What's the most "Balanced" graphics card ?

[DamonSoftXP]

and all you people talking about saving money, give me a break. for $175 i just got a geforce 3 ti 200 with 3.3 ns ram. this will overclock to 600+ memory and spank any radeon 8500 in any benchmark.

 

[Budman]

<< this will overclock to 600+ memory and spank any radeon 8500 in any benchmark. >>



We are talking BALANCED here, not the fastest,now you can go spank whatever you like.

 

[RedShirt]

Radeon.

I had a Geforce 3 by Gainward and the 2D was fuzzy at 1600x1200 at 85 hz.

The Radeon handles it with ease. And since ATI controls everything for their own cards, your guarenteed good 2D.

 

[DamonSoftXP]

yea well like others have said the geforce 3's, in particular the leadtek have 2d quality as good or better than the radeon series and every website including anand will tell you nvidia has better and more stable drivers, indisputable fact.

 

[RedShirt]

Not that I don't agree with you, but it is not an

<< indisputable fact. >>

. Take for instance Nvidia's newest XP drivers that are giving lots of people problems.

 

[Demonicon]

Well I have to be honest here, I just recently bought a GeForce3 Ti200, I don't use my graphics card heavily for anything other than games so it suits me great.

That said, the clear choice for "balanced card" in my view would have to be the Radeon, and i'm not going out on a limb here cause it's not even really that close.

 

[Kingofcomputer]

<< Some cards have excellent 3D but poor 2D ,and the other way around.
In your opinion, what card hits the perfect balance ? >>

If a card's output quality is bad, it's bad in every area, doesn't matter 2D or 3D. If a card is superb fast in 3D performance, it'd be also superb fast in 2D performance. It seems that you're confused by the Matrox card which has excellent output quality (not only in 2D) but poor 3D performance. There is card only good in 3D, can't do any 2D, that's Voodoo 1 or 2, which is an add-on card.

ATI's card is quite balanced at the 2D, 3D performance and output quality.

 

[DTBH]

dunno abt 2d or 3ds all I know is that the 99 price tag on my visiontek gf3 ti200 looks the best. heehee

well IMO if you read all the reviews regarding gf3s and radeon. 2d quality are roughly the same. all I know is my 2d looks great and my friends radeon looks great.

 

[yaethom]

Geforce3 Ti200 if money is REALLY an issue

Radeon 8500 if money is not much of an issue

Geforce3 Ti500 if you have money to splurge.

 

[ShadowFox]

where image quality starts to decline is at high res, i've heard that the Leadtek Ti200 & 500 have great image quality, but i've also heard that many other Ti 200's suffer in 2d. Newer radeons should have great Image quality too, my Radeon 32mb DDR is very sharp untill you get up into HIGH res (1920x1440)

 

[ElFenix]

the leadtek tdh cards have the best output accuracy of any geforce card. i'm told that they're even better than matrox. i know for a fact its better than the creative gf 256 i used to have, as i can almost read 1600x1200 with my contacts in whereas with the creative it wasn't even close.

output accuracy being the board not messing with what the graphics chip is doing. at 1600x1200 the voltage coming out of the ramdac is lower than at lower resolutions and so its more sensitive to crappy components on the board (or at least thats the explanation i read over at firingsquad). this happens in both 2D and 3D, you just don't notice it in 3D because you're not reading some tiny letters.

 

[fow99]

<< Some cards have excellent 3D but poor 2D ,and the other way around.
In your opinion, what card hits the perfect balance ? >>



What do you mean by 3D and 2D, speed? image quality? GT3 is speedy and Raedon has better image quality. 2D speed wise, there is nothing to compare with. Any modern card can handle it.

Just a personal opinion, I still can't trust Raedon's driver support, especially when using Linux. Can anyone correct me on this? In that case I will go for the Raedon in my next upgrade.

 

[Salvador]

My Visiontek gf3 ti200's 2d is inferior to even the ATI Rage 128 Pro OEM that I have. The regular Radeon just blows it away as far as 2d goes.

As much as I like the idea of the 3d on the gf3, I don't know if it's worth living with the inferior 2d day to day.

Sal

 

[wdb1966]

Radeon...as far as drivers go, if you use the ones on the install CD, they all suck. Out of the box, just about all cards have lousy drivers, but both ATI & Nvidia have good driver updates.

Linux is a different story. As far as I know there are no open source drivers for Nvidia products, only proprietary, unless they have changed their policy lately.

Xfree86 4.x picked up my Radeon with a standard Redhat install...worked perfect.

 

[Tennoh]

Balanced? Would probably be an oem 8500LE which is about the same price as a Ti200.

Being owner of a Herc Ti200 and 8500 oem, the Ti200 had better 3d compatibility while 8500 is slightly prettier minus some graphical glitches in some games. Speed also better on a Ti200 if you can overclock it to Ti500 speeds, which mine does 240/500. For example playing S.W.I.N.E., a pretty recent and fun 3d RTS, using 'show fps' command the speed of 8500 hovered around 42fps whereas the o/c Ti200 was around 44fps. This was at 1600x1200 32bit colour max detail including aniso.

As for 2d quality, on a Mitsu 22" monitor, slight edge goes to 8500. Subjective but I found colours are more crisp but this can adjustable by software to suit your taste. However one area where I found an 8500 better and can't be fixed easily was text clarity. This was with and without Cleartype in WinXP. I found 8500 easier on the eyes for all the small text at very high rez, 1600 and up. And then there's DVD playback, which is clearly better on an 8500.

Note on drivers for ATI many people make it seem like the latest 3286 drivers are really bad which they aren't. Sure it doesn't work all the time but they improved it within a month of the 8500's release. I'm sure they will have another version out very soon, as some web reviews are already using newer driver releases. I'd say that's pretty quick release for drivers. In comparison with nVidia driver releases, sure they's plenty, but most of them are leaked somehow. Officially nVidia has released how many this year? 4... And their latest ones, 23.11, are not of the usual vaunted nVidia quality either for many people.

I'm happy with both my Ti200 and 8500LE and use the Ti200 more often primarily for older games, but trying to objective on the most balanced video card question, I go with the 8500LE.

 

[Radboy]

Radeon.