree, but in response to your post I suspect people are going to say "Whoah *need* a video card? Back in my day we calculated our vertex transformations by hand, in the snow, before breakfast and with no shoes on our feet" .... that or.. "pfft on my Linux workstation I don't need a graphics card for running firefox, I use my on-board graphics on my Pentium 3 from 2001 and it runs just fine. Who needs games anyway?"

Maybe I'm just hanging around here too much :0'

Re:we require more minerals

[steveo777]

I wish that Blizzard would redo Starcraft with higher resolution. This 800x600 stuff is really making my eyes hurt with all the new fancy graphics in other games. I wouldn't even care if it was the same game. Wouldn't care a bit. It just looks so BAD on my widescreen, have to run it in window mode! Good Lord. The call for more Starcraft is great... Blizzard, when will you heed the call?

By the way, has anyone heard anything in the past 3-4 months about Ghost? Not that I care, since they canceled it on every system I own.

Re:we require more minerals

[Anonymous Coward]

The Intel integrated graphics that is most common in on-board implementations is bundled into the motherboard cost, so your still paying for it. They also aren't very compliant with newer Direct X at times, they aren't trying to be the lastest greatest, just enough to run Windows and simple games. it may be cheap, like 20 - 30 dollars on top of the motherboard price, but IMHO your basically getting exactly that, a video card that's worth about 20 - 30 dollars. I have no doubt you could run Warcraft III, but you'd probably not get much fps out of it, it would be a very crappy solution as compared to having even a cheap video card. And I can't imagine your cranking up the detail settings in the game
 
I got stuck playing with onboard video while playing Unreal Tournament at a business that allowed the tech staff to stay late and play games after work as a social thing - although to some that might sound like slacking off, other departments started joining in and it became the first unofficial company function that brought people together and let staff mingle more successfully than any of the "official" get togethers. but back to the original point, the graphics sucked at work and when I went home it was back into fantastic looking graphics.
 
And reviews at Tom's Hardware are for someone who wants to get some bang for their buck, not no bang. I'd keep your integrated solution in the price range of $30 and you probably notice they aren't reviewing other cards that cost that much either.

Re:we require more minerals

[LDoggg_]

this 800x600 stuff is really making my eyes hurt with all the new fancy graphics in other games.

Starcraft only ran at a 640x480. Just like warcraft 2. Blizzard didn't put out a game with 800x600 resolution until the Diablo2 expansion.
Yeah, it could use some updating, but I'm sure Blizzard would sooner put the starcraft theme into a whole new engine.

Re:we require more minerals

[steveo777]

Err... yeah, it's been a long time now... I haven't played at all lately because I can't get it to work over wireless. Any tips?

Re:we require more minerals

[LDoggg_]

Yeah, I think tcp/ip LAN play was added on the 1.10 patch. The older protocol might not have been bound to your wireless NIC.

Re:we require more minerals

[Nazmun]

Because you can just assume with any such old or non graphically intensive game will run with the most weak graphic processing setups. Any modern game that requires a graphic card would crawl with any integrated chip due to lack of dedicated video memory which is both an order of magnitude faster then system ram and not shared.

Starcraft and warcraft 3 (with a sufficiently beefy processor and mobo, ie anything in the last 2 years) will run on any video card with even the most minute 2d and 3d acceleration capabilities. I'm fairly sure you need zero acceleration for starcraft as it's 2d.

I wouldn't be surprised if my current machine (athlon 64 3800+ with 2 gigs of ddr500) could play both with a old 8mb pci card. Starcraft will run flawlessly but warcraft might give trouble.

Re:we require more minerals

[crabpeople]

This is what it takes to get a +4 insightful?

Onboad video. bwahahaha. yeah you can play commander keen on it! and flight simulators from the early 90s!

Honestly, that people like this are modded up.. its unfathomable.
onboard video cards SHARE RAM! I mean wow. Talk about not knowing ANYTHING.

Re:we require more minerals

[Breakfast Pants]

It is quite clear to me from your post that you are running linux and you are running Google Earth with software GL. Check to see if drivers are available for your on-board chipset--if it is intel they likely are.

I like this one

[Dryanta]

Geforce 7900 GTX Codename: G71, 90nm technology 24 Pixel Shaders, Eight Vertex Shaders, 24 Texture Units, 16 Raster Processors 256 bit memory bus 650Mhz core, 800 Mhz DDR (1600 Mhz Effective) Memory The Geforce 7900 GTX is Nvidia's answer to the X1900 XTX. Both of these heavyweights have their strengths and show superiority in different games and benchmarks, but neither will disappoint. The 7900 GTX will have the advantage in texturing speed, and the X1900 XTX will have the advantage in shader speed.

This one takes the cake for me at the price point of ~$340. That's just about to the point where it is way freaking too much to spend on a gaming rig. I'm gonna get one. :)

Re:I like this one

[OrangeTide]

In 18 months that $340 card is worth maybe a quarter of that. It's rough to have high-end graphics on your machine.

Re:I like this one

[Lemmy Caution]

I spend more than $340 on a 2-week holiday that's done in, um, 2 weeks. You have to think of it as a value-over-time thing: how much fun are you getting over those 18 months?

Everything's transient, really.

Re:I like this one

[julesh]

I wonder how much longer the CPU will be able to keep up with increases in GPU speed. Beyond a certain point, returns will be small or non-existant.

Look at it this way: the current 'hot' CPU, the Core 2 Duo, has a bus connection that allows it to transfer 1066 Mwords of data per second. Typical applications require a complete refresh of vertex buffer data for each frame. Even for a really well optimised application that runs mostly out of cache, the CPU's likely to need to hit system memory several times for each vertex it outputs, so it's probably putting at most 400 Mwords of vertex data per second into the GPU's buffers (at 100fps, that's around 2 million vertices per frame, which is quite a lot).

The card quoted has 8 vertex shaders running at 650MHz, so it can already afford roughly 25 cycles per vertex, which is probably more than enough to perform any reasonable transformation on those vertices.

But then it's the pixel shaders and texturizers that get really stressed in most applications. This card has 24 of each. Per frame, that allows the same application 156 million pixel shader cycles and the same number of texturizer cycles. The highest resolution monitor I'm aware of has a max resolution of 2560x1600. That's roughly 4 megapixels, meaning that the shaders get 39 cycles per pixel. Given that these beasts are vector processors (i.e. they can process R, G, B, & A in a single cycle), that's just about enough to perform any realistic transformation on the pixels.

Yes, I think there are applications for faster GPUs. And certainly, improving the speed of the memory attached to the GPUs will continue yielding improvements for a while yet -- there's simply no way 1600 MWord/s memory access speeds can keep up with data transfer requirements to all of the 72x650MHz pipelines on this card. But I'm not sure how many generations of card we'll see before they match the performance of even the most demanding application current generation CPUs are capable of instructing them to perform.

And for gaming applications: there's already enough power in these GPUs to process as many vertices as the CPU can provide in any exotic way you can find a realistic need for, and produce high-resolution textured, realistically lit, bump-mapped, fogged, rasterized output overlayed with transparency over static controls, HUDs and background images at the highest resolution supported by 99% of monitors.

What more do you want?

Re:I like this one

[91degrees]

I think the comparison between it and a holiday is a poor one. Really, you should consider the difference in fun of a cheaper card. Most gamers go for slightly less than cutting edge because no games require the latest card to be fun.

But the extreme graphics nuts see things differently. Presumably they're buying all sorts of intangible benefits like the sheer geekish delight in playing games at ludicrous resolution and detail, or just bragging rights.

Re:I like this one

[e03179]

FYI: The Dell 3007WFP supports WQXGA (2560x1600) resolution.

Re:I like this one

[Anonymous Coward]

Regarding pixel shader cycles, you completely forgot overdraw. And it's only getting worse, with ever increasing geometry detail -- more and more overlapping layers of non-front triangles. Early Z and friends help some, but still you're lucky to get only triple the visible shading work done in there...

Re:I like this one

[wgaryhas]

what about a 3840 x 2400 resolution (9.2 megapixel) monitor?

Re:I like this one

[Anonymous Coward]

You wonder how long the CPU will be able to keep up? Have you been sleeping in a cave? Intel just announced 50 core CPUs in the next 5 years. We already have 4 and 8 core CPUs coming. What do you want?

Re:I like this one

[Anonymous Coward]

That would explain why every modern game is so GPU limited that you see virtually no fps difference from the top Core 2 Duo to a mid-range AMD A64 x2 paired with the top video cards on the market...

Re:I like this one

[pauljuno]

Better yet! Buy two and run them in SLI mode on a SLI capable motherboard.

Re:I like this one

[Anonymous Coward]

I want graphics capable of making me think I'm looking at something real, not Pixar, I'm talking about playing a game where you can't tell it's fake because of the graphics. Once you reach that level, I'll be happy.

Re:I like this one

[julesh]

Intel just announced 50 core CPUs in the next 5 years. We already have 4 and 8 core CPUs coming. What do you want?

Faster FSB speeds and faster memory. More raw processing power will achieve little without either of those.

Re:I like this one

[julesh]

That would explain why every modern game is so GPU limited that you see virtually no fps difference from the top Core 2 Duo to a mid-range AMD A64 x2 paired with the top video cards on the market...


