Getting Away With a Cheap Graphics Card

theraindog writes "High-end graphics cards get all the glory, but most folks have a difficult time justifying $300 or more for a single PC component. But what if you could get reasonable performance in all the latest games from a budget card costing as little as $70? With game developers targeting the relatively modest hardware available in current consoles and trickle-down bringing cutting-edge features down to budget price points, today's low-end graphics cards are more capable than ever. To find out which one offers the best value proposition, The Tech Report has rounded up eight graphics cards between $70 and $170, comparing their game performance, Blu-ray playback acceleration, noise levels, and power consumption, with interesting results."

Comments

Getting Away With a Cheap Graphics Card ?

[goose-incarnated]

Shoplift it.

Re:Failing the spork test?

[Kjella]

This 'uncanny drive' is due to the fact that computers work in binary. (...) Counting hard drive space in decimal increments of bits makes no sense except to hard drive manufacturers

And people don't work in binary. I shouldn't need a calculator to figure out how many 100MB files goes into 1GB, with binary I do and decimal I don't. I hardly ever need to know the number of bits as such, what I need to know is how big things are relative to each other and my disk, CD/DVD platters and so on. If you're designing a network interface you don't work in binary. Your GigE connection is 10^9 bits per second, not 2^30. When the bits are laid out on a magnetic platter, it doesn't come in binary increments, at some points you can't put in more bytes and it stops at 326,554,433,545 bytes but you sell it as a 320GB drive. There are only two places it really matters - chips and addressing, neither of which are really important to people using the computers. For the vast majority of users having SI units would be just fine and like in every other field of science and in everyday life of kilograms, kilowatthours, kilometers (in Europe anyway) and so on. It is only a narrow group of people interacting with the computer on a low level that really need binary units.