Guide: picking out the perfect video card

[mountainking]

I thought there were enough posts here about what video card to get so I decided to make a guide to buying one. In this guide I'll focus mainly on what each part of a video card does for you so you can decide how much or how fast of that part you want.

VIDEO MEMORY: Video memory is often used by the manufacturer just to make the card look like a better one. As far as speed of the card goes... theres no overall speed increase of the card but there is 1 exception which is: 3d accelerators often have better performance when you have more memory on your card meaning its going to make calculations faster. The other thing that video memory does for you is give you better color and resoloution depths so if your real into quality of the picture... your going to want a higher amount of this.

BIT WIDTH: For bits on the memory of a video card, it gives a noticable difference in performance but not as much as the manufacturers claim it to be. For instance.. If you have a 128 bit card and a 256 bit card.. the 256 bit card wont be double the performance of the 128 because the bits are just 1 part of the video card. For the card to have double performance it would also need double the memory speed, double the video memory (only because of the 3d accelorator exception) and double the core speed. In some cases it would need double the pixel pipelines as well. So basicly the bits make a performance increase but not as much as the manufacturers juice it up to be. Also, there isn't a true proven way to test the bits on memory so manufacturers tend to make up their own scale for them so 256 bits for 1 company could be the same exact as 128 for another. Its sorta like how intel has faster speeds on the visible ghz of the processor but amd has a more powerfull card with wider piplelines and stuff so its rated different than a pentium 4.

INTERFACES: The interfaces of a card such as regular pci, agp 4x,8x and pcix all have differences in speed. Pci is too slow right now for the current games so the production of them has been pretty much been shut down for them. AGP8x is all you need right now. Out of all the tests, no more than agp 8x has even been needed so at this point pci16x is pointless and doesnt perform any different than agp 8x with todays technology.

CORE SPEED: The core speed doesn't really matter by itself but its a combined factor with all the others that make it perform better. With this, as always, more is better.

MEMORY SPEED: The memory is definitly the most important part of the video card. The amount doesnt matter as much as the speed of the memory. More memory = Higher frame rates. So more in most cases is better. In some cases cards have slower memory rates but have higher performance than ones with higher memory speeds. The reason for this is more bits, and all the other factors that i talked about. Its also important not to just look at a card and think that just because it has a faster memory speed that its better... when buying a video card you cant just look at 1 single component and base your purchase on that 1. look at each catagory of a video cards performance/quality and find which ones are the highest meaning to you.

PIXEL PIPELINES: In most cases pixel pipelines increase the quality of the picture. Its important too that you look at how many are active at once. A perfect example is the radeon 9800pro and the nvidia 6600gt. They both have 8 pixel pipelines. The missleading part is that the 6600gt can only use 4 at a time while the 9800pro can use all 8 at the same time.

I hope some of you people not too farmiliar with video cards are a little bit more understanding of what is good and what isn't. If i have some errors in here on information that is incorrect i appologize in advance.

[fedz]

Core speeds do matter a lot in graphics card, but they are dependent on other factors. No factor is independent.
6600GT performs better than a 9800pro though because of higher clock/core speeds and a better architecture.

PCI-E is worth it to be future proof. Increasingly the video manufacturers are releasing their products on PCI-E instead of AGP, and there is a loooong wait for the AGP card

Omissions, but a good guide overall

fedz

[sigmaseven]

Mountainhiking, reformat your post so people can read it easier.

[mountainking]

what do you mean by reformating my post?? Ok thanks for clearing up a few things that may have been a little confusing in there fedz.

[Hi Ho]

what do you mean by reformating my post??

It would be easier to read if there were spaces between the paragraphs and maybe bold the headings.

That's a nice guide. I'd make the corrections that Fedz suggested though.

[Antistupid]

nice guide. I would think this would do better in the Video section. I also think this should be stickied.

[mountainking]

I thought about it right after i made the post. Not sure if a mod would be willing to sticky it but they might be willing to move it if they think it needs to be moved i guess..

[fedz]

Not sure about a sticky, there's some work to be done. If you want we can do a joint guide in the video forum and have it stickied, or you just re-post it there with improvements and extras (such as performance ratings and links) and that should be good as well

fedz

[ric449]

Not to rain on your parade, but I think this is oversimplified. You need to mention features (such as SLI, Pixel Shader technologies, etc), and performance in certain technologies (such as Nvidia currently beating ATI at OpenGL with ATI winning but just barely on the DirectX front). Take a look at this:

http://ricserv.servebeer.com/nextgengraphicshigh.php

[mountainking]

what would a joint guide be like fedz? ric449: I tried to make the post so that it would be understandable to people even in like 6 months from now if it were to get stickied because 6 months from now... who knows.. they may have 512 bit cards and stuff.

