Comments on: 3D Cards: Calculus For Dummies

By: Frye

Frye — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 14:22:07 +0000

Woops! didnt mean to revive dead thread , dunno how i got here, my bad.

By: Frye

Frye — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 14:18:01 +0000

Marketing people really don’t like a cheap card / expensive card distinction. Check your local Burger King: what used to be a small/medium/large menu is now medium/large/King Size. As if to say: even our smallest menu is pretty big! I think the reason of their choice for fx/gs/gt/gtx is somewhere along those lines.

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By: Justin

Justin — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:32:27 +0000

This is helpful, but I’m really not that savvy on Video Cards. apparently my x1250 doesn’t run Mass Effect but the x1300XT will. Could someone give me a list of Video Cards that start at x1300XT and go UP (in terms of quality and fulfilling minimum requirements) not in terms of just being a higher number given that I’ve now learned that’s just a scam to get non-techs like me to be suckered into buying a sub-quality product.

Much Thanks

Justin

By: Birdoman

Birdoman — Sat, 24 May 2008 11:39:37 +0000

“The chaos of the market” – if you want to see it as a virtue – would be dependent on the existence of lots of competition. Since the graphics card/processor market is essentially a duopoly I think free trade rants are missing the point. If we had four or five graphics card producers (and i mean the actual chipsets), then your chaos would be beneficial. As it stands, they’re abusing their market position to confuse the consumer and capture his/her surplus value. Tsk tsk!

By: dhex

dhex — Fri, 09 May 2008 16:40:01 +0000

You guys are off your rocker. The chaos of the market has brought forth the gift of frames per second delivered at higher and higher resolutions at cheaper and cheaper prices.

i gotta say i’m with vic on this one – i think you guys have been in centrally planned economies for a bit too long. :)

but more to the point, you guys want something you can’t get from the pc market at this point – no one can tell you 100% “this will work ‘well’” because “well” is such a subjective point, even beyond all the intricacies of hardware compatibility. some people can live with 25fps for crysis, some can’t, or whatever your favorite graphics hog of the moment is.

By: Sharkwald

Sharkwald — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:18:44 +0000

Vic, I’m all for competition and innovation, but I’m also in favour of not obfuscating that to the non-enthusiast. Putting meaninful performance metrics, certified by an independent body, on the back of the box is one way to do so. And by meaninful I don’t mean “gets a score of 56378 in 3DMark 08″, because that means bog all to anyone outside of 3DMark obsessives. Tell me if it’ll run my game well.

By: Wildbluesun

Wildbluesun — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:51:56 +0000

Hell yeah. Graphics card research, for me, meant wading through a pile of tables with columns headed things like “pixel pipelines” and “memory bus width”. Whut? A bus is one of those big red things you ride to work on, surely?

If the card’s NAME actually told me ANYTHING about what it does, my brain wouldn’t have leaked through my ears.

By: vic

vic — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:28:22 +0000

You guys are off your rocker. The chaos of the market has brought forth the gift of frames per second delivered at higher and higher resolutions at cheaper and cheaper prices. The rich but confusing range of pickings has also allowed a thousand tech blogs to flourish and a million fan-boy flame-wars to rage across the forums. Yeah it’s dangerous jungle sometimes where you might need the help of some guides to make the right choices but its full of life and much better than having no choices when it comes to hardware. I’d hate to see the consolidation that has happened in PC sound to happen to PC video. Creative’s consolidation of PC sound has basically totally killed innovation there and it has stagnated. Just saying be careful what you wish for.

By: nambiar

nambiar — Thu, 08 May 2008 23:02:09 +0000

Nvidia is guilty of playing the shiate game ever since they decided to eol the 9xxx series even though the 88xx series rivals it by a million light years. 384bit mem-interface is NOT better than 256, says Nvidia. Tangent – I’ve already posed this very Q to the folks at Crytek to no avail, but does anyone here think that the Crysis team tested the game on a CRAY machine ?

By: Birdoman

Birdoman — Thu, 08 May 2008 19:33:31 +0000

Remember the days of updating Half-life/CS with patches with the delightful appellations 1.001.1.1.001 or 1.5.1.011 and so on?

Why don’t they just copy what apple (!) does – for each major new generation of cards, give it a nice friendly name like tiger or sunfish or leetmaster or whatever. For grades within that, throw in an “x.y” numbering scheme where x is the level (good/ok/shit) and y is the memory. It won’t sort out dud versions of new generations, but at least it’d remove the number madness.

By: James T

James T — Thu, 08 May 2008 19:13:02 +0000

Owning a winter home in Florida? Couldn’t hurt…