| Product: |
General Comments on Video Cards |
| Date: |
28/08/00 (1814 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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So you are on the market to buy a graphics card, but you don’t know what you are looking for. You really need to ask yourself a few simple questions.
1) Does anybody use your system for 3D games?
Very important point, this will change the type of card you buy from a graphics card with plenty of 2D features such as video in and out and TV out etc, to a 3D accelerated power card. The difference is very important because the price is such a dramatic change between the two types of card. You will be looking at paying at least double for the 3D accelerated card. On the other side of that point you will have to think that you cant play today’s games without such an accelerated card.
If you decided that your computer needs a powerful card in order to play the latest games then you must decide on what price scale you are prepared to pay. If price is not a factor then not only are you very lucky but you have the ability to choose exactly what spec of card you require. For example you could go for brut power and speed, in which case a Geforce 2 Ultra provides great speed and massive memory bandwidth to work on the 4x AGP port. On the other hand if your price range is slightly lower some sacrifices will have to be made.
In the low end there are the cards such as the Geforce 2 MX that is essentially a cut down version of the Geforce 2 GTS. Pretty powerful but does not have the same clock speeds or pipelines as its bigger brother. 3DFx offer the Voodoo 4 4500, on the same principle it is cut down from the Voodoo 5 5500. Both will do the job very adequately without being the top performer.
The main battle comes in the mid range where we have the Voodoo 5 5500 the Geforce 2 and the ATI Radeon (these are pretty powerful cards to be calling mid range but in respect to the Geforce 2 Ultra they are still less powerful).
The Voodoo 5 5500 has the ability to do hardware FSAA (full screen anti-aliasing) but lacks behin
d the others in terms of speed. The Radeon is a surprise card from ATi. Its the first time ATi have been anywhere near the top of the 3D market. The Radeon is a good choice for any gamer and is my personal choice of card. Everybody knows about the Geforce 2 GTS, it’s always been down as a great card, its only problem is lack of memory bandwidth causing hi resolution slightly slower than it could be. Hard decisions to be made there.
If you decided that you card only needs basic capabilities in terms of gaming then your next decision will be what the card actually needs to do.
2) Will you be using Video editing?
Video editing is another reason for changing video cards. I only have one real choice here and that is ATi's all in wonder series of cards, they will provide you with everything you really need to happily go on your way making movies. If you do both the above then ATi have an All in wonder Radeon that will suit your needs perfectly.
3) Is your card for a simple machine using Internet and word processing?
If this is the case then you need not fork out lots of money for lots of memory or acceleration features. Any bog standard card will do, Firms like S3 and SiS make these cheap cards that you can use which will display all the colours and resolutions you require with actually costing you the earth.
Sometimes its best to look to the future, but don’t buy too much more than you need because today’s technology is always a day away from being yesterdays news.
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