Video Card
Contents
Description
What To Look For
Recommendations
The addition of other extras like "dual head" (support for two monitors) or better cooling fans may also appear by different brands. At any rate, the first decision to make is what chipset you want your video card to use. If you aren't interested in games, then the choice of chipset isn't too difficult - just about any will do for the 2D desktop applications. There's no point in buying a video card over $100 if you don't plan to play games.
What To Look For:
- There are so many different things to look for in video cards these days, and I certainly can't cover them all. I will discuss a few of them though. First, there are many different 3D features such as bump mapping, hardware T&L (texture & lighting), Z buffers, FSAA (anti-aliasing - reduces jagged edges), anisotropic filtering (improves detail on textures), etc. The last two are the biggest issues right now. They can dramatically improve the visual quality of games, but always at the expense of speed (which is generally measured in the number of FPS [frames per second]). A low FPS would cause the game to be jerky instead of smooth (and thus more difficult to play). Higher resolutions (i.e. 1280x1024 instead of 640x480) also significantly improve the video quality, but at the expense of speed. It's nice to be able to play games at 1024x768 or higher with 4x FSAA and 4x anisotropic filtering (or better). 4x in the previous number just means the number of passes to render the anti-aliasing and filtering. The more passes, the better the quality. Confused yet? :)
- AGP or PCI video cards used to be a question, but now pretty much everyone buys AGP video cards.
- The chipset is what controls the video card's operation and does all the calculations (much like the CPU does for the entire computer). The latest chipsets are designed to do both 2D and 3D applications. The best chipsets currently come from NVIDIA and ATI. Other companies include S3, Matrox, Number 9, etc. The chipset is the most important part of the video card, and the faster, more advanced chipsets will clearly be the better choice. The first decision you should make is which chipset you want to use. This will primarily be dictated by price and the level of performance you're looking for. Video cards have become the most or second most expensive component in a computer (CPUs can cost more).
- Amount of memory on the card is also important. It can affect the speed of operation as well as the number of colors and resolution size that can be used in games. I would suggest 128 MB for a video card that will be used for gaming. 32 MB is really sufficient for 2D desktop applications though. AGP video cards can also use system memory but that can slow things down, so it's better to have plenty of RAM on your video card. The type of memory is also important. DDR SDRAM is about twice as fast as regular SDRAM, and DDR II is even faster than that (DDR stands for double data rate).
- Also pay attention to the supported resolutions, refresh rate, and color depth. These are important if you want to run at very high resolutions with a large number of colors. For most home desktop computers, all current video cards will be sufficient in all these aspects. Refresh rate determines how fast the video card can refresh (redraw on the screen) your display. The higher the better. Pay attention to what the max refresh rate are at the higher resolutions. A 60 Hz refresh rate is too low and will cause noticable flicker on your monitor. 85 or 100 Hz is an ideal refresh rate (easier on the eyes), but 75 Hz may be sufficient for you. Make sure your monitor supports these resolutions and refresh rates as well.
- Some other things to consider are TV-Out, TV-In, video capture capabilities, the speed of the RAM DAC, particular 3D effects that are supported (such as hardware transform and lighting effect), the quality of the cooling fan included (and noise produced by it), and what software bundle the video card comes with since you can often get some good free games through the bundle.
Recommendations:
Chipsets
Cards
- Chipsets - For almost all users, NVIDIA and ATI's lines of video card chipsets are the best solution. It's debatable which is better right now. NVIDIA's fastest (GeForce FX 5950 Ultra) is on par with, or a little slower than ATI's fastest (Radeon 9800 XT 256 MB). These are both very pricey though, and I wouldn't really recommend either due to the extreme prices for a fairly small performance increase. Plus, new cards are on their way out that will cost about the same but offer a huge performance increase. Early benchmarks show the nVidia 6800 Ultra (AKA NV40) performing double the speed of previous cards in some benchmarks. ATI also has a new product coming out - the Radeon X800 XT (AKA R420), and early benchmarks show it even outperforming the nVidia 6800 Ultra! However, if you can't wait for these cards and you have the money to burn, get the ATI Radeon 9800 XT if the absolute best performance is what you're after and money doesn't matter. At most other price levels, ATI is slightly outperforming NVIDIA also. This all depends on what game you play and what features are turned on though. ATI has a much better implementation than NVIDIA of some DirectX 9 features like Pixel Shader 2.0. In some newer games that take advantage of these features, the ATI cards will significantly outperform the NVIDIA cards.
Take a big step down in price, and you have ATI's Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB slightly outperforming NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5900. This is what I would consider the performance sweet spot. Not too pricey, but you still get great performance.
Take another step down and we find a price sweet spot. For under $130 you can get very respectable performance from the Radeon 9600 Pro. Another good option is the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, although it's quite a bit more expensive. The cheaper GeForce FX 5600 can be found for a little less than the Radeon 9600 Pro. For these cards (and cheaper ones), I suggest not using FSAA or anisotropic filtering (or at least limit it). You should still get good frame rates if you don't enable these options.
If you don't mind older technology and are very price conscious, a GeForce Ti 4200 (with 128 MB RAM) will still do okay in most of today's games (and you can even overclock it some). Tomorrow's games won't perform so well though! You can find this card for under $100.
- Cards - Choosing the actual brand of video card doesn't usually matter quite as much as the chipset. Most video cards using a given chipset are made according to a reference design from the manufacturer of the chipset. Thus, most of the video cards using the same chipset are very similar. Differences can appear in the amount of memory and / or the speed of the memory though. This can make a big difference in performance, particularly when overclocking. Taking all of this into consideration, I generally recommend getting one of the cheaper brands as long as it's a brand with a good reputation. I recommend the Saphire line of ATI cards. PowerColor is also okay.
For NVIDIA, I recommend all of these brands (listed with the best first). The ones I don't recommend aren't listed. - Guillemot / Hercules
- Asus
- LeadTek
- PNY
- MSI
- Gigabyte
- Gainward
- EVGA
- AOpen
- Chaintech
- ECS
0 comments:
Post a Comment