I bet you'll find dropping the FSB speed on the CPU makes a significant difference. It's not about raw processor power. It's about communication between components; that's the biggest current bottleneck.

Re:I like this one

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I think there are applications for faster GPUs.

Um, such as all modern games? Your calculations are way too simplistic to have any real usage relevance. Sorry.

And certainly, improving the speed of the memory attached to the GPUs will continue yielding improvements for a while yet -- there's simply no way 1600 MWord/s memory access speeds can keep up with data transfer requirements to all of the 72x650MHz pipelines on this card.

What "1600 MWord/s" is that? If you are talking about the video cards 1600 MHz memory bus, it's 256 bits wide! That's mighty long for a "word"...

And you ignore the caching video cards do for all data: vertices, fragments, shader code, Z values, and especially texels which always get massive re-use. But certainly, the engines (on 8 + 24/16 pipelines -- you are misrepresenting the hardware again...) *are* bandwidth-limited in most situations, you are entirely correct there! :)

Re:I like this one

[Anonymous Coward]

Vertex transformation haven't been done on the CPU for a long time (not since T&L became commonplance). So the CPU only has to send the graphics card a matrix specifiying how much the vertices have rotated/scaled/translated between frames. The graphics card does the rest.

Re:I like this one

[bangenge]

This one takes the cake for me at the price point of ~$340. That's just about to the point where it is way freaking too much to spend on a gaming rig. I'm gonna get one. :)

Dude... just curious, but why are you gonna get one, now? I would understand if you had money to burn, or if you're a serious gamer, or if games are running like molasses, but wouldn't it be a bit too late especially since DX10 and vista is coming around the corner?

I have this dilemma myself. I'm running on a 6600GT now, and while it serves me fine (sims2, CS, HL2), I still plan to wait till Vista for a major upgrade.

*note: if MS pushes back vista and dx10 games are really slow in the coming, please disregard my comment.

Re:I like this one

[MarkAD88]

I'm in the same boat as you my friend. I'm running a 6800GT OC and it will handle the majority of my game just fine. The newer games it tends to bog down a little bit on (BattleField 2142 especially) and I'm tempted to upgrade.

However, even though I'm a serious gamer and play just about anything and everything that comes out I'm reluctant to upgrade. There is the looming release of DX10, the fact that I have to switch from AGP to PCI-E if I want any real options which itself entails the processor upgrade (Core 2 Duo 6700 here I come) and a new motherboard and new memory and so on.

The worst part of it all is that I'm sure when the DX10 capable cards release they'll be in the $500 range which means that I'll have to wait another 6 to 12 months after they're released in order to find one in my comfort zone of $300, plus or minus $50.

Re:I like this one

[OrangeTide]

About the same amount of fun I get from a $95 video card. but that's just me, I'm weird.

I can spend $200 on a single night of drinking.

Re:I like this one

[Lemmy Caution]

I kind of agree, though it depends on the games I happen to be playing (I don't play a lot of photo-realistic games: RTS doesn't really need the high end effects, but facial rendering and atmosphere is nice in the genres that use it.) But that's separate from the whole question of the videocard's depreciation: after all, that $95 video card will be worth $20 when that spendy card is worth $95.

Re:Consoles

[VirionNW]

Bah, the PSP3 will totally be crushed by the Wii DS Lite.

Summary

[LoverOfJoy]

Best PCIe Card For Under $100 - Radeon X800 GTO 128MB

Geforce 7300 GT GDDR3 (second choice/tie?)

Best PCIe Card For ~$140 - Geforce 7600 GT

Best PCIe Card For ~$200 - Radeon X1900 GT

Best PCIe Card For ~$250 - Radeon X1900 XT 256MB

Best PCIe Card For ~$340 - Geforce 7900 GTX

Radeon X1900 XTX (second pick)

Best PCIe Card For ~$500 - Geforce 7950 GX2

Best AGP Card For Under $100 - Radeon X700

Geforce 6600

Best AGP Card For ~$125: 3 Way Tie - Radeon X1600

Geforce 6600 GT

Radeon X800 GTO 128MB

Best AGP Card For ~$130 - Geforce 7600 GS

Radeon X1650 PRO

Best AGP Card For ~$175 - Geforce 7600 GT

Best AGP Card For +$200: None (Honorable Mention: Gainward Geforce 7800 GS+ silent 512)

It looked like nearly every card one at whatever price they sell at. A category for $125 (a three way tie there) and a category for $130? It's ridiculous. 7 pages worth.

Re:Summary

[LoverOfJoy]

yes, "one" should be "won". That's what I get for typing at 2am.

Re:Summary

[BrookHarty]

What they dont say, an Nvidia 7800 GT is twice as fast as an ATI 800, 140 bux or 100 bux, 40 bux buys a lot more power.

I like toms hardware video card graphs to help quickly show how a card stacks up.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/02/vga_charts_ viii/page16.html

Re:Summary

[Darth Paul]

A "what to buy" article like this has a significant effect on sales and advertisers perceptions - which is why almost every card won "in its category", to avoid pissing anyone off.

Can you imagine if Tom's Hardware said "THE DEFINITIVE BEST VALUE CARD RIGHT NOW IS THE ... ATI RADEON (blah) GT!!!" ?

Someone at Tom's Hardware would have lost some important friends at nVidia. Which is why we have 7 pages of fence-sitting instead :)

Re:Summary

[Pharmboy]

I think part of it is that NO card is "the best", as they are all different kinds of good. As confusing as comparing CPUs, it depends on what you are doing. I DID agree with the assessment of the "Best PCIe Card For ~$140 - Geforce 7600 GT" however.

I just did a month of research and bought this exact card about 1 month ago, put it on an older i3.2ghz/HT w/1GB ram, and it does acceptionally well. The PNY unit I bought runs most games at the highest or near highest settings (HL2, etc) and have two dvi out, and included two dvi/vga adapters, svideo cable and more. For those of us who love gaming but won't afford a $400 card, this is the next best thing. Think I paid $135 at buy.com w/free shipping and have been extremely pleased with the results.

Re:Summary

[TeknoHog]

I don't get it. How is it possible to confuse a numeral with victory when typing text? Are you using some kind of speech recognition, or having images of winning as being number one?-) Besides, what kind of a Slashdotter isn't used to typing at 2am?

Re:Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Homophone! You are worse than 7 Hitlers.

Re:Summary

[TeknoHog]

Homophone!

I know. But I still don't understand what the confusion in sound has to do with written language. I see this kind of misspelling on /. every day and I'm really curious as to where it comes from. It's as if people spoke the words aloud, then forgot about the meaning, and parsed the spoken form back into written text.

You are worse than 7 Hitlers.

I take that as a compliment. Muhahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Re:Summary

[nelsonal]

I wonder if the portion of the brain that controls motor skills is connected to the part of the brain that creates language via the speach portions? That would explain why homophone typing errors occur far more often than would be expected.

Re:Summary

[Criterion]

I find it hard to accept the fact that the 7600GT got the spot for $175 with no mention of the 6800GS (and don't give me any talk about "obsolete" when the 6600 is in there). The 6800GS spanks the 7600GT to the tune of a 256bit bus throwing 32GB/s versus 128bit bus pushing 22.4GB/s.
See here...
http://forums.vr-zone.com/showthread.php?p=2400829

If somebody could tell me why the 7600GT is more deserving, I'd like to hear it... and yes, I'll take the card that's a bit more power hungry for almost a 30% increase in performance any day.

Re:Summary

[Johnny5000]

A "what to buy" article like this has a significant effect on sales and advertisers perceptions - which is why almost every card won "in its category", to avoid pissing anyone off.

Then what they should do is put each card on its own page, talk about how that particular video card is the best one ever, and fill the rest of the space with ads for that card and links to purchase one. Then they can throw out all pretenses of reviewing the hardware and objectivity.

Re:Summary

[nolife]

Either those charts you linked too are really old or the 7600GT was so slow it was off of the bottom of the list!

This link has much newer charts and comparisons.

Re:Summary

[octothorpe]

Best AGP Card For ~$175 - Geforce 7600 GT

I can't seem to find a retailer who actually sells this card. Does it actually exist for the AGP bus?

Re:Summary

[fisgreen]

What they dont say, an Nvidia 7800 GT is twice as fast as an ATI 800, 140 bux or 100 bux, 40 bux buys a lot more power.

Makes for a for an affordable screamer of an SLI rig, too. Also, I'm convinced Nvidia's drivers are so much better. I've regretted every ATI card I've ever tried, usually due to crappy drivers. Highly recommended.

Re:Summary

[Creepy]

what frightens me is that I got an unlockable eVGA AGP 7800GS ~6 months ago for $4 cheaper (~$50 if you only count 4 * or better vendors like I ordered thru) than the cheapest price on pricewatch. It was $198 with express 2 day shipping (not sure if it was cheaper with slower shipping). It also proved unlockable with CoolBits, so I essentially got a 7800GT for the price of a 7800GS.

sigh - I need to upgrade soon - I'm jealous of my dual 3GHz's at work (with an extremely crappy GPU that actually does affect my work since my company is now adding GPU features into our products... sigh - if you spend $3000 on a PC, you can put in at LEAST a $50 GPU... this one listed at $27 last year when I got the machine).

