ok, i need some help differenciating the GF cards...

[loosbrew]

Hey all, I know this must get annoying, and i see questions similar to this all the time, but i never see a straight enough answer. what i want to know is...what the hell is the difference between all of the GF cards? theres GF, GFMX, GF2MX, pro , ultra etc...is there somewhere that will tell me the exact differences between the cards and which are better than others and why. i hate manufacteres sites, they always seem to try and make thier cards seem the best, so its obviously biased(duh!) but i want someone who knows the differences between these cards and explain it. im in the market for a card, and will be buying one ina month or two, when the GF3 will drop all the other prices. i was looking at the radeon but i run win2k and dont want to dual boot. i play a few games, nothing really taxing IE..starcraft, age of empires II, Unreal Gold. but i want to be able to play any game i pop in. i also want good 2d. a friend of mine has a matrox g400 DH and it ran unreal gold beautifully, at least compared to my diamond monster fusion banshee 16mb pci card. would a g400 be enough for me? 3d is important but not as important as 2d. i guessi dont play games that often but when i do, i get annoyed at the quality of my monster fusion. thanks to anyon etaking the time to read this and answer with some good info. 🙂

loosbrew

i forgot to mention that i run @ 1024x768x32 and i would like my games to run smooth at that res and still have good 2d.
thanks again

 

[DefRef]

For the picky bits, check the Nvidia Product page for the techy stuff.

GeForce - Came out in Fall 1999 and came in SDR and DDR flavors. The SDRs were only marginally faster than the still-new TNT2 Ultras and weren't worth the upgrade. The DDRs were though and rocked.

GeForce 2 - They added the Pixel Shader architecture and turned up the clock speed for another 30% boost in speed. Very cool.

GeForce 2 Ultra - Even faster clock and expensive high-speed RAM boost bandwidth for max speed, but max cost too.

GeForce 2 MX - Aimed at business and budget users, it strips out half of the texture pipelines, but give a great whallop per dollar ratio.

GeForce 3 - The Godzilla of video cards in all respects. The absolutely fastest card at the higest price.

I know people with Radeons in Win2K, what's the problem?

Unreal Gold is a three year old game, so it's a poor measure of the demands of MODERN GAMES (Q3,UT,NOLF). It looks like you play a lot of 2D games, so anything would do, but then you say you want to run anything, which requires more horsepower to guarantee.

Some people have dissed Nvidia's 2D, but I think they're crackheads. I've had 4 Nvidia cards (TNT, TNT2U, GF, GF2) and run 1600x1200x32@75Hz on a 19" monitor and I have ZERO complaints. Some swear by the Radeon and Matrox has only had that to fall back on, so consider that too.

Based on what you seem to play, I'd recommend a GF2MX or Radeon card for your setup. It'll prolly do you the most for the least.

Hope this helped.🙂

 

[loosbrew]

that defintely helps alot. THANKS!!
i do have one more question


<< GeForce 2 MX - Aimed at business and budget users, it strips out half of the texture pipelines, but give a great whallop per dollar ratio >>


whats the drawback of &quot;stripping out half of the texture pipelines&quot;?
whats the benefit of the over half?

thanx for the speedy reply!

loosbrew

also....i am assuming that sdram is whats allowing the GF2mx to be so cheap. am i really missing out in something that much better with ddr? i would like to get ddr, but i really dont know the major performance differences. thanx again

 

[DefRef]

The major bottleneck is memory bandwidth. That's why the one-card-SLI of the V5-5500 did pretty good with SDR RAM. DDR runs effectively at TWICE the rated speed (thus the DOUBLE data rate acronym).

The difference in the number of texture pipelines determines the number of textures that can be laid down in a single pass. Say you fire a rocket down a torchlit hall - The card has to draw the wall texture, any bump texture, the lightmaps for the torches and the light maps for the rocket flare. If your card can do 4 textures at once, then it'll take a single pass, if your card can only do 2 textures, then it'll take two passes to render with the attendant reduction in frame rate.

Business users aren't playing Quake 3, so they don't need killer frame rates, so SDR is cost effective. Why pay for functionality that 's not going to be used?

 

[loosbrew]

i understand the differences between sdr and ddr, but i guess my question is is there a major performance hit with sdr ram in vd cards. i notice that there really isnt that much of a difference in performance between sdram and ddr ram in normal PC's configs, Mayb 5-15%(so ive read) just wondering if its worth the extra bux for a Vcard with ddr.


thanx again for the informative replies, i really appreciate someone who knows what thier talking about answering my questions 🙂

loosbrew

 

[loosbrew]

up

 

[DefRef]

As I said earlier, the difference between the TNT2U and the GF SDR was very minor, even with the T&amp;L assist. Memory is THE bottleneck for many video cards. I experienced about a 30% gain in speed from my TNT2U to my GF DDR and it was good!🙂

In this article they touch on the subject of prices as relates to memory:

Something else which is growing at the moment though is the cost of cutting-edge graphics cards, reversing the trend after a long period of slumping prices. Top-end cards like the GeForce 2 Ultra retail for as much as £350 today, when only a year ago £200 was considered fairly expensive, and the newly announced GeForce 3 will cost you even more.

But what is causing this sudden rise in prices? The cynical amongst us might argue that it's a result of decreased competition. After all, there is currently no mainstream graphics card on the market that can even approach the top end of the GeForce range when it comes to brute force rendering power, so NVIDIA and their licensees can charge pretty much what they want. But according to Peter the jump in prices over the last year is mostly due to &quot;the fast growing complexity of chips and high prices of fast memory&quot;. Chips like the GeForce 2 Ultra require large quantities of exotic memory to avoid creating any bottlenecks, and memory is now one of the most costly parts of a graphics card.

 

[slaytr2]

I think you should consider getting a Geforce 2 GTS. I got an EVGA GTS for 162 plus shipping. It has twice the fill rate of my old TNT2 at both 16bit and 32bit color settings. THis is at a memory clock of 333 (ddr) I got a Hercules MX card but took it back because I couldn't tell an appreciable difference.

Slaytr