How do you pick a video card.............

[thodges5]

How do you pick a video card with the abundance of manufacturers and types of cards. If you take price out of the equation, do you go with...........

3d Labs Permedia
Asus GeForce 2 Deluxe/Dualhead
ATI Radeon DDR
Creative Labs GeForce 256 DDR Annihilator Pro, or Annihilator II, or GeForce 2 Ultra
Daytona Riva TNT 2 Vanta, Pro, Geforce 2
Diamond Stealth III
Elsa Erazor GeForce/2
Guillemot GeForce 2, or 3D Prophet II Pro/Ultra
LeadTek Winfast Geforce 2 GTS
Matrox G450 DDR

These cards range anywhere from $60 to $450. Aside from the amount of memory, what makes a card worth the extra money?

Thanks...........TH

[JetBlack69]

Some of the cards have a tv-out or DVD software. Also, the company should have updated drivers( a sign of good tech support), however, you can use the detonator drivers. NVIDIA gives out for GeForce and TNT cards. Normally, the price has to do with the software inside. And, not all of the cards you mentioned are the same. Cards can be worth more if it has a faster clock speed and memory speed. Some of the cards have heatsinks on the ram which makes it cost more. I'm sure I'm missing a few things, but the things I mentioned can increase the price of the card.

[Xayd]

There are about as many misconceptions out there about vid cards as there are truths.

The main considerations are speed and visual quality. Speed is a double edged sword, though.

A 400+ dollar Geforce2 Ultra won't make games that fast on a machine running a P2 333 with 64 megs of RAM. 3d games are processor and memory intensive, so memory bandwidth and processor speed are big bottlenecks if they don't meet the requirements of today's games.

nVIDIA makes chipsets, other people make Geforce and TNT cards. So the Asus V7700 and the Elsa Gladiac are the same card, MOSTLY. Mostly because the manufacturer of the card puts the RAM on it, so low quality RAM on the video card can affect performance, especially if you overclock the card. I've seen people push Guillemot Geforce cards to 220mhz clock speeds, when a Powercolor Geforce card will barely squeeze out an extra 10mhz sometimes.

ATI cards are manufactured by ATI, so you get what you get when you buy one of theirs, same with 3dfx.

As far as models go...

Voodoo3's and TNT2's are the technology of a couple of years ago. They still work with pretty much any game available today, and will give you decent speed if you have processor speed and RAM. If you play primarily single player, low stress games like combat strategy sims and RPG's, these are great cards and will do all you need.

Geforce cards were the successor to the TNT chipset, and will offer improved speed and more features, which you can easily read at nVIDIA's webpage, this post is too long already ;). The Geforce2 chipset was a speedy successor to the Geforce chipset, with mainly improved memory bandwidth.

The VSA100 chip in the Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 cards were intended competition for the Geforce 1, but were delayed due to production problems. The Voodoo4 turned out to be a bust, the Voodoo5 compares comparably to a 32 meg Geforce2. The Geforce2 comes in both 32 and 64 meg varieties (btw, the extra 32 megs of video ram DOES NOT translate into double speed, rather an increase in speed of 2-3 percent, so don't be fooled by lots of RAM). The claim to fame of the Voodoo cards with VSA100 chips is anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing samples images three or four times over to "smooth out" the jagged lines that you get in games. Nice eye candy, but hardly necessary if you play first person shooters, since the speed hit with it on is tremendous. Cost you at least 20-30 frames per second.

The ATI Radeon is ATI's first stab at the modern gaming market. It has the features that ATI has sold on for awhile, like TV input/output and hardware DVD acceleration, but this one also has the memory bandwidth and fill rate for full speed gaming. I honestly haven't used one and can't say that much about them, but I WILL say that ATI's driver support has been seriously lacking in the past, and I won't trust them until they demonstrate improvement there.

The driver issue is also an issue with 3dfx cards now, since they've been taken over by nVIDIA. Driver support from 3dfx will be gone, and it's uncertain if anyone will continue to maintain them.

That about covers the 3d gamer market of cards. I was always a big fan of 3dfx products, and use a Voodoo5 now. I had a Geforce card, but the support for nVIDIA chipsets in Unreal engine games that were designed for 3dfx cards originally wasn't there, and since I play Unreal Tournament more than any other game, I ditched it and went back to 3dfx. I was also unimpressed with the 2d appearance of the Geforce card. It was blazing fast in any Direct3D or OpenGL game I used it in, though.

What card you get depends on what your needs are. If you need inputs and outputs and DVD features, get the Radeon. If you play nothing but Quake and care about nothing but your frames per second readings in Q3A, get a Geforce2. If you buy a card every 6 months and want something to tide you over until the next generation, get a Voodoo5 while they're cheap. If all you play is old flight sims, get a Voodoo3 or TNT2 and save a hundred bucks.

If you're still overwhelmed by video card questions and concerns, there's more than you can read over at Max3D (link at the top), as well as some good reviews at http://www.sharkyextreme.com

Xayd

[thodges5]

Thanks for the input.

XAYD,

That was definitely a mouth full. As usual, I'm still a little undecided on which card I will go with. Which ever video card I do get, it will accompany a SE440bx-2 motherboard by intel, and PIII 550. RAM will be at 256m.

Other than hardware, the majority of the games I play are an occasional game of Q3 and more often than that are the AOE games.

Thanks........TH