OT: Deciding on a new graphics card

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Apparently, nvidias' geforce 9 series will be out tomorrow, which means the price of geforce 8 series cards will drop. My old card, being an AGP card, is rather unsuitable. My new card, which came with the motherboard, is small and cheap.

My new motherboards' best slot is a 'PCI Express x16', which is apparently fancy and new.

A card in the mid-range would probably be best.

Thanks.

[Ed Kolis]

PCI Express x16 is fancy and new? Hmm, funny, I have like a 3 year old machine with one of those... Unless you're talking about PCI Express 2.0 x16... that's apparently something different which I'm not familiar with

The GeForce 9 is coming out tomorrow? Darn, I should have held off on my order of a GeForce 8600

Here's the one I got - can't tell you how it is yet because it hasn't arrived yet, but I'll let you know when it does - should be later today, as according to the UPS tracker, it's "out for delivery" from the local distribution center as of today!

http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16814150258

I also ordered a pair of 1GB RAM sticks, so that might also affect my performance, seeing as I'm currently at 1GB total, so don't attribute everything I'll be saying later on to the video card!

[Fyron]

Ed Kolis said:
"PCI Express x16 is fancy and new? Hmm, funny, I have like a 3 year old machine with one of those... Unless you're talking about PCI Express 2.0 x16... that's apparently something different which I'm not familiar with "

PCI-E 1.0 and 2.0 are electrically backwards and forwards compatible, as will be 3.0 whenever it comes out. They tried to design the standard to be long-lasting, and able to evolve over time (unlike ISA, IDE, PCI, etc.). The only difference is that PCI-E 2.0 devices in 2.0 slots can run faster, with greater bandwidth.

PvK said:
"Eh, but the Geforce 8000+ series cards all have features which are for Vista only, not to mention the Vista sabotage features. So for those of us who have no intention of running Vista, the GeForce cards to consider are still the 7000-series. No?"

Vista sabotage features??? Rampant paranoia much? Nvidia and ATI (AMD) have absolutely no incentive to "sabotage" anything; no amount of money from MS would convince them otherwise, since they would lose so much more money from poor sales when word got out...

The 8xxx series cards are a lot faster than 7xxx, and 9xxx will be a lot faster still. 8xxx and 9xxx support DX10, yes, but they still do DX9 a lot faster than the 7xxx cards.

Narf:
The greatest consideration is how much money you want to spend. There are so many f*ing cards now that you can spend as little as $60, on up to $600 or more (not to mention retarded SLI setups). People thought that MS' efforts at market segmentation with Office and Vista were bad, just look at what Nvidia and ATI do...

[narf poit chez BOOM]

About $200 max - But there's probably a point where the money/bells-and-whistles ratio makes it inneficient to add more of the former.

So I could buy a PCE-E 2.0 card and it would work with the PCI-E 1.0 slot?

[narf poit chez BOOM]

I'm currently looking at this one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130319

Can it support two monitors?

[Fyron]

99% of video cards these days have two VGA or DVI (simple, bundled adapter to connect VGA monitor here) outputs. Even budget-range 8xxx cards have em (though they might cheap out with DVI + VGA). For the card you linked, look at the Specifications tab; it shows 2 DVI under Ports. You can also see on the picture that it has 2 DVI ports, as well as a S-Video out.

The 8800GT 512MB is a very solid card, and about the most expensive card you'll get before the price/performance ratio starts going to infinity.

"So I could buy a PCE-E 2.0 card and it would work with the PCI-E 1.0 slot? "

Yep.

[PvK]

Yes, Vista sabotage features. If anyone's paranoid, it's the likes of media megacorps and M$. As in, requiring hardware to support shutting down or reduced fidelity of audio/visual media if systems think they detect DRM issues, as has been discussed and articles cited on this forum about the time Vista came out. The "word" has been out since then - how could you forget it?

And no, not all the 8xxx cards are faster than all 7xxx cards. When I researched that point a few months ago, the advantage was for the 8xxx series unless one coveted the DX10 (Vista only) support.

Hence my inquiry.