Re:Summary

[nacturation]

I wonder if the portion of the brain that controls motor skills is connected to the part of the brain that creates language via the speach portions? That would explain why homophone typing errors occur far more often than would be expected.

How about those spelling errors? Sounds like teach, looks like speech? Interestingly enough, I *never* used to make those kinds of errors. You can check back through my posting history and you'd be lucky to find an odd typo. However, these days I catch myself making homophone-style errors with increasing, though still infrequent, frequency. Maybe it's my age -- approaching mid 30s -- that is a factor. And I also find that as I have more thoughts on my mind, my attention to detail slips a little bit.

And to bring this back on topic, last week my Radeon 9800 Pro bit the dust. I was pleasantly surprised that I could upgrade to the X1600 for half the cost of what I paid for the 9800 Pro and get increased performance to boot! Gotta love technology prices.

Re:Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

The 7600GT clobbers the 6800GS in every benchmark. Hardly the "30% perfomance increase" you were talking about, unless you're referring to the 7600GT's advantage over the 6800GS. . .

See http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2717&p=10

Re:Summary

[AceCaseOR]

nacturation wrote:

How about those spelling errors? Sounds like teach, looks like speech? Interestingly enough, I *never* used to make those kinds of errors. You can check back through my posting history and you'd be lucky to find an odd typo. However, these days I catch myself making homophone-style errors with increasing, though still infrequent, frequency. Maybe it's my age -- approaching mid 30s -- that is a factor. And I also find that as I have more thoughts on my mind, my attention to detail slips a little bit

I've also noticed that, by default, all spelling & grammar flames must have at 1 spelling and/or grammar error.

Re:Summary

[Elwood P Dowd]

Someone needs to put together a $$ vs Radness chart using that data & the price information from this new article.

Re:Summary

[Polo]

Personally, I like the PC parts picking guide and it's graph of
video card price vs performance.

http://shsc.info/PCPartsPickingGuide#titelanker13

Even more interesting is that their chosen graphics cards seem to
scale -- more money gets you proportionally more performance.
However if you scroll up to the cpu section, it doesn't scale so well.

Re:Summary

[Damon Cleeve]

The 7800 GT is not on the list because it is old and too expensive. The 7600 GT is though, but it's not nearly twice as fast as the X800 GTO...

Re:Summary

[Damon Cleeve]

I wrote the article, and I can tell you I didn't sit on the fence unless there were legitimate close performance runs. The problem is, with different architectures some cards will win some benches and other cards will win others, it's difficult to difinitively say one is better than the other when they trade blows based on which game you're playing. The reason there's 7 pages of article is because there's so damn many categories. And for the record, I admit the AGP section I submitted was screwed up a bit. The $130 AGP section should have been omitted, that was a leftover from an old version... I've been doing this article on the forums for the past year and a bit. The $130 AGP category should have been the 7600 GS, X1650 PRO, and X800 GTO... which all do perform very closely.

Re:Summary

[nelsonal]

I've actually improved (I was the bane of my English teachers in grade school) thanks to the little red underline in Word.
Does anyone have a good reccomendation on a cheap dual PCIe card to be run in a 4 monitor setup? I've got the 4 monitors (1600sw) but need to upgrade the hardware to run them.

Re:Summary

[Criterion]

Ok, I see that it's benchmarking higher.. still no answer as to why.

Re:Summary

[Breakfast Pants]

I unconditionafathomabally don't listen to anyone who uses the term acceptionally.

Re:Summary

[WuphonsReach]

Dunno, I went with a 7800GS instead as my last upgrade for this AGP gaming system. In another 2 years or so I'll finally replace this system with a 4-core AMD chip and a new PCIe video card.

Re:Summary

[glsunder]

It's more likely that the cards at each price point are very similiar. In windows, both ati and nvidia have pretty decent drivers. It'll pretty much depend on if your favorite game has any issues with one or the other. I have an ati card on my windows machine, my wife has an nvidia card, the older kids have an ati card on their windows machine, and our 2 year old has an nvidia card in his edubuntu computer. So it's not like I hate/love either company to an extreme.

Re:Summary

[nacturation]

Well, if there is a spelling error I can't see. As far as grammar goes, I'm sure my writing is informal enough to break a few rules. But do explain the error of my ways.

Re:Summary

[kayditty]

I don't think I could reccomend anything, but I may be able to recommend something. OLOZLOERLROLlollERBLADEZES nice troll

Re:Summary

[Celandine]

Sure, I bought one a couple of weeks ago. http://www.leadtek.com/3d_graphic/winfast_a7600_gt tdh_1.html

Re:Summary

[AceCaseOR]

If memory serves, it is grammatically incorrect to start a sentance with "And". However, I could be wrong.

Re:Consoles

[Anonymous Coward]

PSP3.. Sony's new portable gaming device

At last!

[TechnoBunny]

Graphics cards are as bad as CPU's in this regard - by the time you've digested GPU frequency, memory frequency, pixel pipelines, onboard memory, yadda yadda yadda, its nearly impossible to put two different cards, side by side and say which is better. Well done. Now, can we have the same for CPUs?

Re:At last!

[Provocateur]

You can yadda yadda sex all you want, but here on Slashdot, nobody EVER yadda yaddas stencil shadows, per pixel lighting, and quad SLI configurations. Ever.

I don't know why...

[Zorque]

...They went with the 128MB version of the x800GTO. On Newegg.com you can get the 256MB version for $87, though to be fair it is third party. Strangely enough, I can't find an AGP equivalent for under $125.

I'm currently using the 256MB AGP version because I'm extremely cheap (and don't want to reinstall Windows -again- when I get a new motherboard), and I can attest to how greatly it performs.

Re:I don't know why...

[TrappedByMyself]

you can get the 256MB version for $87

Read the reviews.

Re:I don't know why...

[hkmwbz]

Because the 250 MB version actually has significantly worse memory performance?

Re:I don't know why...

[giorgiofr]

Revert your controllers drivers to the generic ones that ship with Windows and uninstall your graphic drivers, too, then swap the disk and reboot - on first boot it will be a bit slow but will pick up all your hardware and then you can install the right drivers for the controllers.
I've kept the same system across 3 different mobo's with different chipsets and processors - not a glitch.
HTH

Re:I don't know why...

[Gr8Apes]

Yeah, except that process stinks. I don't understand what the issue is with just reinstalling windows. It's a quick 20 or so minute process on the new system, especially if you slipstream whatever service pack you're interested in. Heck, it's about 3-5m of input, and then walk away for a while, then another 2m of input. (Why they can't collect all the data in 1 fell swoop, who knows. FC5 and Debian are both nicer installs in that regard)

Besides, installing fresh allows you to do some quick testing without fear, like bleeding edge drivers, or experimenting with non manufacturer supplied drivers. Of course, I do have a "stable" machine as my main machine while this one undergoes spastic configurations. I'll be doing my 5th install in 3 weeks shortly, with the configuration largely ironed out this time. (I had issues with a couple of the onboard "features". The built-in NIC actually locks up the system when flooding it @ 100Mbps, replacing it with an add-in card solved that problem. The onboard firewire is either bad or requires a different driver - I'm giving it one more driver attempt before punting and buying a DFI or Abit board. (yes, ECS sucks, but I was holding off on getting a PCIe vid card. With the 7600 GS selling for under $70 though, that position has become stupid in light of time wasted with the ECS board)

Re:I don't know why...

[admdrew]

Because the 250 MB version actually has significantly worse memory performance?

You really shouldn't complain about reduced performance when you somehow managed to break 6 MB of RAM off of your card :P

Re:I don't know why...

[giorgiofr]

Well, I for one don't feel like reinstalling and *reconfiguring* all of my productivity suites and servers and services and app settings just because I upgraded to better hardware (or, as in my last switch, a not-running-up-to-80 C-and-then-resetting mobo :D).
You said yourself you'd only reinstall on a test machine.

Re:I don't know why...

[AdamHaun]

Do you not use any software? I keep installation files for most of my software on my harddrive and I have broadband, but I've still never gotten a full reinstall done in less than three hours. Even after SP2, Windows Update alone takes forever. And then there's copying all my music and movies over from wherever I backed them up...

Re:I don't know why...

[Gr8Apes]

That's true, once I get a windows machine configured, I don't upgrade anything. Including the OS. I use FF and Thunderbird. I reduce my MS exploit exposure as much as possible by removing all unnecessary services as well, which is almost all of them other than file sharing, although I'm looking into a replacement for that as well.

I buy another machine after a year or 2, or 4 as in this case, and configure it. Once it's stable, I have a slew of stuff I install, and I'm done. (The new machine is only 2 weeks old) However, in my case, I create a software load CD/DVD with all the things I load on it, so if I ever have to reinstall due to a disk crash or some kind of corruption, it's a quick reinstall. Then I ghost the drive, so I can very quickly go back to this precise configuration.

For the game machine, I then take the ghosted drive and recreate the machine config on a secondary primary partition, which is basically a throw-away once the game or games are done. With data on a second HD, this means that I have a stable productivity environment, and a copy if I'm gaming that will usually allow me to switch quickly over into my productivity suite without rebooting, as all data is on a separate disk/partition that's visible to both.

