Archive for June, 2009
Richard Vanderhurst reviews the ATI Radeon X1950 Pro
0
ATI’s Radeon X1950 Pro is meant to attain 3 things if you are purchasing a graphics card. The Radeon X1950 Pro represents ATI’s latest move in the continuing price / performance chess match between the 2 3D card corporations. Like most current 3D cards, the Radeon X1950 Pro needs a connection to your Computer’s power supply. The refurbished CrossFire design is maybe more exciting than the Radeon X1950 Pro itself. ATI has eventually overcome the 2 major obstacles that kept us from advising CrossFire over Nvidia’s competing SLI setup.
Also, we are pleased to see that ATI has lost the external dongle that linked the 2 cards together.
We need only to think back to past reviews where we had to overcome not one, but two damaged dongles to get our testing done. Instead, ATI now bridges the 2 chips within your Computer with 2 little ribbon wires that plug into the head of each card ( you get one wire with each card you buy ).
Naturally, the sole displays that will hit 2,560×2,048 run in the $13,000 range, so ATI’s claim isn’t important to many of us, unless you are concerned in medical or army imaging. And sadly, we do not have a $13,000 display in the laboratories, otherwise we might have tested it at this silly resolution. ATI told us that its recommended price for this card would be $199.
We’ve trolled the varied shopping metasearch sites. The general trend of higher costs might be due to offer problems ; ATI says that it’ll drop in the approaching weeks. In our 3DMark 2006 and Oblivion tests, the Radeon X1950 Pro compared well to the GeForce 7900 GS, both in single card and twin card mode. Nvidia took the lead on Quake four, which stunned us, since ATI has done well on that test latterly. Thanks to a test bed flame-out, we are running this review without Half-Life two : Episode One scores. But with the present average street price hovering around $250, we will not advocate it, because Nvidia’s cards are at present more cost-effective.
Richard Vanderhurst Reviews the eVGA e-GeForce 9800GTX+
0
EVGA’s Superclocked edition of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 9800+ is a fast 3D graphics card at a reasonable cost. You may expect it to play most current Computer games at smooth frame rates, particularly on lower resolutions. We have seen costs as low as $165 and as high as $235, so you’d be smart to research. Otherwise, the differences between these 2 cards, in price, power consumption, and speed are immaterial. In this “Superclocked” design from EVGA, Nvidia’s chip has its core clock speed boosted to 756MHz, from its stock 738MHz setting. This chip was meant to be Nvidia’s Radeon HD 4850-killer, but as you can see on our charts, even this overclocked model only hardly outperforms its competition.
We ran some rather assertive baselines on these cards, and for the main part they held up well. The exception, as always, is Crysis, on which neither card was in a position to achieve a playable frame refresh rate. Whether or not the Radeon card was quicker on that test than the GeForce, it’s still only hitting 20 frames per second on 1,400×960, the lowest resolution we tried. Dropping the detail level down to medium and the anti-aliasing to 2x led to refresh rates around 35 fps, but still well below the sixty frames per second hallowed ground. For Far Cry two, you can see the 2 cards are approximately tied on the lower resolutions they favor. On the less tough Left4Dead even the 1,920×1,200 setting poses small challenge.
Otherwise, for the foreseeable future at least, either one of these cards should deliver a smooth, well-detailed gaming experience. If the performance is essentially a wash, we find that each card has an advantage in other areas that might sway your purchasing decision. Though it is a double-wide, overclocked card, the EVGA GeForce GTX 9800+ basically uses less power than the Radeon card with your PC idling. As with almost all 3D cards above $100, each of these cards also need a direct connection to your Computer’s power supply, particularly a single six-pin PCI-Express power input. Ironically, as the Radeon card needs only a single growth slot, it’s better suited to smaller Computers than the GeForce GTX 9800+, though the previous needs more power.
Not every game will distribute its workload uniformly across 2 graphics cards, but with one card that is not a problem. For the sake of stability ( as well as faster installation ) you are typically better off with a single $400 card then 2 $200 cards. With few games that exploit either vendors’ features in a forceful way thus far, neither can claim supremacy with its extras. By including an onboard audio processor, ATI has eliminated that intermediary step.
