Test of budget video cards with DirectX10 support

It’s no secret that manufacturing companies make the main profit from sales of video adapters in the lower and middle price ranges. It is for this reason that in this segment there is a serious struggle between competitors for a place in the sun Especially considering the fact that Windows Vista has taken quite confident steps to “occupy” all the latest computers and laptops, and only under its control is a set of DirectX 10 multimedia libraries available. As a result, if you want to keep up with the times and see all the beauties of the interface Vista Aero  with your own eyes, as well as to take a different look at the games of the future, you cannot do without purchasing the appropriate device.

Who came to us?

From the impressive number of video cards that came to us for testing, we can roughly distinguish several categories: the first – “there is no budget”, it includes such “monsters” as Radeon 2400Pro, Radeon 2400XT and GeForce 8400GS.

The second is “mass consumption”, which is represented by the Radeon 2600Pro, Radeon 2600XT, GeForce 8500GT, GeForce 8600GS, GeForce 8600GT and miraculously fits the price of the GeForce 8600GTS up to the limit limited by the test conditions $140.

The third is “retro”, with the only participant Radeon 1950Pro, which does not fit into the price range, but is designed to show what video cards of the previous generation were capable of in comparison with products of the new lines. Moreover, Most products differ from each other in core and memory frequencies, and this significantly affects the number of FPS and scores in synthetic tests, they are united by one similar feature, namely, hardware support for DirectX 10 (of course, except for the Radeon 1950Pro). Of course, you will say you, a video card without support for all new technologies cannot be called modern. And you will be absolutely right, but the question remains open: what capabilities and level of performance can we count on with the amount indicated above?

Lifting the veil…

With the Windows Vista Aero interface, everything is quite simple; there are only two varieties: Aero Express and Aero Glass, which differ in the level of graphic settings and system requirements. But today they are quite modest: for the first, 128 MB of video memory is enough, for the second, 256 MB is enough.As you can see, any of the tested video cards is not only suitable for working with the new interface, based on system requirements, but also, thanks to fairly high frequencies, allows you to comfortably enjoy the graphic delights of the new OS.

The only prerequisite is the presence of 1 GB of RAM, otherwise working with Vista will be a real punishment. And if high video system performance is not important to you and the latest computer games do not interest you, pay attention to Radeon 2400Pro or GeForce 8400GS. Moreover, there are options with passive cooling designed to reduce the overall noise level of the PC.

Note to players

With gaming applications the situation is completely different and requires detailed familiarization and study. It is known that the most common criterion for measuring the performance of video cards is the average FPS value (frame per second, or frames per second), obtained during testing in gaming applications. In synthetic tests, the measurement results are mainly given in points or their own values. The measurement results between video cards can vary quite significantly due to design features, such as the frequency of the chip and memory, the amount of memory, the number vertex pipelines and textures per clock, memory bus.

However, in addition to the speed of the devices themselves, there are other factors that influence the drop in FPS: lack of RAM, a slow processor, or an insufficiently fast hard drive… As a result, the reason for the drop in performance in gaming applications is not always only a video card can serve, but it is an undeniably important link in this chain and can significantly unbalance the system, which at first glance was assembled wisely. So when choosing a game accelerator, be sure to understand what you want to get from it as a result, so that it is not painful it hurts…

Arms race

According to the results of our testing, one interesting trend has emerged: in the popular synthetic test 3DMark 2005 and 3DMark 2006, in most cases, ATI Radeon video cards prevail over their direct competitors, and in gaming applications the situation is repeated with exactly the opposite, and NVIDIA GeForce video adapters take the lead, as indicated by the performance charts.

However, we have to state that all of the above is true only for games based on DirectX 9 technologies, in which the performance of the tested video cards is, by today’s standards, at an acceptable level. In the Call of test Juares (DX10), all products showed rather sad results – the number of average FPS only in rare copies reached 8. Therefore, we can safely say that DirectX 10 support in experimental samples is not just words, it exists and can significantly brighten up the long hours spent for a PC together with the Vista Aero interface

Full version of the article in PDF format.

Robo User
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