It's a little more work to setup, but you wind up with a rock stable work environment, and a worry-free game environment. (You do need to back up your data, of course, but that's a separate issue)

If you're really anal, you can use swappable drives for the stable vs gaming disks. Then there's no chance of corruption by even a rampantly evil virus.

Re:I don't know why...

[Gr8Apes]

Sure I do. I can have a solid system up and running with all software installed in about 45m. Note: I do NOT do windows updates. Ever. I have slipstreamed installation disks with SP1 and SP2, so I don't have that particular issue either, depending upon which one I want installed.

Driver installations, depending upon the board, are the worst, as that's usually 4 or 5 reboots, depending on how many items you're installing, and motherboard drivers are generally picky enough that you don't want to install 3 drivers at once without rebooting, at least not without a trial run or two. (My old machine was 2 reboots to finished system after the OS install - 4 drivers could be installed in a single go, with 1 more reboot required for graphics drivers.)

As for music and movies - note that they're on separate external drive, which goes untouched. I have two drives with copies, as this content almost never changes, and since they're nearly full, won't get added to either.

Re:I don't know why...

[crabpeople]

"I think many "typical Linux users" are in the same boat: not too interested in playing games"

And this my friends is the main problem the rest of us have with linux. Its not different ways to do things, it's not too hard to work with, it is the fact that linux has "no interest in playing games" that keeps linux off the desktop. Build it, and they will come.

Re:I don't know why...

[kayditty]

That's probably the stupidest comment ever. No, it doesn't. Why the hell wouldn't you actually LOOK before saying that? It's obvious you were working on some kind of weird assumption.
The 256MB version uses the same 256-bit GDDR3 at a higher clockspeed (980MHz effective vs 700MHz effective). How does it have worse "memory performance?" Do you know some secret, or something?

Re:Consoles

[aywwts4]

Nerd? Seriously? ...Can that really be construed as an insult around here?

Re:Consoles

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Sexual harassment is determined not by the harasser but by the harassee. So too is it with insults.

Commander Keen

[OrangeTide]

If you were planning on playing Commander Keen, it would be a fine graphics card to own. Supports 132x60 text mode too, if you're one of those types that littles tiny letters. (Multi-sync monitor required)

http://orangetide.com/vgadoc/ati.txt for register settings on your VGA Wonder, incase you want to access any enhanced features.

Re:Commander Keen

[kuzb]

If you were playing commander keen, and you're calling yourself a geek, we'd have to ask you to turn in your badge and gun before leaving.

Re:Commander Keen

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with commander keen? He has a cameo on Doom2, so he must be cool!

Seriously, those games are pretty good. I enjoyed playing them when I was younger. And just like the later games from id Software, they were very advanced for their time. Previously, making a side-scrolling platformer with decent graphics had required hardware support, so they had only been seen on games consoles and arcade machines.

Re:Commander Keen

[Anonymous Coward]

Commander Keen was a fun game, but it was hardly advanced for its time. Even though VGA graphics and Adlib music were already the norm for PC's, Commander Keen (and the original Duke Nukem) used EGA graphics and PC speaker sounds (and very annoying PC speaker sounds too). Captain Comic did basically the same thing a couple of years before Keen.

Re:Consoles

[bangenge]

If you're gaming on your PC, you're a nerd.

That's not gonna insult anyone here.

Fact is, there's really a lot of games that only a keyboard and mouse can satisfy. FPS's and RTS games are those that come to mind.

Re:Consoles

[BadAnalogyGuy]

On a site catering to nerds, do you honestly think I meant that as an insult?

Re:Consoles

[atari2600]

He's new here fellas. Who wants to go first?

Boring boring

[hedleyroos]

I really don't see the point in newer and faster graphics cards for PC's anymore. When the GeForce2 launched I was still impressed and just had to have one, but now that I can actually easily afford any graphics card I find myself returned to my console roots. Why? Because the shiny graphics are boring.

I can still play Baldur's Gate on my PC - that's all I need. Good enough graphics and great fun.

Waiting for the Wii, waiting for the Wii...

Re:Boring boring

[xtracto]

I have to agree with that. I am, as you waiting for the Wii, although this is going to be the first console I'll buy with great expectation since my father surprised me with the SNES... I owned an Xbox for like 6 months while in university but I got bored of the games (I preffer to make program myself).

Now I have a notebook (3.06 Ghz, 1GB ram) which is great for my PhD student needs (darn, a P3-800 would be ok for latex-pdf-opera-linux combo... but I use Eclipse/java to run MAS simulations) and I believe am expecting to buy a gamine machine to play games, just that.

On a slightly related side note, an Asus GEforce 7600 (named in the article) is £137 on CQOut on UK. This CQOut can be a good EBay replacement, they accept Paypal (some of the sellers) and they have their own online payment system (charges 1% of transactions to the sellers). I think this might be of interest to someone of slashdot. It is available for USA, canada, UK and other countries.

Sorry for the plug but I myself have been looking for a replacement site for ebay/paypal. I got scammed recently, fortunately paypal returned me £148 of the £160 I paid for a ticket to see the Killers... (yeah I was that stupid... the worst thing is that I dont even like that band but my girlfriend loves them and I gave her the GREAAAAAAT idea of buying them on ebay... you can punch me in the face).

Re:Boring boring

[Library Spoff]

*offtopic*
someone wanting £160 for two tickets to see the killers?
lot of money for a gig. You can see them at a festival next summer for that...
yes i know it's not as `intimate`

Just another example of people not buying tickets to see bands anymore but to sell on Ebay.
I wish the fuckers at Ebay would stop allowing the re-sale of tickets but they're making too much money off it. /rant

Re:Boring boring

[Anonymous Coward]

There's another article about a self cleaning mouse today. See if you can wedge a Wii reference in there too.

Re:Boring boring

[hedleyroos]

Aha, I was waiting for that one!

I'll do so tomorrow when the dupe for the self-cleaning mouse thingy is posted.

Re:Consoles

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Heh... I think I mixed up the PS3 with Paint Shop Pro 3.

Video cards

[pe1chl]

This list is for gamers who want to get the most for their money. If you don't play games but surf the Internet and edit video, the cards in this list are probably too expensive.

It would be nice to have such a list for that type of usage.
I want to run X with the usual apps, and to play video. At HD resolution.
I think many "typical Linux users" are in the same boat: not too interested in playing games, want good performance for normal 2D and video.

But the market is more focussed on gaming than on this, and when you get a low-end gaming card (I have an Nvidia 6600GT based card) you end up wasting a lot of power and generating heat, and still not have perfect video playing.

Re:Video cards

[Anonymous Coward]

If all you're doing is playing video (he said editing, not playing) and running basic non-graphic intensive apps(anything beyond photoshop), and not playing any recent (1.5 years or less) 3D graphic intensive games, you'd be able to get away with just about whatever 40-60 dollar card works with the rest of your hardware. It frankly doesn't matter. This is really just to lighten the load off the onboard chip so it doesn't have to be used.

Re:Video cards

[pe1chl]

Have you ever tried playing HD video on a 40-60 dollar card?
Those cards often cannot even drive monitors at 1920x1200 or 1920x1080, especially over DVI.

I had an nvidia FX5200 before, but it cannot play video at 1920x1200 fullscreen. Something goes haywire, probably because it is overloaded.

Re:Video cards

[jimicus]

I think many "typical Linux users" are in the same boat: not too interested in playing games, want good performance for normal 2D and video.

But the market is more focussed on gaming than on this,

Or you could use Xgl....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xgl

Re:Video cards

[Anonymous Coward]

I really want to know where people get the notion that a fancy 3D video card is needed for video editing and running photoshop etc. All you need is something that acts as a framebuffer for the resolution you're running at. Beyond that, the card's image output quality is the most important aspect.

Re:Video cards

[value_added]

It would be nice to have such a list for that type of usage. I want to run X with the usual apps, and to play video. At HD resolution. I think many "typical Linux users" are in the same boat: not too interested in playing games, want good performance for normal 2D and video.

This reads almost like an afterthought, but I think it deserves a +5 INSIGHTFUL. I can't count how many times I've read posts or articles on Slashdot concerning video cards and performance and wonder why I'm bothering to read any of it. Not to sound trollish, but c'mon people, some of us don't play games, have no interest in games, but do need or want a capable video card. For any number of reasons. Granted that gamers demand top notch performance, and they may or may not represent the market for the better cards, but if the discussion is going to be so narrowly focused, then maybe all such articles should be subjected to a Real Time with Bill Maher NEW RULES moment and relegated to the Games section. Moreover, this being Slashdot and C-Colon-Backlash, I'd like think that anyone submitting articles concerning video cards would be cognisant of who their audience really is.

Re:Video cards

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a GeForce 4 (Ti 4800 SE) which is probably worth approximately nothing now, and my computer can actually handle (some) HD video quite nicely - the video card does 1920x1200 fine (though it's to a CRT, not over DVI), and I can play a fullscreen 1080i video in VLC with no problems. But I think that happens to be using MPEG-2, and it keeps the CPU (P4 3GHz) about 80% busy - I expect it'd be worse with newer compression formats (though I don't have any to test with), and then it'd be useful to have a higher-end card that can accelerate the decompression.