[mountainking]

why cant i edit the post again?

[kram 2.0]

Originally Posted by mountainking why cant i edit the post again?

There's a 75 minutes (?) limit set by the admin on the allotted time from posting to the last minutes allowed for editing.

kram

[mountainking]

oh no wonder I was confused. I targeted this post more to how a video card works and what the different parts do rather than software that comes with it and comparing different brands. Im not here to say that ATI is better than Nvidia or vise versa. Thats not my job. In real life im the marketing manager which is why I dont have virtually any say at all in what the company does toward their products and stuff. I just thought id post a thread that people could sorta look at for a reference if their new to video cards and stuff. I don't really wana overload them with so much information that they get too confused. pixel shading is something thats pretty hard to test or i would have put it into the post. Ive worked for ati for 4 years now and i havent really heard anything from other guys about testing the pixel shading on 2 different brands. If you guys know of any way to test it with a true test and not just visual apearance... let me know because i might be able to do some stuff on my friend/coworkers test systems because he has some nvidia cards i could use to test with. But then again im not here to say that one brand is better than the other... im just here to be informative i guess.

[spyder003]

Originally Posted by mountainking If you guys know of any way to test it with a true test and not just visual apearance... let me know because i might be able to do some stuff on my friend/coworkers test systems because he has some nvidia cards i could use to test with.

The thing is, video cards are all about visual appearance and not about benchmarks. The output that the card creates, image quality and FPS are way more important than benchmarks to me. It's all about how the games look rather than scoring 1,236,924 in uber 3dMark2024 or whatever. The true test is the human eye and benchmarks mean jack IMO.

[mountainking]

sometimes you cant always test with the human eye though. I heard the human eye can only see up to like 30 fps or something. If there are 2 cards and ones getting 30 and ones getting 60.. theres a big difference between the two and they arent showing any visually

[ric449]

Even if you can't tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps, its always worth going for the highest fps you can. This way you know that when games need more power, your card should hold out longer than the 30fps card.

[mountainking]

That was my point exactly Ric... thanks for clarifying that a little better!

[kram 2.0]

Originally Posted by mountainking sometimes you cant always test with the human eye though. I heard the human eye can only see up to like 30 fps or something. If there are 2 cards and ones getting 30 and ones getting 60.. theres a big difference between the two and they arent showing any visually

The problem there is that if the human eye can't see it, what's the point? Ric makes a valid point about the future advancement of games and such that will utilize such powers - however, if one's constantly worried about that, how would one purchase a graphics card? Things always gets better.

kram

[shadowbreaker513]

Originally Posted by kram8806 The problem there is that if the human eye can't see it, what's the point? Ric makes a valid point about the future advancement of games and such that will utilize such powers - however, if one's constantly worried about that, how would one purchase a graphics card? Things always gets better. kram

Because a higher average fps allows you to turn on more eye candy like reflections, aa, and af while still maintaining a solid framerate. Also some people are able to tell the difference upwards of 30fps. Personally, I stop noticing improvement at around 70.

[spyder003]

Originally Posted by kram8806 The problem there is that if the human eye can't see it, what's the point?

Exactly. I decided to bite my tongue for once - but kram said it for me.

[Hi Ho]

The problem there is that if the human eye can't see it, what's the point?

Shadowbreaker explained it just as well as I could. The higher the FPS the more eye candy you can have without the frame rates dipping below acceptable levels.

[mountainking]

Technicly when your finding the frames per second on a video game... its a benchmark. One of the reasons i didnt want to put up a list of cards that are better than others is because it would create a flame war. A lot of times there are just opinions between 2 cards. What one person thinks about a card could be totaly different than another since its only opinionated. I dont think benchmarks are exactly a good idea but the information is semi accurate. I mean... better card=higher number.

[Moose on the Loose]

I totally agree with Ric.

It's true that your eyes won't notice a fps bigger than 60 fps, but it's still useful to have a video card that gives you 100 fps, because that way you have a margin.If you get 100 fps now, you'll be able to get 60 or more fps for a while longer. If you have 60 fps right now, the odds are big you're going to have to cut back on detail if a new game comes out since you'll only have 50 fps with that game. (which is still good, but the evolution will continue).

I'm not very good at expressing myself in English, sorry about that.

[mountainking]

yup. Mise as well be ahead of the game. and most of the time... when you increase what i talked about at the very begginning... your gona get better performance. there really isnt a reason to post what video cards are better than others because what im trying to teach people who read this is how to find out if a video card is good or not so they can determine that in the future.