That and the single slot could be enough to sway home theater fans away from the GeForce card.
Richard Vanderhurst Reviews Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2
0
It started at $399 when it launched back in Nov , but costs have come down as low as $299 for the 2GB version reviewed here. You want to connect this card without delay to your Computer power supply through one six-pin and one eight-pin PCI Express power input.
And as a double-wide card, it also takes up a fair quantity of space within your Computer . Dial down the antialiasing or overall image quality and you should be expecting an improvement by ten frames or so usually. If Crysis is maybe too demanding, Far Cry two is kind of the sweet spot for 3D testing at the moment, as it is a little more forgiving than Crysis, but still looks great by current standards.
The sole proviso we’ll add to the performance debate is that because this is a dual-chip card, it depends on the scalability of 3D games to put both chips to good use. If a game or the card’s driver software fails, you will see limited performance.
2 latest cases in point : Far Cry two had an argument with cards using ATI’s CrossFire multichip technology ( since resolved ), and as of this writing, the Computer version of Grand Burglary automobile IV will not recognize Nvidia chips in SLI mode. Single-chip cards, like the 2 from Nvidia in this price range, do not have that issue.
It’d not surprise you a quicker, dual-chip card desires more juice than comparably priced single-chip cards, but it is still worth spelling out the difference. Allegedly the Radeon card is relatively more effective at load than it is at idle, but in all cases, the additional performance has a real-world cost re power consumption. If this card does not quite deliver on power potency, it can basically have a direct result on your productiveness, at least if you use screen property as your scale. The card identified every one of them successfully, and let us operate in either clone mode, with the same image mapped on all 4 screens, or in extended mode, which extends one desktop screen across each display. ATI’s driver software makes that straightforward, though , as it also gives you relatively robust controls for preparing the displays in whatever order you would like, and also adjusting each display’s settings. Adding 4 displays does not always mean you can all of a sudden play a game at 7,680×1,200, as most games will only scale to preset resolutions, and / or need explicit code to support multiple monitors.
You can put a game on one screen and a Internet-based map and a walkthrough on the others.
Richard Vanderhurst reviews the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked
0
GeForce GTX 260 Review
“Core 216″ refers back to the fact that this is the second issue of this chip, with 216 processing cores, compared to 192 in the first. Sadly , potency in 3D cards does not usually translate into speed, and if you spend a little bit more you will find a noticeably quicker graphics card powered by ATI.
We like that card in its price class, but it is actually not the most reasonable product out there, neither is it acceptable for those with smaller monitors. Its frame refresh rates on all but Crysis are playable, so it’s in no fashion incapable, but current relative speeds also supply a guide for which cards might perform well on more demanding titles down the line.
We are especially impressed by its efficiency at load, consuming a full fifty watts less than the GTX 280, which was only a little quicker on our performance charts.
If you are feeling aware of your power invoice and the environment, and do not mind sacrificing some frames per 2nd, this EVGA card may all of a sudden look more engaging. Likely, you would still wish to match this card with at least a 550- or 600-watt power supply, presuming you combine it with a quad-core or fast dual-core CPU. You will not find a budget Computer with such a high wattage PSU, but you could be in a position to sneak it into a lately bought Computer around $1,000 or so. You want to attach the audio to the motherboard audio chip or your Computer sound card to send audio over the HDMI port, however. And, naturally, this card supports Nvidia’s SLI multicard technology, as well as hardware-accelerated PhysX, CUDA-enabled software, and all the other supposed “visual computing” features Nvidia likes to gloat about.
Some parallel computing features, like the agnostic zooming features in Adobe’s Photoshop CS four, are helpful, but we haven’t begun to see any gaming or widespread software implementation to persuade us of GPU-based computing’s main line use. We believe it’s only a matter of time, but by that point you will likely have a completely new array of 3D cards to choose between.
