The Graphics Card - Choosing a Graphics Card

Graphics technology is still evolving at a ridiculously fast pace. Nvidia has made a habit of releasing new products or refreshes of current products every six months. ATI unleashes a new architecture about once per year, and it trickles out twists on that architecture for several months after.

The graphics card affects your gaming experience more noticeably than the system’s processor. You’d notice a bigger difference in frame rates between a current generation and a last generation video card than you would between two processors within a few hundred clock frequencies of each other.

The ATI Radeon 9700 Pro is a work of art. Fitted with 128MB of Double Data Rate (DDR) memory, it blasts through pixels and polygons at stunning speeds and runs every current game with high visual quality settings at excellent frame rates. ATI’s driver support has gone from lackluster to exemplary in the past couple of years. Prepare to pay $250 to $300 for a card based on this chipset.

If that’s not in your price range, the Radeon 9500 Pro is a mid-priced card with largely the same feature set as the 9700 Pro. The biggest difference between the two is horsepower: the 9500 Pro benchmarks slower than its big brother.

Both cards are DirectX 9 parts, fully compliant with the latest version of Microsoft’s multimedia driver library. That means that with one or the other, you’ll be ready for DirectX 9 games when they start trickling to market—which, as of this writing, is probably late 2003.

Having yet to test Nvidia’s GeForce FX line, we can’t recommend it. However, Nvidia’s track record is remarkable. Each new architecture it’s released has always been well ahead of the last. Furthermore, like the Radeon 9700 Pro and 9500 Pro, the GeForce FX is slated to be a DirectX 9–compliant part. Nvidia’s driver support has always been stellar. Watch sites like www.extremetech.com and www.gamersdepot.com for reviews of GeForce FX products when they come out, and adjust your selection accordingly.

As for cards themselves, it’s often hard to distinguish one card from the next, provided they’re based on the same chipset. A few manufacturers add more powerful cooling solutions, making overclocking easier. ASUS, which makes Nvidia-based graphics cards, is known for this. Crucial, which makes a Radeon 9700 Pro–based card, offers a lifetime warranty with its products (Figure 3-4).

Figure 3-4 Crucial’s Radeon 9700 Pro is all but identical to ATI’s own card based on its flagship chipset.

Choose your chipset first. Then shop around for the secondary features you prefer and the price you’re willing to pay. The web site www.pricewatch.com is an excellent and popular resource for finding the best deal on a given chipset.

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.

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