Tom's Hardware: Win, Lose or Ti - 21 GeForce Titan Tests

msolnik writes "Got a huge wad of cash burning a hole in your pocket? Why not spend it on a fancy new video card... Uncle Tom has reviewed 21 different cards so you can make a well educated decision. This is by far the most best Geforce comparison out there. A definate read for all you hardcore graphics guys."

Past the point of v ideo cards mattering?

[swb]

I have a 2+ year old (in tech terms) ATI Rage 128 based card (AIW-128) running under XP and with the newest ATI drivers and the games I've played with it (most recently the Medal of Honor demo), performance is just fine by my eyes @ 1024x768 and 16 bit color.

I've seen nVidia GeForce2 cards going for $100 but I just don't see the point. There was a time when moving from a 2D card to a 3D card like the orginal Voodoo was really worth the $300 or so it cost -- performance and quality skyrocketed. Similarly the move from the voodoo I to the II, and from the II to that card's next generation (the ATI 128).

Past that point, unless you have some specific non-gaming application that really needs the 3D performance it seems like kind of a waste. 3D performance has been pushed beyond the point where it matters, even for gaming and the features being added seem trivial -- just TV out?

All new cards it seem should come not only with good 3D, but video in and out, TV tuners, and the ability to do hardware MPEG2 compression of full-frame video at zero cost to the CPU. At that point the video card arms race would make more sense..

Bah.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is a bit sad, really. Once upon a time, the test would have between between 21 different cards from 21 different manufacturers, with 21 different chipsets. Now, the vast majority of poeple just go for an nvidia gfx card.

A similar thing happened in the computing world - these days, most people just get an x86 PC - once upon a time, you cuold choose with relatively equal ease between Amiga, Acorn, Atari, Mac, PC, etc. Each had different advantages and disadvantages. Now we get generic boxes based on the mediocre x86 architecture that are differentiated by marketing and hologram badges on the cases...