Video Cards - Your Thoughts

[Buck]

Which video card do you find to be the most successful with P4 and AMD systems that bodes good drivers under Windows 9.x - XP? This question of course, is to fulfill the needs of the average user; the ATI Xpert 2000 to Geforce2 GTS folks.

Obviously, there are other cards; for extreme gaming or graphics, dual display and the like, but they are few and far in between. Although, the G550 does have some decent pricing.

BR

 

[The JoJo]

I've only had good experiences with cards from Asus,Gainward,Hercules and Elsa that are based on Nvidia Geforce XXX chipsets. Bundled with Nvidia reference drivers they haven't given me any problems with about 30 systems built.

Sorry I can't be more specific.

Hope this helps.

 

[Handruin]

I've had good luck with my first NVidia card, the Asus 3400 TNT with 16 MB memory.

I currently run an ATI Radeon 64DDR ViVo and I've had very good luck with it. I was scared to buy it knowing ATI's history with buggy drivers, but I did, and have had no problems. I've used this card with 98SE, windows 2000 Pro, and now windows XP Pro. Game performance in windows 2000 Pro was below average, but now that I run XP, the speed has increased.

That's about all I can offer for video card experience in today's market. For the money, I would buy another ATI card because they cost less then Nvidia cards, and perform well enough for me.

-Doug

 

[Handruin]

Dang, forgot to mention my current system is AMD Athlon, and my older system was a PII system. Both worked fine with the cards mentioned except that the TNT card was never used in my current system, only the Radeon was used in my PII (sorry, not P4).

 

[Tannin]

Buck, I stick pretty closely to the cards that don't give me problems - as you'd expect, given my dislike of doing unpaid support work. At present these are:

S3 Trio 3D/2X - cheap, non-3D, practical (Generic)
TNT M64 (Generic)
Gforce II 200, 400 & GTi (some generic, some MSI or ASUS)
Matrox G450 (Matrox, natch)

None of these give me problems as a rule, though I might just have struck an issue with a Matrox yesterday. I prefer to stay a few releases behind the leading edge with the Detonator drivers. Also, we always load the mainboard AGP drivers before we do anything else at all.

The OS's we use with these are roughly:

15% Windows 95B
60% Windows 98SE
10% Windows XP
5% Windows ME
5% Other Windows (95C, 98A, 3.1, NT, 2000, etc)
5% Other (OS/2, 'nix, etc)

THe chipsets we use with these are, roughly:

75% VIA
15% AMD
5% Intel
5% SiS
?% Other (very rare - the odd Ali but not many at all)

 

[Mercutio]

Almost everything I do is Via, or less often, AMD-chipset.

My preference

Matrox G400 or G200
ATI Radeon 7x00
3dfx Voodoo3 (would be higher if not for the end-of-life thing)
ATI Rage
Matrox Millenium I/II/G100
S3 Savage4


The G-series Matrox cards are simply the nicest things out there in terms of driver quality. I can't say I've ever had a problem attributable to a Matrox card.
The latest budget Radeons are very, very good for 2D. No problems there, either. 3D, I don't much care, but they get extremely good framerates - better than my voodoo5 - in the 3D stuff I've tried on them (Quake3, UT, Black and White and some Winamp plugins). Stupendous cards for the money.
It wouldn't surprise me if the Rage has the best drivers of any ATI card. Lord knows ATI released enough of them. They're good middle-of-the road cards, and always have been.

I still use the old Matrox and S3-Savage cards when I need to. Those cards have serious problems with 3D games and no texture memory. The Savage4's drivers for 2000 aren't the best in the world; you can pretty much count on a BSOD once every other month from them, but display quality is good and if there's nothing else available, I'll get one of those.

The cards I've had problems with are pretty much every video chipset SiS has made, Rendition V2200 (dead card, I know, but the final driver revision should AT LEAST be usable on Win98), S3 Virge, everything nvidia has made up to the Geforce2 - and I won't be touching anything newer than that, and the KyroII, which didn't display colors right in DirectX games (something that's kind of essential for a gaming card to get right).

