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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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?