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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."
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Bah, the PSP3 will totally be crushed by the Wii DS Lite.
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.
...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.
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
. o O ( TwO hEaDs ArE mOrE tHaN oNe... )
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...
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.
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.
The ______ Agenda
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.
:D Quake 3 and its generation all run fine.
No, I can't play Quake IV on it, but I do have wobbly windows that stick to each other.
Take that, integrated graphics naysayers.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
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?
If you're reading Slashdot, you're a nerd. What's your point?
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.
Meta will eat itself
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.
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.
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?
On a slightly lower end machine (with the 945GM video), 83 fps