In short, there's a couple of completely dead graphics cards that I prefer to use over some of the crap that's out there now.

 

[NRG = mc²]

Gforce II 200, 400 & GTi (some generic, some MSI or ASUS)

Not very good with graphics cards, are we Tony? :wink:

Its GeForce, 2, MX200, or GTS. GTi.... hahah :roll: :mrgrn:

The only cards I've had problems with was S3 Trio 3D (AGP, 4mb), ATI AIW Rage 128 (PCI, 16Mb) both due to useless drivers.

I'm a rusted on nVidia fan and haven't had any problems with them except for my KT7A mobo not liking running my Hercules GeForce 2MX at 4x AGP, or having fast writes enabled, and now my Asus A7V266-E used to crash all the time with the same drivers and card I've used in three other systems. Changing the drivers to later version solved the problem. I think both of these porblems are more VIA-based than anything else.

 

[Tannin]

The GTS is the obsolete model. NRG. It has been replaced by the GTi. For example, the one I'm holding in my hand right now: MSI G2Ti Pro-VT.

 

[Santilli]

My luck

Kyro 2 Guillemont didn't work under 98, great under 2000.
Voodoo 5500 rocks, under both os, and, for the price, was the steal of the century. Use it for dual boots on 98/2000, when I can find it.

TNT 1 and 2 have worked very well, with no complaints. and the MMX, for a cheap video card is nice.

Considering trying a Matrox on the next box I build, but, unlikely for a while. Hoping the voodoo 5500 lasts for a while.

Nvidia pricing is pretty scary, and, even though their cards seem to work well, I would be reluctant to cough up the price for a new, bleeding edge card.

My TNT 2 went from 150 or so dollars, to 22 dollars in less then 8 months...

5500 went from 500 to 125, in the same time period.


gs

 

[Sol]

The bleeding edge of any PC markets gotta be a pretty bad investment but video cards cirtainly seem to be the worst.

As for my two cents on whats good.
I was very impressed with Tanins MSI GForce2TI. A very nice chipset which should be able to take the next generation or two of games without disgracing itself.
Somwhat less impressive was the GForce4 MX card. Quite a good performer, probably as good as the G2TI really, and as overclockerble as anything I've seen, these things just keep getting faster. The issue that I had is the lack of any official driver from Nvidia at all.
The thing came as a card in a box from Pine or some such. No CD nothing. Nvidias website has no downloads that can help. Only going to one of those sites with tweeks and leaked drivers and getting leaked Betas was of any help whatsoever.
As I may have mentioned on another thread(about another video chip manufacturer) I think this is just plain stupid.

The pick of the high end stuff price wise seems to be the G3TI200 and especially the MSI edition, they have all the features there are on a Gforce3 card including a brand-name type waranty for not too much more than the generic cards it would seem.

 

[NRG = mc²]

You mean the Titanium model? Like GeForce 2Ti ? I've never seen it abbreviated to GTi but hey, whatever rocks your boat :lol:

 

[CougTek]

Recently, I've had very good experience with the ATI Radeon 7500. At the time it was introduced, that card wasn't very interesting due to its poor driver optimizations. But now, ATI finally managed to write some half-decent drivers and the Radeon 7500 is about as fast in 3D as a GeForce 2Ti or GeForce 4MX 440. Not bad at all considering its superior 2D image quality and integrated MPEG-2 acceleration. It comes with a TV-out and the result, even if not very usable as a monitor replacement, is fine for movies. So far, it didn't cause any BSOD so I'm very satisfied with it.

Its big brother, the Radeon 8500, recently dropped in price by ~30% here in its retail version. I will probably try it soon. With the latest drivers intalled, the Radeon 8500 is suppposed to be nearly as fast as a GeForce 3Ti 500, although it currently cost 150$CDN less. Should be a winner in my book.

