 Original article
found at A1 Electronics.net
Choosing a
video card, ATI Radeon,
Nvidia GeForce.
2004 seems to have
flown past rather quick and we are here again doing our choosing & buying a
video card. We have tried to simplify the now rather extensive list of
available cards that are presently available but hope that our guide gives
you the basic information you need to make your choice and have focused on
ATI & Nvidia.
This is not meant as a War
& Peace tome about video cards from ATI or
Nvidia that are available but as a handy guide to help you make a
choice. For specific information about any particular card type either ATI
or
Nvidia we have reviews listed in our Video card section.
What will you be using
it for?
Is perhaps the first question asked. What will the intended use be of
your
ATI or
Nvidia video card. Will you be mostly working with 2D applications or 3D
such as games. If you are only looking to run say 2D office applications
such as Corel WordPerfect, Photoshop and the likes, then you do not need to buy
an expensive top of the range card but something from the mid-range of
ATI
or
Nvidia will give you the all the performance you need and more for 2D
work while still giving you acceptable 3D performance.
If on the other hand you
are mostly looking for a card to play modern 3D high-performance
applications and games then you need to look to the high-performance video
cards from ATI & Nvidia. For today's latest games you need a card that is
ideally DirectX 9 supporting for such games as Doom III & Half-Life 2.
DirectX 9 has given game creators even more freedom to create even better
graphics and will be the programming for 2005.
Basics of video cards
and your needs.
It is not worth thinking about buying a motherboard with a built-in video
solution as the 3D performance from any of them is to say the least very
poor. They also increase the cost of a motherboard. Instead buy a basic
motherboard and basic card from either ATI or Nvidia. They also load your
CPU to a high degree with the obvious performance loss consequences.
ATI graphics processors (GPUs)
use 24-bit precision while Nvidia support both 16 & 32-bit so ATI have
higher precision or higher picture quality than Nvidia but the calculations
are obviously more complex and need a lot of computing.
Video-out is normal on
video cards but video-in is only on ViVo models to connect to sources such
as composite video or S-VHS. ATI offer All-in-Wonder series cards that
include a TV tuner while Nvidia offer its Personal Cinema products. These
are expensive so you might look to buying a separate add-in TV card which
means you can change your video card at any time.
If you are looking at a
basic level of video card because it says it is DirectX 9 compliant be wary
as this can mean only certain areas and it needs a lot of processing power
to give decent frame rates which these basic level cards cannot achieve.
OpenGL is the next most
popular 3D API and has been around longer than DirectX which is Microsoft.
OpenGL is supported by all video cards ATI & Nvidia and is continually being
updated and extended.
Video playback can be
accelerated by video cards taking the loading of your CPU such as resizing a
video window or filtering for example. The more it can do the more it helps
your CPU by increasing overall performance. With high-definition and
high-resolutions you can find that your CPU needs the video GPU to do the
decoding and playback. The latest generation of ATI & Nvidia graphics
processors have extended video features particularly as this is becoming an
important market.
Performance and picture
quality.
Performance is normally measured in frame rate per second with the
faster being the better as such. TV for example in the UK is run at 50 FPS.
Frame rate depends on the image resolution and picture quality you have set
your graphics card at. 1024 x 768 is regarded as the standard resolution
which gives you plenty of processing power to choose quality image settings.
Increasing the resolution to say 1600 x 1200 dramatically increases the work
needed to be done by your ATI or Nvidia card to make the display which means
you suffer a big frame rate drop. CRT monitors can work happily at 1600 x
1200 compared to LCD panels and alike.
From this pixel fill rate
and memory bandwidth you get a measure of how much your graphics processor
can process per second and how quickly the processor can access data from
its memory.
AF & FSAA are two methods
of improving image quality in 3D games. AF or Anisotropic Filtering filters
textures on 3D objects to make them look more vibrant or crisper than
otherwise while FSAA or Full Scene Anti Aliasing is for smoothing the edges
of 3D objects. There are different methods of AF which results in different
image quality. Both need a lot of computing power and memory bandwidth so
both ATI & Nvidia use much optimized versions which give higher performance
and still offer improved image quality. Of course what you see depends on
the quality of our PC monitor as well. With only 16-bit precision on
Nvidia's GeForce FX cards the image quality of DirectX 9 games like FarCry
was not very good but frame rates are high. Nvidia are now using new drivers
that have increased image quality but frame rates have fallen with their
latest range of 6xxx cards.
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