Re:Video cards

[whitehornmatt]

Yes, I watch HD fine through my FX5200

Re:Video cards

[arthurh3535]

Pretty much any built in video card on motherboards or any currently "new" video cards are heavily overbuilt for 2D and web surfing.

IIRC, 32-bit color quality only requires 16 megabytes of RAM, so any video card that has twice that can handle desktop surfing quite easily.

Well, unless you've decided to turn on massive anti-aliasing and layering like WinVista and such.

Re:Video cards

[kimvette]

I run Linux and I want an extremely fast card. What benefits gamers benefits folks who work with graphics, multimedia, and 3D apps. On my new system I'm going 7600 GT - phenomenal performance for its price point (I draw the line for video cards at $200, or $300 for a video card with integrated tuner). Since I want to learn Blender, 3D performance is extremely important to me.

More so now, in fact, since the advent of xgl. Since OpenGL acceleration is going to be used for conventional 2D operations, and 2D optimization is going the way of the dodo on pretty much every platform, give me an ultra-fast 3D video chipset regardless of whether I'm on a home machine, workstation at the office, or a laptop.

Re:Video cards

[Jaysyn]

The title of the article is "Best *Gaming* Video Cards". Is that so difficult for you to understand?

Jaysyn

Re:Video cards

[pe1chl]

Pretty much any built in video card on motherboards or any currently "new" video cards are heavily overbuilt for 2D and web surfing.

Sure, but note I also mentioned HD video playback.

Re:Video cards

[pe1chl]

The problem with playing back video at 80% CPU usage is that it takes very little extra load to overload the CPU. So, when a cronjob wakes up, a mail comes in and it is spam and virusscanned, or the reading of the MPEG data takes a little more CPU than expected, you quickly encounter framedrops.

It would be better when the MPEG decoding happened in hardware, including the postprocessing filtering etc. This would be similar functionality as found in DVB set-top boxes, DVD players, etc. MPEG in, video out, without effort from the CPU.

I would prefer such hardware on my video card over 3D accelleration. Maybe a sufficiently versatile 3D accellerator could be programmed to perform those functions. Certain cards boast "video support" that appears to be working this way, but often it is only implemented under Windows, not in the Linux driver.

Re:Video cards

[pe1chl]

It did not work on my FX5200, and on the nvidia forum there are several posts from people encountering the same problem.
(strange effect that looks like horizontal line jitter not unlike the scrambling systems sometimes used with analog TV)

It only happens at fullscreen. Going back to a window only *slightly* smaller than fullscreen solves it.
(but of course this looks ugly on the TV)

Re:Video cards

[Anonymous Coward]

You answered your own question. A fast enough CPU is much more important in playing HD video than the actual video card.
While some form of GPU acceleration for decoding video exists, both implementations from Nvidia and ATI require an extra ~$30 (forgot the exact price) software to actually make use of it, so it is a non-starter for most people.

Re:Video cards

[k8to]

If my Matrox G550 Can drive 1920x1080 just fine, surely these modern cards can manage it?

The cost of my card was around 50 bucks.

Re:Video cards

[Anonymous Coward]

Most nVidias and ATIs on the market are focused on gaming.

For your kind of usage you want a Matrox or a nVidia Quadro.

Re:Video cards

[pe1chl]

From the datasheet of your card:

Maximum resolutions (per display)
        Digital: 1280 x 1024
        Analog, main display: 2048 x 1536
        Analog, secondary display: 1600 x 1200

Missed target?

[cgenman]

Specifications and reviews that really get into the nitty-gritty are great - that is, if you have the time to digest everything. At the end of the day, all a gamer really needs to know is what is the best video card for the money.

No time but looking for the best video card for the money? Here, let me shortcut you to 7 pages of options.

Re:Missed target?

[LoverOfJoy]

Because the secret REAL target was to get as many ads shown to you as possible.

Re:Missed target?

[Damon Cleeve]

Maybe you should simply cross reference the amount you have to spend with your motherboard's interface instead of reading all seven pages... I think that's the point.

sarcasm

[macadamia_harold]

It's 2006. You need a video card.

It would be great, if, say, someone had done a video card shootout, and included onboard video as a control group. Then you could link to it to support your statement.

Re:sarcasm

[grammar fascist]

I'm running Xorg-air + Compiz on an Intel 945GM, and it's very snappy. (Of all the plugins, only Blur makes it crank.) It doesn't even drain the battery more than regular 2D compositing.

No, I can't play Quake IV on it, but I do have wobbly windows that stick to each other. :D Quake 3 and its generation all run fine.

Take that, integrated graphics naysayers.

Re:sarcasm

[Captain Splendid]

I'm tempted to call shenanigans unless you were running Q3 with everything off at 640x480. What kind of fps are you getting?

Re:sarcasm

[damiangerous]

122 fps.

On a slightly lower end machine (with the 945GM video), 83 fps

Re:sarcasm

[crabpeople]

As you say battery, I must assume that you are running a laptop. Laptop video cards are not "onboard" so to speak. They are made for light to moderate gaming and thusly have WAY more processing power than a normal desktop onboard video.

You have a laptop with a video card in it. Lots of laptops come with nvidia or ati video cards built in.

Re:sarcasm

[lordofthechia]

You are correct, the integrated Video graphics could use some more official benchmarking (since that is what alot of people will be comparing a new Vid Card to). Of the integrated chipsets I can vouch for the 6100 (and by extension the 6150), I've built two Linux Gaming rigs using a mobo with that chipset and I get decent FPS in WoW (with most everything turned up). Best sub 400 machine I've built!

Re:sarcasm

[default luser]

What's so hard to believe? Onboard graphics have had performance to run Quake III since Nvidia released the NForce chipset. With an onboard GeForce 2 MX core and dual-channel DDR, the NForce could run Quake III almost as fast as the standalone card.

The GMA 900 and 950 series are a little higher in performance than the GeForce 2 MX, and they also have pixel shaders. What really holds the GMA 9x0 back is lack of hardware vertex shaders or TnL. It can play older games just fine without hardware (just like cards like the Radeon 7000VE and the Kyro II used to), but newer games crawl without hardware vertex shaders.

Re:Consoles

[Secrity]

I'm not insulted; although I am not a nerd, I am a geek. ;)

Re:Consoles

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're on /. you are a nerd - read the subtitle of the website - News For Nerds - if any of this interests you, you are a nerd (or depending on your locale and the appropriate colloquial terms, a geek). Consoles have some games that just don't transfer to PC, no doubt - Metal Gear Solid is horrible on PC controls and intuitive on PS, fighter games are very very wierd to play on PC (emulators). On the other hand, try playing an RTS, an FPS, or an MMO on a console without buying an attachable keyboard and mouse and you'll discover (if you're any good at the games) why we gamer geeks of these genres prefer our PCs.

Of course, if you are out insulting nerd-dom on a) the internet b) /. you probably only play the sports games on consoles anyways (I always wondered who bought those).

Re:Consoles

[mcvos]

If you're gaming on your PC, you're a nerd.

If you're reading Slashdot, you're a nerd. What's your point?

Re:Consoles

[Jedi Alec]

Wii, XBox360, PSP3.

If you're gaming on your PC, you're a nerd.

I got my mom hooked on Bejeweled...I'll let you know when she opens a /. account.

Anti-aliasing at high-end

[tygerstripes]

I recently installed a fanless 7600GT. This thing makes no noise at all and, with careful internal cabling, has no problem being passively cooled.

Now, playing HL2 at a resolution of 1680x1050 with HDR, AF, all the fancies turned on, it played fine but with a (barely) noticeable judder when things got really busy.

So, I tried turning off Anti-Aliasing (this is one of the most demanding graphics features, as the GPU essentially has to treat each pixel as many pixels and work out the difference - it's to reduce the jagged, stepped appearance of diagonal lines). And d'you know what? I couldn't tell the difference at all. The frame rates went right up, but the appearance on screen was basically identical.

It occurred to me that when you're at a decent resolution AA really doesn't matter - the individual pixels are so difficult for your eye to distinguish that diagonal lines look diagonal, whether anti-aliased or not.

So basically, AA is an almost useless feature when you've got a good enough resolution. I can't find a game that will slow my card down - Doom3, Oblivion, you name it - and this card was less than £150. There's going to have to be a serious upping of the ante in games detail if anyone expects me to consider one of these £200+ cards to be of any worth.

Re:Anti-aliasing at high-end

[mdarksbane]

Yes, almost exactly.

Anti-aliasing is basically sampling parts of the image at 2x or 4x the resolution. 4x anti-aliasing is similar to just rendering at 2x the resolution (samples go up by square of resolution), except for the video card manufacturers can pull some fancy tricks to make it actually faster than that.

When you are playing at a high enough resolution, you are already sampling at a high enough frequency that most artifacts will disappear.

I think at 1024x768 you can still notice a difference, and on bad artwork, even at higher resolutions the AA can help (buildings with sharp 90 degree edges can be very noticeable at times). But for most games, I run at 1600x1200 and don't really notice the AA difference either.