At home, I use a GeForce 3Ti 200 from Asus. I bought it because it has been a while since I had a NVIDIA card and at the time I got it (end of last summer), there were only praises about it. I've never used any Detonator driver above the 21.83 that came with the card because I read that the 23.11 might cause instability problems with my VIA chipset (KT266A). I would like to have the increased performance of the latest drivers, but not at the cost of my system's stability. I'm only a casual gamer though, so even if I don't benefit from the latest goodies, it's fast enough for my little needs. I haven't had any problem associated with the GeForce 3Ti 200 so far.

My previous graphic cards were :

• ATI Radeon 32MB DDR (good bargain at the time, gave it to a friend and still working fine).
  Diamond with a Savage 2000 chipset (never worked fine, a waste of money).
  Matrox G400 16MB SDRAM (still in use, great image quality. NOT for games though).
  ATI Rage 2c 4Mo PCI (still working and in my temporarily off server. Even 2D is limited on this thing - nothing above 1024x768).

 

[Buck]

The ATI Radeon VE 7000 32MB I can buy and sell at a good price. Also, the ATI Radeon 7500 64MB is reasonably priced. I normally try to sell video cards under $100.00 if not well under $100.00 for most users. Those that need more, know what they want, and I'm happy to get the better 3D cards. Believe it or not, I always have customers coming in with older PCI and even some ISA video cards that just get tickled pink when I can sell them an 8MB AGP card for under $20.00. Those inexpensive (we don't want to use the word "cheap") cards work remarkable well with WindowsXP.

BR

 

[Corvair]

This is a quote from someone else, not me:


MATROX PARHELIA

It has been a long time since there has been a name for anything related to Matrox that has spurred more speculation and hope than this one. The online world outside of MURC has been deaf to Parhelia, and few have really caught on there is meat to this name. I have been spending months investigating Parhelia if it's real, if it's fake, and what exactly it is.

I have been contacting all of my sources I could gather and comparing notes. After thinking I had 100% accurate information, I found I was only partially correct. All of my sources are of high regard in my eyes, but this should still be regarded as a rumor until you hear anything official from Matrox.

All right, on to the heart of the Matrox Parhelia.


1. It is very real.

2. Yes, I said it is real. Not fake.

3. It is fast. It will have a new memory design, different from all current video cards. Memory speed will be faster than the current fastest (a GeForce4). Faster by a huge margin of victory (~19GB/s bandwidth).

4. It is fast. It will be an all new chip. It will not be 256 bit and will not be 128 bit. Expect clock speeds around 300 Mhz. Also expect varied product offerings from this core after the initial products are released.

5. It is 3D feature filled. Expect it to have a fully programmable Transform and Lighting. Displacement mapping is sure to be featured along with shaders. It will have the most powerful Transform and Lighting unit available.

6. It is 2D feature filled. Before you say there is nothing that can be done to improve 2D, let me just say there is. 2D performance and quality will be a leap ahead.

7. It will be expensive. Of course I have no exact dollar amounts, but I am fairly confident in saying Parhelia will be more expensive than current high end cards, but with good cause. It offers much more than anything else on the market.

8. There will be different versions of the card at launch. There will be a lower end model with lower clock speeds and less memory (probably 64MB). There will be a high end model with higher clock speeds and more memory (probably 128MB). Then later there will be a super high end model, (probably 256MB and more features for its target market). The last one is expected to be pricier than the MMS series of cards and will probably be aimed towards the 3D Labs card users.

9. Of course, it goes without saying, but anyhow it will be multimonitor capable, but will have more dual monitor flexibility.

10. It should be announced within a month, maybe two.

11. If you want one and can afford it, you should be happy this summer.


I know all of you reading want more specifics, and I know more specifics. But please realize the things I have left out are done so because I am unable to verify. Some things I left vague because there was conflict in the information I received, but were reasonably similar to believe they were worth mentioning.

More to come, you will hear it here first. Stay Tuned!

 

[NRG = mc²]

That memory bandwidth sounds OTT, as others pointed out in the original post

 

[Sol]

I'm glad to hear that the Radeon drivers have improved. Does anyone know how good the OpenGL performance of the cards are though.
I know that the 3dMark scores for the radeons look good but last I heard anything on the quake3 engine - Ie. pretty much all good FPS games released this year- doesn't run too well.