Fyron said:
PvK said:
"Eh, but the Geforce 8000+ series cards all have features which are for Vista only, not to mention the Vista sabotage features. So for those of us who have no intention of running Vista, the GeForce cards to consider are still the 7000-series. No?"

Vista sabotage features??? Rampant paranoia much? Nvidia and ATI (AMD) have absolutely no incentive to "sabotage" anything; no amount of money from MS would convince them otherwise, since they would lose so much more money from poor sales when word got out...

The 8xxx series cards are a lot faster than 7xxx, and 9xxx will be a lot faster still. 8xxx and 9xxx support DX10, yes, but they still do DX9 a lot faster than the 7xxx cards.

[Fyron]

Fast 8xxx cards (G92 GPU especially) are faster than the 7xxx line. Naturally, there are gimped cards for the low to mid ranges that won't be as fast as the highest end 7xxx cards, due to the insane amount of market segmentation GPU makers run.

==0==

HDCP is hardly a "Vista sabotage feature." It will come into play in any OS, including XP, Mac OS X, and Linux (unless you use DMCA-illegal cracking software). It's not Microsoft/Nvidia/ATI/Intel 's fault that the movie studios force encryption, and you can't hardly blame them for wanting their OS/hardware to not be gimped and unable to play the latest media. The movie studios wouldn't give a damn if MS/Nvidia tried to take a stand and refused to support HDCP; they would probably prefer no support at all for computer playback, since it only leads to piracy in their eyes. Either piss off the movie studios that don't care, or piss off your customer base... hell of a choice. Of course, HDCP support doesn't matter in the slightest if you are not playing Blu-ray or HD-DVD movies, making it not much of a reason to stop buying newer video cards. Vista's protected media path doesn't come into the picture without ridiculously DRMed content.

Luckily the music industry has seen the light about DRM; hopefully the movie industry will some day, but I wouldn't hold your breath.

[PvK]

Yes, I was talking about the low to mid range products. The articles I have read have pointed at Microsoft as the culprit with DRM sabotage hardware, and Vista (and recently, the next XP service pack) as the means to try to force it onto the market. Paying for hardware that supports this "feature" is paying extra for a sabotage feature, it seems to me, and supporting the idea that people don't have the right to own and fully control computer hardware, which is an idea that seems clearly wrong and counterproductive to me. The 7xxx series doesn't have it, and the 8xxx series does, as well as other features designed for DX10 which is Vista only, and I dislike Vista for many reasons and never intend to own it, so for at least the present and near future, higher-end 7xxx series looks better to me than the 8xxx series.

[PvK]

"We're right back to the misguided alarmism." Eh, it seems to me that rather we have two perspectives, and you just keep mis-labeling mine. Your perspective seems to be that "whether the user can play Blu-ray and HD-DVD or not" is a central issue, while I don't want my OS and hardware designed to shut off or degrade if some security code isn't happy. I want the right to program native code (or run whatever third party native code program) that communicates directly with hardware that is designed to let me freely read and output digital signals (e.g. for audio/video). I don't want to be forced to run software/hardware designed to limit what I can do, report on what I'm doing, or shut down systems if my computer seems to be doing something someone else's program hasn't approved.

"How were any of the pre-Vista DRMs opt-out?" Yes, I mean by running other software, or telling Media Player not to connect to the Internet to verify licenses etc. Is not Vista different from pre-Vista in that now it complies with a secret and potentially changeable spec which has the potential to disallow your media hardware to function? Maybe you can run other software on Vista now, but what if the HDCP support decides to update to include checking for unauthorized player software and disables/impairs your media hardware?

"I'm certain MS understood this, but they couldn't afford the black mark of having their media center unable to support the latest media tech.." MS can afford to do whatever they want, and they could very well have taken a stand for users being able to own and operate computers without media-industry sabotage designed into the OS and hardware, and could have led others in the rejection of such crap. Instead they signed right up. Seems to me it goes pretty well with their corporate strategy of trying to own and control how things work and remove such control from users, to slowly adjust users to accepting that people are just users, not owners or actual programmers, and software is a service.