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3D PCI video card for games



 
 
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  #1  
Old August 25th 03, 02:41 PM
sam
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Default 3D PCI video card for games

Hi all

I already have a G400 DH AGP card for my primary video and TV -Out.

I want to add a PCI video card for games

Any recommendations?


sam



  #2  
Old August 25th 03, 03:22 PM
Rick
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"sam" wrote in message ...
Hi all

I already have a G400 DH AGP card for my primary video and TV -Out.

I want to add a PCI video card for games

Any recommendations?


That's backwards. AGP speed is required for 3D games, not 2D and TV.
Since the solution involves replacing your G400 anyway, just replace it
with something that has both decent 2D/TV image quality and 3D speed,
and forget about installing a separate PCI card.

Rick


  #3  
Old August 27th 03, 08:46 AM
Erez Volach
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I think the best you can aim for is either PCI Radeon 7000 or GeForce 2MX
Don't think there are any faster performing 3D cards, but doubt anything
faster can be realized over PCI's bandwidth anyway.

E.V

"Rick" wrote in message
...
"sam" wrote in message

...
Hi all

I already have a G400 DH AGP card for my primary video and TV -Out.

I want to add a PCI video card for games

Any recommendations?


That's backwards. AGP speed is required for 3D games, not 2D and TV.
Since the solution involves replacing your G400 anyway, just replace it
with something that has both decent 2D/TV image quality and 3D speed,
and forget about installing a separate PCI card.

Rick




  #4  
Old August 28th 03, 02:05 PM
Arthur Hagen
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"Erez Volach" wrote in message
...
I think the best you can aim for is either PCI Radeon 7000 or GeForce 2MX
Don't think there are any faster performing 3D cards, but doubt anything
faster can be realized over PCI's bandwidth anyway.


Wrong, wrong and wrong.

From ATI, there's the Radeon 9100 PCI and 9200SE PCI.
From nVidia, there's the MX 440, Quadro 4 and FX 5200 cards.

From Matrox, well, there's the MED5mp, which is basically a Parhelia PCI
with monochrome-enabled drivers. My guess is (but no guarantees) that you
can add an entry to the inf file for the regular Parhelia drivers, and use
the card.

And the PCI bandwidth isn't the bottleneck except for for moving textures.
With a 128MB graphics card, most textures can be preloaded in the video
memory on the card, making the slowdown much smaller than you'd think.

Regards,
--
*Art

  #5  
Old August 28th 03, 02:39 PM
sam
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Thanks guys for all the inputs.

I really like my Matrox G400 DH for playing video to the TV. I am not a
frequent game player. I used to have an ATI as my primary vdieo card and a
Diamond Stealth 3D PCI card to play games that require hardware
acceleration. that was ok for me then.

sam

"Arthur Hagen" wrote in message
...

"Erez Volach" wrote in message
...
I think the best you can aim for is either PCI Radeon 7000 or GeForce

2MX
Don't think there are any faster performing 3D cards, but doubt anything
faster can be realized over PCI's bandwidth anyway.


Wrong, wrong and wrong.

From ATI, there's the Radeon 9100 PCI and 9200SE PCI.
From nVidia, there's the MX 440, Quadro 4 and FX 5200 cards.

From Matrox, well, there's the MED5mp, which is basically a Parhelia PCI
with monochrome-enabled drivers. My guess is (but no guarantees) that you
can add an entry to the inf file for the regular Parhelia drivers, and use
the card.

And the PCI bandwidth isn't the bottleneck except for for moving textures.
With a 128MB graphics card, most textures can be preloaded in the video
memory on the card, making the slowdown much smaller than you'd think.

Regards,
--
*Art



  #6  
Old August 28th 03, 06:06 PM
Rick
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"Arthur Hagen" wrote in message ...
And the PCI bandwidth isn't the bottleneck except for for moving textures.
With a 128MB graphics card, most textures can be preloaded in the video
memory on the card, making the slowdown much smaller than you'd think.


The benchmarks I've seen beg to differ. 3D gaming (especially with
today's current games) on the PCI bus is painful.

Rick


  #7  
Old August 28th 03, 07:26 PM
Arthur Hagen
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Posts: n/a
Default


"Rick" wrote in message
...
"Arthur Hagen" wrote in message

...
And the PCI bandwidth isn't the bottleneck except for for moving

textures.
With a 128MB graphics card, most textures can be preloaded in the video
memory on the card, making the slowdown much smaller than you'd think.


The benchmarks I've seen beg to differ. 3D gaming (especially with
today's current games) on the PCI bus is painful.


Please show me a benchmark comparison between two systems where the only
difference is that one is a PCI card and the other is an otherwise identical
AGP card. That shows enough of a difference that it's "painful".

In a few cases, like with the Voodoo 5 5500, the PCI card was slightly
*faster* than the AGP card, due to less overhead. Most of the time, though,
an AGP card will be *slightly* faster, and quite a bit faster only for
transferring textures or other large chunks of data. For most games,
though, you don't transfer a large amount of data to the card except at
level load time (or "zoning"), but only send short instructions to the
graphics card, which are then executed just as fast on a PCI card as an AGP
card. And even when you do transfer large amounts of data to the card, the
data often comes from the hard drive, which makes the PCI vs AGP transfer
speed almost irrelevant, as it's not going to be the limiting factor.

--
*Art

 




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