Re:Anti-aliasing at high-end

[matt328]

I agree with that. I myself have a fan(ful?) 7600GT, and if you run at any decent resolution at all AA is not necessary. I immediately noticed this in Oblivion, HDR/no AA looks and performs much better than Bloom/4xAA and even at 16X the image quality didn't impress me. Sure if you're running something at 640x480, AA makes a world of difference, but at 1280x1024, its hardly noticeable and will destroy your frame rate.

Re:Anti-aliasing at high-end

[glesga_kiss]

So, I tried turning off Anti-Aliasing (this is one of the most demanding graphics features, as the GPU essentially has to treat each pixel as many pixels and work out the difference - it's to reduce the jagged, stepped appearance of diagonal lines). And d'you know what? I couldn't tell the difference at all. The frame rates went right up, but the appearance on screen was basically identical.

I concur. I also just got a 7600 GeForce Go and I've been playing Half Life 2 with all of the settings maxed out. When on a particularly complex scene involving water reflection, I noticed that looking at your hoverboat craft slowed the FPS right down. I turned down AA and got a huge performance increase with no noticable quality difference. I made a point of looking through chain-link fences and up at the trees. To be honest, I couldn't even notice any improvement with the AA maxed out. You still got the jaggies and moving the view point produced the usual "dot crawl" you get when looking at thin objects. I'm currently running at 2xAA IIRC which should be a decent tradeoff.

Re:Anti-aliasing at high-end

[Anonymous Coward]

No. What you are describing would be 4X or 16X supersampling. (The x is the number of samples... the square of the resolution multiplier, only they won't be in a square grid, they will be at best a rotated grid or scatter pattern.)

That's NOT what 2x or 4x is doing on almost every game. Mostly what you're seeing is rotated grid multisampling, which samples selectively along the edges of polygons to remove any jagged edges with high contrast - and that's all.

Probably your monitor or eyes are too fuzzy to show the single pixels, or you just aren't looking at the things that show the flaws.

Sufficiently good anisotropic filtering would normally cover the rest - but as various pixel shaders become more common, we're actually starting to get artefacts based on the interference between shader pixels and screen pixels, rather than between texels and screen pixels - only this time, we have no LOD tricks to try to smooth things over. The results can sometimes be very ugly.

Another thing that tends to show up the flaws is when things tend to be modelled with textures with alpha channels - stuff like gratings, windows, wrought iron, tree leaves and grass. Those often sharp corners don't filter very well at all, unless you specifically multisample along the edges, or even supersample specifically for those textures where that's an issue (for an example, Geforce 7xxx series cards can do this, it's called transparency-adaptive supersampling, and it makes trees look not blocky).

Ever seen shimmering while moving? On anything? Textures, the edges of things, where light shines off things, water shimmering where it's not supposed to, grass and trees flickering slightly... the subtle curves of the LOD just being too low, too many shortcuts in the anisotropic filtering, and causing keftales... Maybe you're used to it. Maybe you think it's good enough, or that it always does it, but it doesn't and it shouldn't. Those are just the results, really, of the shortcuts we're using today to get this stuff rendered in good time, and over time we'll have to use less of those, or make them look better.

Supersampling can look a lot better. A LOT better. However, that really will start to eat the performance for breakfast - sure, the bus texture compression will get a lot of the volume down, but it's still shifting twice or four times as much as normal.

You can enable that if you really want to, by using nHancer for an nVIDIA (not sure about ATI but I'm sure there's a way), but it's something you'd be more likely to use on a workstation, or a technique you'd be more likely to use in batch renderings or raytracing.

Really, we do still have a lot of unresolved quality issues. We're using anisotropic trilinear filtering on the textures; why isn't it tricubic? Why isn't it full precision? Why only 16 taps? Why aren't we doing full-screen supersampling more often?

Happily, graphics are by far the fastest evolving technology in the computer hardware world (thanks a lot to ATI's and nVIDIA's constant one-upmanship, here's hoping it continues).

I'm happy you've found something good enough for you right now. I've got sharp eyes and an LCD screen. I see pixels. I see shimmering, and it bugs me. But then again, it's quite surprising that I can actually have enough graphic power in my PC now, to actually play some games supersampled... if you saw how much smoother it looks without the shortcuts, you'd want it too.

And, of course, in a couple of years, it'll be *so* last-generation. Yay.

Re:Anti-aliasing at high-end

[thepotoo]

If you are running at a lower resolution (640*480) then simply turning on AA looks a lot better than upping the resolution. I get 25fps on Oblivion at 640 with AA, but only 16-19 when I run at 1024 with no AA (all other settings are the same.)

But, yeah, if you are already running at 1024, turning on or off AA won't make a much difference in looks.

Re:Anti-aliasing at high-end

[glesga_kiss]

If you are running at a lower resolution (640*480) then simply turning on AA looks a lot better than upping the resolution.

It's a laptop so I made sure it had a card powerful enough to run at native resolution for the next few years or so. 1280x800 IIRC. I'll try your suggestion out on my old rig, it's still active for multiplayer etc. and the source games take it down to 15fps at times. Though I have to admit, the higher resolution comes in handy for long range vision in games if there's a lot of sniping going on.

Sorry Tom, but you've got it all wrong

[Taagehornet]

Instead of wowing their audience with in-depth benchmarks they head right for what someone reading a review really wants, an opinion of the best bang for the buck.

Sorry Tom, but I have to disagree. What interests me is not your conclusions but your measurements leading up to it. I may have other preferences than you, what you consider barely acceptable performance may be more than I need, you may be able to accept more fan-noise than I, etc. If you provide me with the details, I'm perfectly capable of drawing my own conclusions.

Re:Sorry Tom, but you've got it all wrong

[secret_squirrel_99]

If you provide me with the details, I'm perfectly capable of drawing my own conclusions.

In which case you could read any one of the 87000 other articles and reviews that provide that additional depth. This article was quite clearly intended for those folks, and there are plenty of them, who don't want to spend more time buying a video card than than they would buying a car

Re:Sorry Tom, but you've got it all wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Taagehornet, you've got it all wrong. What you're asking for is already on Tom's site (VGA performance charts, review, etc). But do you know how much of a pain in the ass it is to check back and forth between different benchmarks and different vendors for price? Throw it all together for me and make some recommendations, and then I can look into more detail on a few cards in the right price range. This is a great article; I hope they come out with one of these every couple of months as prices change and boards are released.

AGP offering...

[BSonline]

ATI x1600 - under 150 AND has a decent amount of Bang.

Don't panic, I really did mention a non-Nvidia graphics card. This is the one that made me switch.

Bangs per watt?

[DrXym]

Some graphics cards consume monstrous amounts of power, probably enough to add a TCO of $30 or more per year to the actual price. It would be great to see a price comparison that took into account the cost of power the thing ate during its lifetime.

Re:Bangs per watt?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but in cold weather you'd use that electricity in heating anyway, meaning that it's irrelevant for Alaskans but should be counted double for Texans (since they have to dissipate the heat with aircon), but only for 8 months of the year... basically I'm saying it's more complicated than you think. And lets not even get into the fact that you'll probably need to run an extra case fan (which generates its own heat) for a hot card.

All they can realistically do is provide idle/loaded power consumption figures.

as if it matters right now

[Anonymous Coward]

any gamer needing a new graphics soon, is probably waiting for the dx10 cards. if you buy a card now, it'll be old as soon as vista is there...

Best bang for the buck?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sega Dreamcast.

The one problem with this list

[mdarksbane]

Is that it ignores feature support.

For example, some fancier shading tricks are only supported in the Geforce 6800 and later (try running, say, the new Company of Heroes game on a 6600. You can get a great frame rate, but you're missing out on a lot of cool looking stuff).

A lot of times going from one generation to the next (or from the consumer card to the once-flagship-card) will net you a lot more than just pure speed. I work for a gaming type company, and I know a lot of the features we use in some of our shaders just plain aren't supported on lower end cards, or are "supported" by the driver but are actually implemented in software, which means if we can't code around it the feature get disabled for that card, and your game won't look as pretty. It's becoming more and more of a concern with new games.

It's still a nice quick snapshot intro to the graphics cards available, though. The sort of run down I try to do for people when they're asking what they should buy.

Re:The one problem with this list

[Phaid]

The 6600 series cards are all newer than the 6800 series. They support all of the same API features. What really differentiates the Nvidia 6xxx series cards are hardware features -- number of pipelines, memory type and bandwidth, gpu and memory clock speeds, etc. The very low end cards like 6200 don't support 64-bit textures or SLI, but all of these support the same shader model. The same is true of the 7800/7600/7900 cards among each other. Of course, since the lower end cards in a given generation are less powerful, you may have to turn off certain eye candy features to get good frame rates at high resolutions, depending on the game. But the basic support for those features is still there.

Re:The one problem with this list

[mdarksbane]

They all support the shader model, but will the cost be the same?

It doesn't really matter so much that they "support" a feature if it still kills your performance to use it.

I'm just saying that it isn't a linear scaling of speed because of the degree of support for specific features. There's more of a difference sometimes than just the clock speed or fill rate.

