The Graphics Card - The Players: ATI and

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The Players

It’s the chipset that makes a graphics card what it is, and it’s the chipset manufacturers that makes PC enthusiasts excited when a new product is announced or released. Graphics chipset makers are almost always ahead of the technology curve, offering exciting new features sometimes months before games start to incorporate them. Even so, newer chipsets also offer raw oomph, pushing current and older games to higher frame rates.

Frame rate is king. The frame rate is the number of still screens that the graphics card displays on the monitor per second, creating the illusion of animation. This rate determines how smooth a game looks while you’re playing it. The threshold of playability is about 25 frames per second (fps). A rate of 30fps is good, and 60fps is ideal. Though it’s nice to have an even higher frame rate, your brain can’t tell the difference once the frame rate rises above 60fps.

So why should you want a graphics card with a chipset that runs games at 100fps? The answer lies in features: if the card is that powerful, you can turn on such features as anti-aliasing (discussed in its own section a little later in this chapter) and anisotropic filtering (a graphics technique that keeps textures crisp on objects that trail off in the distance from the point of view), and you can increase the game’s resolution while still maintaining a frame rate at, or above, 60fps.

Four major players currently compete in the graphics chipset market: ATI, Nvidia, Matrox, and SiS. They are discussed here, along with 3dfx graphics chipsets, which, while no longer available, were important players at one time. We don’t include information about chipsets that come with motherboards, because they usually offer lackluster graphics acceleration. Onboard graphics adapters are good for servers and business workstations, but as a proud gamer you’ll want the cutting edge in performance.

ATI

ATI has been in the graphics business for years. In terms of 3-D performance, it often played second fiddle to Nvidia, which has usually had better, faster, and newer graphics hardware available. That was true even up to ATI’s last generation of products, the Radeon 8000 family. The 8500 was a great card, but it spent a very short time at the top of the graphics chipset heap before Nvidia shut it out.

That all changed with the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro (shown in Figure 3-1). Released in mid-2002, it’s held the crown of the graphics industry into 2003. It’s got everything a gamer needs: fierce power, plenty of features, and competitive pricing. A DirectX 9–compliant part even before DirectX 9 was released, it’s well ahead of current gaming technology, and ready for next generation titles that won’t be available for a long time.

Figure 3-1 ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro

ATI only recently started licensing its chipsets to other graphics card makers. Until that time, its own cards were the only platforms for its chipsets. By selling its chipsets to other companies, ATI has done something wonderful for gamers: it has created competition between card manufacturers and driven down the price of its products. The Radeon 9700 Pro came out with a price tag of about $400; at the time of this writing, www.Pricewatch.com lists the cards for as little as $230.

The Radeon 9000 family also includes mainstream chipsets, the Radeon 9500 Pro and the Radeon 9500, which are available with a street price of around $175 and $120, respectively. Its current budget chipsets, the Radeon 9000 Pro and Radeon 9000, are featured on cards available for less than $100.

Nvidia

This long-standing king of the graphics industry was usurped by ATI in 2002. Its GeForce4 Ti series, with its high-end Ti 4600, is still an excellent range of graphical chipsets, but Nvidia can no longer claim that it offers the fastest solution on the block.

That could change, though. The GeForce FX, the latest offering from Nvidia, was poised to roll out in early 2003. Its release probably took place between the time that this was written and the time this book hit the store shelves. History has shown that Nvidia’s offerings are fast, stable, and ready for the latest in gaming technology.

Nvidia came into its own in the late 1990s, when it pulled the rug of the graphics acceleration business out from under 3dfx’s feet. Nvidia’s TNT series had the audacity to match 3dfx’s performance, and the early GeForce-based cards actually outpaced the best that 3dfx had to offer. Until ATI stole the crown, Nvidia was on top. Figure 3-2 shows an Nvidia-based graphics card.

Figure 3-2 An ASUS graphics card based on the GeForce4 4600

One of Nvidia’s strengths is its driver support. A dedicated software team churns out new device drivers for the Nvidia chipsets on a regular basis, and each driver release usually ekes out even more performance from the chipset. ATI has, until recently, been lacking in that area.

This chapter is from Build Your Own High Performance Gamers' Mod PC, by Chen and Durham (McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2004, ISBN: 0072229012). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today. Buy this book now.

Next: More Players: Matrox, SiS and 3dfx >>
 

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