Graphic Card

Introduction

Faster and faster, and even faster - the big names in the graphics industry continue to launch new products in ever-shorter cycles. In a seemingly endless spiral of events, the 3D performance of new graphics processors is constantly pushed to new heights, as they gain more features, and are packed with increasing amounts of faster RAM. This leads to an unavoidable upward spiral in price as well: at $500 or more, the fastest graphics cards currently available cost as much as an entire off-the-shelf entry-level PC.

So who really, actually, honestly needs all the great new 3D features of such sinfully expensive graphics cards? Or, conversely, does their absence in an inexpensive entry-level PC make it useless? By no means! Usually, such machines offer everything needed for working with office applications, image editing, listening to music and surfing the Internet . These tasks require neither a fast graphics card nor a super-charged CPU. Watching DVDs and videos is also no problem - even the simplest VGA card available today fulfills the necessary requirements.

The only exception when it comes to video would be when any kind of high definition (HD) content is viewed. For HD you need a very fast CPU to handle the immense amounts of video data involved; alternatively, a graphics card with the appropriate features can also help by sharing or even minimizing the burden of the decoding work. If the system has neither, playback will begin stuttering.

Printer Resources

Check Prices
XFX Overclocked GeForce Price: $489.00	XFX GeForce 6600 GT Price: $141.00
ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon Price: $319.96	XFX GeForce 7800 GT Price: $388.57
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Price: $154.25	ATI Radeon X800 XL Video Price: $264.00
MSI NX7800GTX-VT2D256E Price: $479.00	ATI Radeon X850 XT Price: $396.84
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Price: $135.00	eVGA GeForce 6800 GT Price: $300.00

Another trait that can differ between graphics cards is the quality they offer during the playback of movies and films. There are distinct differences in image quality between cards when interlacing, scaling (resizing) and other video features are used. However, the importance of these criteria is a matter of personal quality standards and depends on the individual user's perception. If the task at hand is only playing back a DVD or a simple video clip downloaded from the Internet, any graphics solution available today is up to the job.

Given all this, how can anyone explain such a large range of prices in graphics cards? And what could possibly justify a graphics card costing $500 or more? The answer is simple, really: games! Virtually all modern games strive to create a gaming environment that is as realistic as possible by using highly complex and elaborate 3D engines. To this end, they require an enormous amount of computing power to be able to handle the calculations required and the large amount of data processed. Simply put, modern 3D accelerators are really highly specialized, self-contained 3D computational units, acting basically as a computer within the computer.

The Exploding Cost Of 3D

Widely accepted industry 3D standards define the features and capabilities a graphics processor must have today. The most popular of these standards is Microsoft's Direct3D (part of DirectX) which has had several generations defined so far. The graphics chip makers work very closely with Microsoft in defining current and upcoming specifications of this 3D standard. You can find more information on DirectX and 3D standards here: THG Graphics Card Buyers Guide .

To allow each new iteration of the DirectX standard to create more and more realistic video output, the computing power of the graphics processors is continually being increased. In addition to raising clock speeds, this is achieved by increasing the number of transistors that make up the chips. As a result, the production cost of the chips has continued to rise. This has occurred despite production processes seeing several breakthroughs over the past years, and even though they continue to be improved, working at smaller and smaller scales.

For example, the GeForce 256, which NVIDIA launched towards the end of 1999, consisted of 22 million transistors. The chip supported hardware T&L, was DirectX 7 compliant and came with 32MB of memory. Today, the most complex DirectX 9 processor in the market is NVIDIA's GeForce 6800, which consists of 222 million transistors and comes with 256 MB of RAM; versions with a whopping 512 MB have already been announced.

In terms of 3D performance, saying that these two chips are worlds apart would be a bit of an understatement, even if we looked beyond their respective transistor counts and DirectX generations.

	GeForce 256	GeForce 6800 Ultra
Core Speed	120 MHz	400 MHz
Memory Speed	150 MHz	550 MHz
Memory Bus	128 Bit	256 Bit
Chip Man. Pr.	220nm	130nm
Transistors	22M	222M
Pixel Fillrate	480M Pixel/s	6400M Pixel/s
Texture Fillrate	480M Pixel/s	6400M Pixel/s
Geometry Rate	15M Vertices/s	600M Vertices/s
Memory Bandwidth	4.8 GB/s	35.2 GB/s

Why expend all this effort? Again, the answer is games, since they are the only consumer applications that actually take advantage of a card's 3D capabilities, a fact that won't change for some time. Of course there are also professional applications such as Computer Aided Design (CAD), raytracing and video-editing, which also require a fast and 3D capable graphics card. However, consumer cards are not the best choice for this type of software. ATI and NVIDIA offer a special workstation product line of cards with highly optimized and certified drivers for applications such as AutoCAD, Maya, Avid, Catia, Lightwave, Softimage, 3DSMax and so forth.

The next generation of Microsoft Windows, code-named "Longhorn," will offer a hardware-accelerated user interface that will require a 3D graphics card . However, we don't expect that graphics cards will need to be overly brawny to run it. Besides, there will also be an alternative user interface as a fall-back option that won't require a fast 3D card at all.