Massive Graphics Card Review

Brian Tonka writes to tell us that rojakpot has posted a pretty comprehensive graphics card review including over 240 different desktop graphics cards. With each of the vendors given their own section and using 15 different points of comparison this should be quite a starting reference for the enthusiast and casual buyer alike.

simple: open source drivers?

[Speare]

Simple question. What's the list of modern cards that can accelerate 3d without a binary vendor driver on Linux? Something you can load on a typical Ubuntu or Fedora without finding JoeNoName's-Bleeding-Repository?

Follow-up: can Red Hat or Novell or somebody please offer a certification logo program for some of these cards? You know, a sticker that you can find on the boxes in CompUSA or something, which says that it's not going to be a stink to get running on Linux?

3D at 2560x1600

[rufusdufus]

A while ago I was trying to build a machine that could run my 30" cinema display at full native resolution (2560x1600) in 3D. Surprisingly difficult to figure it out partly because of the terminology. To run at that resolution, the card must be 'dual link' which is different from 'dual cards in SLI configuration' and they may actually be mutually exclusive features.

I got dual nvidia 7800 GTX KO's in SLI configuration and it works great(even though the builder said it probably wouldn't)! I can run games like GuildWars and *upcoming beta product* at full resolution with excellent frame rates.

Just an FYI.

Re:simple: open source drivers?

[jmorris42]

> The best so far would be the radeon 9250, which is the most recent card supported by the current (open source) x.org
> "radeon" driver, and has EXA acceleration in the just-released 6.9/7.0 version.

Does it actually work yet? I keep on buying ATI based cards on the theory that it is the only major vendor with Free drivers available (even if ATI themselves doesn't help all that much to make them happen, it is still more than Nvidia does) but I have never had success with Xfree86's 3D driver. I always get random hardware lockups until I tire of it and install the proprietary driver. It can be a major bitch as well but once installed correctly the lockups end.

Haven't tried the latest x.org version though, does it work at last? I'd really like to remove the only taint (other than a couple of old Loki games) from an otherwise 100% pure machine.

Re:This isn't a review

[80 85 83 83 89 33]

there are so many people that only have PCI slots (no AGP nor pci-Express) who would give anything for a nice comprehensive comparo review of old-school pci graphics cards.

there is so much debate as to what is the fastest PCI card for gaming; yet the hardware sites don't understand the pain and suffering out there... or do they? all that is available on ANY hardware site is pure conjecture and respewing of marketing hype.

they will NOT do a PCI video card review.

i think they are under pressure from marketing forces (read: ad dollars) to not reveal the actual performance of PCI. (yet the review sites HAVE stated that the move to pciExpress is purely marketing; that there is NO performance benifit from AGP to pci-Express.)

there is even a pci version of nvidia's 6200, yet try and find a review of that! (http://www.3dfuzion.com/cards_6200_pci_128.asp [3dfuzion.com]) yet you can find hordes of reviews of the agp and pciExpress versions of it.

well, many brand name systems have only PCI, and it is a shock to many poor souls when they realize it (not everyone is as thorough as the /. crowd when it comes to picking out computers. and people recieve them as gifts, etc.). and i bet not providing a viable upgrade option is also a marketing move to force people to buy whole new systems just so they can play games.

of course, i'm posting this hours after the article was put up, so prolly no one will even read this.

Re:This isn't a review

[Cerberus7]

You make an excellent point. It's been so long since review sites stopped looking at PCI cards that there's no way to say if AGP itself has shown any benefits beyond a couple of frames per second here or there. Unless somebody were to get their hands on AGP, PCI, and PCI-E versions of the latest generation and reveal the truth to us all. We're talking a couple-thousand bucks worth of video cards, so I'm certainly not in a position to do it. I'd gladly do the testing, though. I have a hunch that AGP would show barely an improvement over PCI in a typical system (where the PCI bus is mostly idle), and PCI-E would only show improvement in a dual-card config.

Some actual reviews of a wide range of cards

[D. Book]

Here are a couple of actual "reviews" comparing a broad sweep of video cards:

Digit-Life's 3Digest [digit-life.com]

Tom's Hardware's VGA Charts [tomshardware.com]

Anyone know of any others? One of the big problems in the hardware review site industry is that they all review the same stuff and duplicate one another's work 100 times over (for various reasons which I won't go into), while you'd be hard pressed to find a single review of many low-mid range cards. Even if the purpose of such reviews would simply be to inform people about how poorly they perform, it's a major oversight. There is still a heavy bias toward high-end stuff in the above linked reviews, but at least there are a few low-end and mid-range cards chucked in.

P.S. Another pity is slashdot's poor editorial standards, accepting the description of the linked article as a "review" being the latest example. I guess I could just stop visiting, but then I'd miss out on all the insightful comments from visitors who actually do produce some worthwhile content. So I just block the ads, so as not to reward the editors' laziness.

Re:This isn't a review

[arth1]

Frankly, I don't consider PCI a real option for high-end gaming.

Good for you. Now move along, cause we're not discussing high-end gaming here.

Rojakpot's list lists PCI/AGP/PCIX/PCIe cards and motherboard chipsets regardless of what they're intended for -- even older cards like Voodoo1 and Matrox M200. That the list is both buggy and appear to have lost parts (what happened to the Matrox P-series, earlier on the list and still in retail?) is a different matter...

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*Art