Tom's Hardware: Win, Lose or Ti - 21 GeForce Titan Tests 109
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."
Re:Past the point of v ideo cards mattering? (Score:3, Interesting)
But I don't want to pay for a TV tuner with my video card any more than I want an Instant Messaging app with my OS [microsoft.com] or Browser [netscape.com].
What I would expect is that if they are going to offer these features, then they should at least be of some reasonable quality - see my other post about quality of picture on TV-outs.
I'd also expect to be able to trade off features/performance for either price or power consumption (and therefore heat/noise), but I'm apparently the only person who cares about that. Or PCI for a second-head.
Observations on an Old System + GeForce MX200 PCI (Score:3, Interesting)
The graphics card built with this system was a Matrox Mill II - so no 3D acceleration to speak of.
Playing Quake and Quake 2 on this system was Just Fine, but anything more modern was just not possible. I tried playing the Quake 3 demo, but was getting something on the order of 1 FPM, so I've been pretty well shut out of all the 3D stuff.
Then the other day, I noticed that the price on an XTacy GeForce MX400 PCI card (no AGP!) was like $150 CAN - so what the hell, I bought it.
It turned out to be DOA (system would not POST) so I exchanged it for the only other PCI card they had in stock, an XTacy MX200 card (which was like $120 CAN)
They also happened to have Quake3 (in the tin box, no less) SoF, and Descent3, all the Loki ports, in the bargin bin for like $10 each, so I got those too.
Stick in the card, grab NVidia's drivers, configure XFree to use them, fire up Q3 - and bam! Playable! Just like that.
Things get a little choppy if more than about 10 people are in a room shooting at each other, and SoF and Descent3 (played in 800x600 with full textures) will "skip" once and a while, but for the most part, the game experience has been just fine.
Interestingly enough, when I turned on the frame rate display on Q3, I was getting anywhere from 10 fps to about 27 fps, with an average of about 15 - and the play experience is just fine. Faster framerates would be nice, but this IS old hardware, and really, it'd just be gravy. I don't particularly find myself wishing that the framerate was higher than it is - in fact, before I turned on the fps display, I thought I was making 30 fps. To see the average was about half that was a real suprise.
I can't help but wonder if the processor or bus is the bottleneck, or if the MX400 card had've worked the display might be a touch faster - but it doesn't really matter. The MX200 is "good enough".
So overall, I'm a happy camper.
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Re:Past the point of v ideo cards mattering? (Score:3, Interesting)
Past that point, unless you have some specific non-gaming application that really needs the 3D performance it seems like kind of a waste.
You should try some different games.
I have a GeForce2 and I've been thinking the same thing for a while, but I just bought the EverQuest expansion "Shadows of Luclin" and now I'm looking for a new video card. My GeForce2 (on a 1.3Ghz Athlon with 1GB of RAM) can't draw the new 512x512 pixel textures and high-polygon character models guickly when I get into areas with lots of other players or lots of vegetation, even at 1024x768 resolution.
EQ has never been the most efficient game in terms of power required to render its displays, but the approach EQ takes is what games *should* be able to do: EQ describes its world in terms of polygons, texture maps and light sources and lets the computer/video card do the rest. Not spending a lot of developer time on making nice-looking graphics render quickly on low-end (or even not-so-low-end!) hardware means more developer time that can be spent on enlarging the virtual world (and Norrath/Luclin is *huge*).
I hear that with some of the $300+ cards, SoL action is smooth at 1600x1200 resolution with all of the bells and whistles turned on... too bad my wife already bought my Christmas presents :(