Thursday, September 02, 2004

Video Card Stuff

PVC Video Card Comparison - Matrix of video cards showing DirectX version, shader model, clock frequencies, etc.

The GeForce4 Ti 4600 card that I have is a DX8 card, roughly half the bandwidth of the FX 5900 XT card (22.4GB vs 10.4GB) and 293M vertexes vs 136M vertexes. The FX 5900 XT card is a DX9 capable card.

Upgrades from the FX 5900 XT, based soley on bandwidth / vertexes (22.4GB and 293M, $185):

GeForce 6800 Ultra - 35.2GB, 600M - $550-$600
GeForce 6800 GT - 32.0GB, 525M - $400-$450
GeForce FX 5950 Ultra - 30.4GB, 356M - $325

Only the 5950 might have been worth it, even that would've only gotten me another 20-40% improvement but for a much higher cost.

I also ordered a new CPU/MB/RAM set... Opteron 144 1.8Ghz, Asus SK8V (VIA K8T800 chipset), and 2x512MB ECC. The Opteron 146 seems to have vanished from the retail channel and the Opteron 148 chip is about twice the price of the Opteron 144 (2.2Ghz instead of 1.8Ghz). Should still be faster then my existing AthlonXP 2600+ chip and I can probably drop a faster chip in next year when prices drop some more.

Update:

New Aquamark scores for the Opteron 144 + PC2100 + GeForce FX 5900 XT. (Old scores for an AthlonXP 2600+ with PC2700 + GeForce4 Ti 4600 was 19480, CPU: 6286, GFX: 2304.)

36520 (not quite double), CPU 7260 and GFX 4878.

Might get better scores if I upgraded to a faster CPU and bought some PC3200 memory. Might need to tweak the video card drivers as well. There's one at the Aquamark site where the user has a Athlon64 2800+ running at the standard clock rates on the video card, except that they're running PC3200. The score for that one is 40452 (about 10.7% better then mine).

(The only reason I have PC2100 instead of PC3200 is stupidity, I ordered without checking exactly what memory they were bundling with the machine.)

posted by Wuphon's at 11:01 AM