Or at least, there will be a practical one based on some games turning off features if they know you can't run them at full speed. Company of heroes looks signficantly better on the 6800GT's at work than my 6600GT at home, at the same detail settings. If it were just speed to be worried about my card would look the same, just have half the frame rate.

Re:The one problem with this list

[Damon Cleeve]

Actually, feature support isn't ignored at all, it was heavily considered when the recommendations were written. I know this for a fact, because I wrote the article... :) All geforce 6x00 cards carry the same Shader Model 3.0 support, the same as 7x00 generation cards and X1x00 generation radeons actually. While Shader Model 3.0 is highly touted over 2.0, the only tangible difference in any new title - and there's only a very small handful of them, Oblivion, AOE 3, Serious Sam 2, and Far Cry (with a patch!) pretty much make up the bulk of the list - is OpenEXR HDR support. OpenEXR HDR is nice, but it's pretty much limited to very few titles, and it's far from a 'must have' feature. It is pretty, but few cards (even the SM 3.0 compliant ones) are powerful enough to enable it in titles like Oblivion, anyway... So it's a checkbox feature for the most part. In the lower price pojnts, it's not worth getting a SM 3.0 card over a SM 2.0 card just for the feature because the performance degredation is so high in some cases that it's unplayable anyway. In addition, HDR in some titles like Half Life 2: episode 1 only requires Shader Model 2.0 cards like the old 9700 PRO. So dmarksbane, let me assure you... feature support was not ignored in the slightest. I payed real close attention to it. It simply doesn't matter as much as you think it does because the higher price ranges all have equal feature support, and the lower price ranges aren't powerful enough to enable it anyway. :)

Re:The one problem with this list

[mdarksbane]

I'm actually very surprised to hear back directly from you. Thank you for the response, and I'm glad to hear that you did take these things into consideration.

However, there is a general problem (and it's not yours, it's the hardware manufacturer's) about what "support" actually means.

For example, ATI cards claim to support the OpenGL 2.0 spec. And they do... but some of it is in software.

There were several shader methods relied upon by our software that are part of the spec, supported on Geforce 6800 hardware.. but an equivalent ATI card which claims support for the same spec supported it in software, and performance dropped over 100-fold.

There are several similar issues between a Geforce 6600 and a 6800, or a 6800 and 7900, despite the fact that both "support" the same shader models.

I don't expect a review like these to take all of this into account (it's hard enough finding a developer site that actually does). But it can be an annoyance, and in cases where programming around it isn't feasible (we found another way to implement things on the ATI card), can influence how your game is going to look.

Re:The one problem with this list

[Damon Cleeve]

Hey man, I hear you. But while those issues exist, and they're a pain in the butt for developers... in practical use they aren't a consideration and I'll tell you why. To the best of my knowledge, there is no game out there that a human being could see a difference on when running, say, a 6600 Vs a 6800. Even in screen captures, you'd have to use a utility to point out per-pixel differences. To me, it's a bigger issue the differences between say, Nvidia and Ati drivers - Nvidia drivers still run a few optimizations by default that push what I consider the acceptable limits of quality vs. speed optimization - but whatever. These differences are pretty easy to spot in static screenshots, although once again - in real-life gameplay it's rarely an issue, so I find it hard to make as big a deal out of it as some people do. So I think you're coming at this from a developer perspective... and that's totally valid, don't get me wrong - but I'm not sure it has an impact on someone looking for the best performance card for the buck.

Re:The one problem with this list

[mdarksbane]

I still swear that Company of Heroes wouldn't let me enable some of the shaders on my 6600GT at home that it would on the 6800 at work... but that might just be the developer trying to look after me a little too much.

Good article, and good responses :)

Re:Consoles

[Anonymous Coward]

Account? Who needs an account. Four years I've been reading /. and I still refuse to create an account.

This won't work if you change processor arches

[Benanov]

Windows bluescreened the last time I swapped a disk from an AMD box to an Intel one. Linux of course won't notice if you're using the i386 kernel builds.

Re:This won't work if you change processor arches

[giorgiofr]

I switched from an Athlon XP to a Pentium 4 to an AMD 64 and I'm still using the same system.

Re:This won't work if you change processor arches

[MBGMorden]

I've swapped between AMD and Intel boxes with no issues. It's all about prepping the system first.

Re:This won't work if you change processor arches

[lymond01]

It's because Windows cares about your motherboard. Like when imaging your systems at work, if you put an image from, say, a Dell Optiplex 620 on a Dell Optiplex Gx280, the 280 will bluescreen because Windows has different chipset drivers loaded from the image. This is where there's Sysprep and a slew of other image-helping systems.

Re:Consoles

[tepples]

Wii, XBox360, PSP, PS3.

Which leaves how much room for games produced by smaller developers, such as shareware, freeware, and Slashdot's darling free software?

I dread buying new hardware

[gravyface]

I rarely keep up on gaming technology, but when its "time" (and it's time: there are a couple of new games out there I want to play), I always feel like I'm going to get ripped off because the new flux-capacitor-super-alpha-double-barrel-acronym-a cronym 3D rendering technology is coming out next week and the card I just bought will self destruct in 5...4...3...2...

Uphill. Both ways.

[Kadin2048]

Back in my day we calculated our vertex transformations by hand, in the snow, before breakfast and with no shoes on our feet

Pfft ... you kids; back in my day, we didn't have hands!

Re:Uphill. Both ways.

[AceCaseOR]

Yeah, we had to write the calculations with our noses, because we couldn't afford sticks. My mother would wake me up to start doing the calculations at 1 in the morning, an hour before we went to bed, and spent all day and night doing those vertex calculations. And then, at night, right before we went to bed, our mother (there were about 16 of us living there, in the lake) would kill us and dance on our graves. And then 1 hour earlier, we'd have to get up and start it all over again.

With apologies to Monty Python

Anything from BFG Tech

[robyannetta]

I purchased a Geforce 6800 GT OC from BFG Tech when they were first released in February of 2005 for $400. Yeah, I splurged for the fastest thing out there at the time, but it was worth it.

In early September 2006, the two fans on the GPU cracked and seized. The card automatically shut down to protect itself from overheating.

I called BFG Tech and told them what happened. They told me that the fans only had a one year warranty on them and the card was six months or so out of warranty. But the CS rep on the phone was friendly and said they'd replace it anyway.

I sent in the card and exactly 7 days later I got a brand new card free from them.

These guys at BFG Tech are the best friends a gamer could have. They've made me a customer for life, plus they've saved me a ton of money so I don't have to buy a new card.

All my new cards I buy in the future will be from BFG.

Compare 2D "workstation" cards, too.

[Kadin2048]

Agreed. I'm in the same boat; I rarely play games on my Linux machine, and when I do, they're typically 2D games anyway (*cough* TuxRacer *cough*).

I'm using the video card that came in the computer when I bought it, and have found it to be pretty good: it's an NVidia Quadro4 NVS 280. Allegedly it's a $200 card for the AGP version, but I think you could find it for a lot less than that, based only on the fact that I got the entire computer that it's in for about $280. (It's a HP Workstation from Retrobox; I can't say enough good about that company.) There seem to be a lot of OEM-branded ones hanging around, mostly IBM and HP because they were used in a lot of low-end workstations; I bet you could find one for under $50. Just make sure you get the LFH to DVI or VGA cable if you get a card used; otherwise it won't be worth much.

Anyway, for what I do, a decent 2D card with dual-display capabilities is better than an insane 3D card that I'm never going to use. The Quadro4 is passively cooled, so no fan noise, and it only draws around 20 watts or so, from the specs I've seen.

I don't know whether a 2D card like this would allow you to do hardware acceleration of windowing (a la Xgl or Quartz Extreme), but I've never been particularly driven to play with that stuff anyway. My Mac does it automagically, and that's just dandy, but it's not worth the afternoon/weekend that I suspect it would take to get working on my Linux machine.

It would be interesting to see a comparison between 2D 'workstation,' 3D 'gaming,' and built-in graphics chipsets, doing average desktop tasks, specifically not 3D games, but including lots of window resizing, text scrolling, and video playback. I suspect that this sort of thing would be of use to a lot of non-gaming users, who are not really served by the focus of reviews as they're currently done.

The idea of being able to run a higher framerate in Quake than my monitor refreshes at really has never excited me; but knowing which cards will be able to do a live resize of a 1080p video window without dropping frames would be nice.

Re:Compare 2D "workstation" cards, too.

[Jaysyn]

Maybe I didn't understand your post, but that Quadro is still a 3d card. The Quadro series of cards are much more precise than your average run of the mill GeForce, that's why they are used in CAD & CAM workstations.

I'll have to check this retrobox place out.

Jaysyn

acceptionally

[Anonymous Coward]

acceptably exceptional or exceptionally acceptable ?

Geforce 7600 GT AGP

[DaFallus]

Best AGP Card For ~$175
Geforce 7600 GT

It really would have been nice for Tom's Hardware to have included a link to where you could actually buy this card. The only version of this card that I can find for sale is the PCI-E and I'm not really looking to buy a new motherboard just so I can upgrade my video card.

Re:Geforce 7600 GT AGP

[les_c_gulde]

It's way down at the bottom of the search results, but you can find it on Newegg (Leadtek).

way off

[tomz16]

Wow... these recommendations are all way off... I picked up a 7900GT for $200 from Newegg two weeks ago, and I've seen 6600GT's go for much $100 on e-bay.