 

[Tannin]

Excuse me NRG. I'm entirely dependant on other people for my video card knowledge - for myself, I look at cross-platform driver availability and 2D picture quality, nothing else. In other words, I just plug in a G450 or, if I'm budget constrained, a G200. I wouldn't recognise a frame rate if you hit me over the head with it. I'm dependant of people like Sol to keep me vaguely aware of the current 3D stuff I sell.

But blame bloody MSI for my mistake about the name of the new chipset - their ability to pick stupid bloody incomprehensible model numbers for their video cards is only exceeded by their ability to pick even more stupid names for their main boards.

Nice cards though. The punters seem to like them and they don't come back broken very often - which in the end is all I really care about. It does concern me that Nvidia are fast threatening to get a stranglehold on the market. I should really follow my usual practice and suport the #2 or #3 so that the #1 company doesn't end up owning the entire market and then jacking up prices and lowering their standards (as exemplfied by Intel pre-AMD or Microsoft post 1995). But I have got lazy and just gone with the flow on this one.

Getting old I guess.

 

[GMac]

I'm a happy ATi user - I've used a Rage 128 and Radeon AIW (original) in my home box, and the Xpert 98 is the stock card in our student workstations. I have had the odd problem with buggy drivers, but not recently, and the performance is first rate (in DirectX at any rate - I haven't done much OpenGL work with either of my home cards).

GM

 

[Mercutio]

The problem at the moment, Tannin, is that there is no #3 general-use video card right now. ATI and nvidia. I don't know which produces more chips. Matrox hangs on by a thread but it's off the radar for most people because their cards are so bad at 3D, and then you get down into the murky depths of SiS, Trident and Intel graphics chips (shudder).

Look at the list we had a few years ago:
#9, Permedia, Cirrus Logic (out of the graphics biz AFAIK), S3, 3dfx, Rendition... all gone.

 

[Buck]

Look at the list we had a few years ago:
#9, Permedia, Cirrus Logic (out of the graphics biz AFAIK), S3, 3dfx, Rendition... all gone.

You can add to that, Paradise.

 

[Mercutio]

D'oh!

Knew I forgot one. Whatever happened to Weitek? They made decent stuff back in the early '90s... and Western Digital's half-meg ISA cards weren't bad, either (although they tended to get a little more funky than most when asked to display out-of-pallette colors).

For me, ATI was the lesser of two evils when I started buying their cards late last year - the last time I had been enthusiastic about an ATI card before then was when I brought home a 2MB ATI Mach32 ISA card - but I have really been surprised at the quality of their current crop of cards. Enough that I started picking up their older, "budget" cards to supplement my Matrox purchases. I think that says a lot.

 

[Buck]

Paradise was Western Digital.

 

[Tannin]

In the says of te 1MB VESA card, Western Digital were just the best. Better than Tseng, and Tseng were good. I loved them.

 

[Tannin]

In the says of te 1MB VESA card, Western Digital were just the best. Better than Tseng, and Tseng were good. I loved them.

 

[Tannin]

Doh! I hate mornings.

In the days of ...

 

[Pradeep]

our lives....

 

[Mercutio]

Paradise was Western Digital.

Was it? The old card I just dug out of my parts box (man, I need to get rid of some stuff!) doesn't have any chips that say "Paradise" on them, or any stickers that might cover up such a chip.

Nothing was better than those old ETx000 cards. Those were the best video cards out there for a long time. I suppose one or another of the early S3 PCI cards was better, and then the Millenium of course, but the ET4000 card really was the best money could buy IMHO.

My favorite antique card since I was digging through my old stuff, shamelessly thiefed from one of my uncle's old 3D CAD stations: A full-length PCI card. The PCB says its a Fujitsu card. 32MB of onboard RAM and 4 72-pin SIMM slots. COVERED with chips, on both sides. I'm not sure how old it is, but it looks damned impressive.