Price Guides, February 2005: Video Cards
by Kristopher Kubicki on February 19, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
The Low End
Anand's benchmarks in December told us all that we needed to hear. NVIDIA clearly dominates the low end PCIe market with their TurboCache solutions, and even if they didn't, the non-TurboCache cards still manage to out-muscle ATI's X300 lineup. ATI's HyperMemory will be upon us soon (again), so in the meantime, we just have to wait and see. At the very least, we are excited that the PCIe low end video cards are actually sub-$100 video cards. Considering that the 6200 TC GPUs have only been available in mass quantities for a few weeks, we should start seeing $50 offerings in a few months for those really on a budget.AOpen leads the pack with their 64-bit and 32-bit options. Don't expect to get a particularly immersive experience in World of Warcraft - particularly considering that the cards are paging from your system memory; but for everyday computing and office productivity, TurboCache is your best bet. Our industry sources have hinted that mainstream NVIDIA IGP might be replaced by $50 TurboCache options in the near future, and given the raw power of the 6200 TC versus GMA900, TurboCache is probably the more economical purchase anyway. Anand's benchmarks show that the TurboCache lineup scales very linearly, but the sweet spot for price and performance on the low end is right at the 64-bit range.
If ATI's HyperMemory proves just as useful at TurboCache on the low end, we could be in for a real interesting battle. ATI has a long roadmap of IGP chipsets ahead of them, so we know that they do not expect sub-$100 video cards to replace their IGP market. However, with ATI just beginning to get a taste of NVIDIA's aggressiveness on the AMD platform (RS480), best laid plans could quickly change.
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bigpow - Sunday, February 20, 2005 - link
Wait a sec.[quote]XFX dominates the 6600GT AGP landscape, and without a doubt, the card [RTPE: PVT43AND] remains our AGP mid-range pick.
[/quote]
I thought AT recommended Leadtek 6600GT PCI-E on a previous comparison test?
Which one is it? XFX or Leadtek?
ShizNet - Sunday, February 20, 2005 - link
AGAIN - all details are behind us (quality/image/expandability)what is reason to purchase $400+ vidCard? one reason - to play GAMES (pc) - you don't need this beast for e-mail
OR you can buy xCube/gStatioin/pBox (any puns are welcome) - pay same ~$50 for same game
AND get same pleasures out of building/shooting/conquering
going back to the start:
does all this HardWare advances are OVERRATED? - because they won't last for a year
i won't even touch HERE what you can do w/ lil mod to those xStations/pBoxes
and i am NOT a fan of M$ or Sony, just a fan of story: 'little train that could'
semo - Sunday, February 20, 2005 - link
#19doom 3 is not playable on p4 1.8 with a radeon 7500
have to get a geforce ti i guess
KristopherKubicki - Saturday, February 19, 2005 - link
ShizNet: I would first look at who is taking a year to rewrite games from console to PC. Obviously MS has a vested interest in keeping Halo on the XBOX before putting it on PC. It's not that its fundamentally really hard to do, but my guess is it's licensing and politicking that keep releases on the console.As for the hardware argument - given the same PC hardware I would not be surprised if many of thsoe same games look/feel identical. I think your argument is moot because 1.) CounterStrike is definitely not a benchmark of performance/quality for PC or XBOX and 2.) San Andreas will hit PC and XBOX at the same time. And I bet you it'll continue to look better on the PC anyway. I really haven't seen a single title on XBOX that was better than the same title on PC with the exception of the purposely crippled Halo.
Kristopher
ChineseDemocracyGNR - Saturday, February 19, 2005 - link
Actually Doom3 is playable in a Pentium 4 1.5GHz with a GeForce MX 400.You can't have both an outdated PC and good quality image settings, you gotta pick one.
ShizNet - Saturday, February 19, 2005 - link
i'm not arguing here the quality of the image or the way the business runs (at loss or gain)LOOK deep into issue on hand - xBox (hardWare/softWare) is 2 yr-old and it still can 'catch up' w/ brandNew-hingEnd PCs. try to run 2 yr-old pc -- HL2 @ ~20 fps and doom3 @ ~10 (if at all)
while xBox chopping away @ Halo, CS, not to mention SanAndreas and others
don't you think there is someThing wrong with this picture?
KristopherKubicki - Saturday, February 19, 2005 - link
PrinceGaz: Many (most?) new Xbox games have 1080i or 720p capability.But yeah, the XBOX is sold on a loss just for people to buy games. And believe me even on HD, games on my XBOX look like garbage compared to my PC :)
Kristopher
ShizNet - Saturday, February 19, 2005 - link
#13is it your answer? or is it your 'MAYBE'?
do you even know how code is written? first you write the way it should be, then you 'optimize' it to hardware (of your choice ati/nVidia/other)
so you telling me it's easier to write for 2 yr-old nVidia (dx 8.x) than for dx 9.x APIs? there are no lowLevel coding in vidGames anyMore. if you haven't heard games are based on engines (APIs): doom, source (halfLife2)... same s**t for console or pc.. and drivers are provided/adjusted by ati/nvidia, not the other way around
with your idea about 640x480 - plug your HIGH-end pc card in the same TV and see the quality of image and tell me about AA/AF
go put that P from your - :P - where it should be
PrinceGaz - Saturday, February 19, 2005 - link
The X-Box normally runs at 640x480, which is all a standard TV set can take (and may be slightly blurry at such a "high" resolution if it isn't a good quality TV).As with all consoles though, the reason why the X-Box is cheap is really because it was sold for less than the manufacturing cost, as the real money is made from consoles with game sales and every X-Box game sold netted Microsoft a good few dollars.
ChineseDemocracyGNR - Saturday, February 19, 2005 - link
KristopherKubicki,sorry for the off-topic, but did AnandTech also test K8T890 boards? So far only two are available (from ASUS and Soltek), but from what I gathered the ABIT, Gigabyte and Albatron boards should be out real soon.