For casual gamers, the 6600GT is plenty fast in current games!

-Tom

Re:way off

[tomz16]

should read : much less than $100

Re:way off

[Damon Cleeve]

They're not way off. Find me a new 7900 GT for $200. No, 'open box' doesn't count. As far as ebay, the article clearly states the prices are for new cards... used isn't in the scope of the article. Looks bang-on to me.

print url

[porsche922]

The mandatory print url link to the story http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/26/the_best_ga ming_video_cards_for_the_money/print.html

PCIe advertisement?

[mtmra70]

Is it me or did they cheap out on the AGP suggestions?

I have an AGP motherboard that cost me well over $200 (6 sata ports that can do RAID 1/0 & RAID 1/0/1+0 along with every other bell and whistle) and right now I want to get the best bang for my buck....but my buck may be over $200. Their suggestion for a $200+ card is to go PCIe, which means I have to buy a new mobo. If I am doing that I almost certainly need a new CPU and memory. You would be a fool to buy a new mobo that supports your 'old' CPU just for PCIe.

Re:PCIe advertisement?

[Gnavpot]

Is it me or did they cheap out on the AGP suggestions?

You are paying a huge penalty for AGP. So huge that if you have a recent rig, you will have to spend a fortune for a GPU which is better than your current one. So the best general advice is really: Stick with your current GPU and save the money for later or buy a new PCI-e rig and finance most of it with the saving on the GPU.

Example:
For the price difference between a 7600 GT PCI-e and a 7800 GS AGP you can buy an AMD Athlon64 3200+ and a motherboard which supports the DDR SDRAM you probably have on your old motherboard. This motherboard/CPU combo may not be what you really want, but it is "for free" since the two GPUs performs identically.

Re:PCIe advertisement?

[mtmra70]

So you are telling me if I have a $300 budget for a card and have an AGP board, I can magically replace a $200 mobo, $150 CPU AND get an equal "$300 AGP PCIe" card for only $300????

Re:PCIe advertisement?

[WuphonsReach]

Memory prices are up over the past 2 weeks which is driving costs up for everything. And the price on the 7800GS isn't *that* bad ($275-$300).

(A dual-core CPU, motherboard, 2GB of RAM is currently running around $500.)

Re:PCIe advertisement?

[Gnavpot]

So you are telling me if I have a $300 budget for a card and have an AGP board, I can magically replace a $200 mobo, $150 CPU AND get an equal "$300 AGP PCIe" card for only $300????

No, I am telling you that for the price difference between a 7600 GT PCI-e and a 7800 GS AGP you can buy an AMD Athlon64 3200+ and a motherboard.

screw toms hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Ran across a BSA ad, stopped reading. I'm not actually into blanket-blocking ads, but I think I'll make an exception for Toms.

It was pretty much content free anyway: "ATI or nVidia, here's the prices we pulled off PriceWatch, uh yeah they're all good".

Why all the negativity?

[shoolz]

My buddy Don wrote that article. Actually, wrote it and continually updated it on their forum for the past 2 years until Tom's decided it was so valuable to the community that it warranted a full Tom's article. Many, many people, myself included, use that list to help them make a sound decision for a card in their price range.

How can everyone criticize it so frivolously and heavily when all the thinking and research and careful consideration has been distilled down into a no-nonsense, 7 page go-to guide?

Re:Why all the negativity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I thought this list looked familiar.

Re:Why all the negativity?

[srvivn21]

Slashdot is part of the Internet's Yin. Look through the past stories and make a tally of how many ideas and gadgets are met with antipathy and disdain versus how many garner acclaim. You might be surprised.

I only noticed this characteristic after something that I have some connection to was treated with the scorn-stick.

Welcome to Slashdot. Leave your sensitivity at the door.

Re:Why all the negativity?

[shoolz]

Agreed. I've been a /. reader since late '96, so I'm well used to it. Others, especially new users, not so much.

I sent the triumphant mail to Don this morning to tell him he hit the front page, and he was crestfallen by all the poor behavior and negative remarks.

Prior to today, he was only vaguely aware of /. and never read it. After today's treatment, I don't think he'll ever come back.

I'm not sure which is sadder

[usacomp2k3]

The fact that Tom's was linked here on /. or the fact that I followed the link.

Because this is Slashdot

[Sycraft-fu]

The criticism is highly unsurprising for two reasons:

1) A lot of Slashdot users that like to post often are broke. Well ok, maybe they aren't, but their computer buying habits are as if they were. They have very old and/or low end computer hardware and take it as a badge of pride. Thus they tend to have a real disdain for higher end hardware as being "unnecessary". Despite their proclaimed pride for their low end hardware, they are jealous of those that do have higher end systems. One of the ways some people deal with jealousy is to downplay the thing they are jealous of.

2) The article isn't Linux focused. Slashdot is a hangout of Linux users and thus Linux zealots. The zealots think that their needs are the most important needs and thus the ones that everyone ought to focus on.

I wouldn't take the comments too seriously. People love to bitch on online forums, and it's real easy to be extremely critical when your own work isn't on the line. It IS a good list and one that I'm going to refer people to who are looking at graphics upgrades. It answers the question that I get asked most often for computer upgrades: "I want games to look better/run faster so I want a better vid card. I only have $X to spend, what should I get?"

XFX 7950GT

[JebusIsLord]

I just picked up the new XFX 7950GT. I know bang/buck isn't quite as good as a Radeon X1900XT, but I bought it for 2 reasons:

1) Passive cooling! My overclocked gaming machine is now quiet enough to sleep beside.

2) No catalyst control center. Good lord, what a horrible piece of crap software that thing is.

Re:XFX 7950GT

[Ultra Hits Radio]

How much did that cost, it must be pretty big and handle everything that is out there for now at least. I just have a 6800 gt 256mb and it runs my games just fine.

Re:XFX 7950GT

[JebusIsLord]

$390 (Canadian) for the overclocked version is what I paid. I think they said $299 US for the standard-clocked one is the MSRP.

DirectX 10

[pauljuno]

And speaking on this subject, the vast majority of serious gamers who purchase these cards would recommend waiting until the DirectX 10 cards become available, they should be coming onto the market shortly in anticipation of the release of Vista. This will apparently be quite an upgrate from DirectX 9.

Re:DirectX 10

[jawboot]

Ooo, a bargain hunter's dream. I will wait for the DX9 cards to hop into the $5 bin then.

fbucks

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a video card, and bang divided by bucks, as bucks approaches zero the value of bang doesn't matter.

Actually, this article just divides graphics cards up into price categories and picks the best one from each group.

Once, Tom's Hardware did measure the "bang" of several different graphics cards and divide by bucks: fbucks.

2D versus 3D cards

[Kadin2048]

Interesting. I hadn't paid much attention to it (can you tell?) other than getting it working and being pleased with its performance.

I guess I'm a little unclear as to the real difference between a "2D" and "3D" card anymore, then. The Quadro4 is advertised as being for 2D work, particularly CAD and graphics stuff: although now that I'm rereading the sales blurbs, it says "optimized for 2D performance..." So I guess that just means that it does do some hardware 3D acelleration, just not much, because it's optimized for precision rather than throughput?

I once read something that said that some cards implement more of the OpenGL instruction set than others do, but I can't find any substantiation of this. Just makes me more interested in seeing a real comparison sometime that included some of the [advertised as] "2D" cards compared to the [advertised as] "3D" cards, for non-gaming and graphics use.

There must be some advantage, otherwise why do products like the newer Quadro4s or Wildcats? Somebody must think that they're superior.

As to Retrobox, their stock fluctuates pretty dramatically. Some weeks they might be just chock full of workstations and servers, other times it can be pretty dismal. The machine that I got was a single-proc (P4) HP xw5000, which is certified as being RHEL-certified. That was actually why I bought it versus something else; at least I knew the hardware wouldn't be too Linux-unfriendly. With 512MB, a 40GB drive and the video card, I think it was around $280. (This was almost a year ago.) I've also heard that they sometimes have really good deals on pizzabox servers, but I've never come up with a good reason to buy one.

If you can deal with not having much of a warranty (or a Windows OEM license) and don't mind waiting a little while to get your system (they refurbish stuff after you order it, apparently, so be prepared to wait two weeks in some cases), you can sometimes get some nice deals.

Unfortunately, the inventory-search part of their web site is down today.
http://www.retrobox.com/rbwww/home/search_menu.asp

Re:2D versus 3D cards

[Jaysyn]

AFAIK, they are just more precise. I don't know how I'd even give a decent example of that, I do civil engineering design & normal AGP cards (GeForce, etc) work just fine for me. I don't know if you'd need that level of precision for designing medical equipment or military hardware. I've heard that the Wildcat / Quadro type cards render faster as well, but again I can't give a good example.

Great buy on that workstation BTW

Jaysyn

PCI?

[Znrch]

So am I the only person on earth who doesn't have AGP or PCI-E? Hello, stone age :(

Re:Consoles

[VirionNW]

Ah it happens, with the pile-up of acronyms it's only a matter of time before they start to come out randomly.