Results tagged “graphics card” from Birmingham Mail - Technobabble

I blogged recently about the new offering from nvidia, the £450 280gtx and how I was completely underwhelmed by the latest releases of computer components.

Perhaps I was feeling fatigued by the constant stream of slightly tweaked and overclocked graphics cards masquerading as the 'next big thing', but I couldn't get excited, even though the 280 is, in fact, very quick.

But now the situation has changed somewhat - and I actually feel myself becoming excited again by new releases.

The reason is that nvidia's competitor ATI has finally got its act together and released competitive cards at the right prices.

As the graph of frames per second at high resolution in current game Crysis shows, the £125 4850 card is the real jack in the box - just about as good as the 9800gtx which is more than £75 extra.

And the top of the range £200 4870 is in some tests better than the £250 nvidia 260 card. This leaves the 280 at the top of the pile - but let's face it, at a minimum of £400 who bar the most deranged tek head with no girlfriend, or, let's face it, life, will be able to afford it?

I almost feel myself catching the upgrade bug - the benefits of competition at long last!

THE perils of a game being made with cutting-edge technology was brought home to me recently when I dusted off an old favourite for a blast.

As a bit of a strat fan I loaded up turn based shooter Incubation - similar in many ways to the classic X-Com series.

At the time it was pretty cutting edge, and utilised a facility only available to people who had bought the latest graphics card.

Those who have gamed on the PC for some time might remember 3dfx - and Incubation had a special enhanced graphics mode which would take advantage of the new hardware.

Sadly my more modern ATI Radeon 3870 512mb card was deemed by the game to be unable to cope in the full 3dfx mode.

It would, however, work fine in the basic graphics mode, although it keeps asking me to load directx 5.0...

How to get it working in full 3d mode? Answers on a postcard to ben.hurst@birminghammail.net please!

It would be fair to say that anyone technically unaware, looking for a new graphics card capable of playing the latest games at the moment would be somewhat confused.

The situation has not really been helped by nvidia's naming policy - the 8800 series has had so many revisions that anyone could be forgiven for wondering what's going on.

For your reference the cards in order of speed (including AMD's top cards) go 8800gs 384, 3850, 8800gt 256, 8800gts 320, 8800gts 640, 3870 512, 9600gt, 8800GT 512, 8800gts 512, 8800 GTX, 9800 GTX, 3870 X2, 9800 GX2.

Confusing eh? Especially as Nvidia reused the GTS tag for newer cards. So which card would I buy? Clearly budget is an issue and it depends on what your system is, as there's no point in pairing a £400 9800gx2 with a ageing cpu as the graphics card will be hopelessly bottlenecked.

The recent king of the middle market has been nvidia's 8800gt 512 - released as a spoiler for the 3870 from AMD it actually spoiled it's own 8800GTS 512 which was released shortly afterwards. Who would want to spend £210 on the GTS when the £150 GT did the job nearly as well?

Since then the 9600gt has come out as well, and is only marginally slower than the 8800GT.

The graphics card market is saturated with minor revisions, slightly overclocked versions of the same cards and so on, but I think that I'd still go for the 8800GT 512 - if you can find it for around the £115 mark!