Component Recommendations - Graphic Card

A lot has happened on the graphic card sector. The next generation of multimedia and 3D accelerators is ready to enable higher resolutions, better frame rates, better effects and more details. If you only do office work, you can buy almost every video card. But gamers and graphic freaks are out for more. There are some things to consider when buying a graphic card:

Signal quality
The best are still the Matrox and Number Nine cards (Millennium G200 and Mystique G200, Millennium II, Revolution IV), others luckily have reached good quality as well (Riva-TNT, Banshee, Savage 3D). Memory
How much memory is on the board? Can it be upgraded? What type of memory? Bulkware is sometimes only equipped with SDRAM. Maybe you want to get a card with the sometimes faster SGRAM. If possible, the memory specs should be less than 10 ns. Chip cooling
Particularly the Riva-TNT boards get very hot; and if you even want to overclock it you will need an active cooler. Some cards come with a fan by default (e.g. Elsa Erazor II, Asus AGP-V3400TNT). Interface
Most new cards are mainly available for the AGP bus. I would try to get such a card (if your board features AGP), since the bus clock is twice as high as the PCI clock. This improves 3D games and DVD video playback, for example. Special Features
Some cards feature a TV in- or output. It's always great to play Quake II on a 80cm TV :)

An overall recommendation is simple: The best 2D/3D chip available is the nVIDIA Riva-TNT. Best features and functions, best performance, AGP support, 16 MB local memory, twin texture unit. I switched Quake II to 1600x1200 resolution on a Pentium II 400 and could have played it at almost 20 fps. Of course the frame rate decreases with increasing details or many enemies, but it's great to see that the TNT is basically able to run this resolution relatively fast. I think with a 600 MHz CPU it would be fantastic. This makes the TNT the best one-card solution.

If you want the highest frame rates possible you should consider two Voodoo² boards, which have to be used additionally to an existing 2D or 2D/3D card. To find the right Voodoo² card, please refer to: Voodoo² accelerator review . I recommend teaming up the Voodoo2 cards with either a Riva TNT or a Matrox G200 card. If you fancy video editing abilities go for the Matrox Marvel G200.

The differences between different Riva-TNT boards are quite small, particularly in terms of performance. Usually I would recommend to take those cards from popular manufacturers to ensure a proper driver support. But it's all a bit different with nVIDIA. Those guys regularly release updated reference drivers, which offer almost all important features and the same performance as drivers from card manufacturers. So I don't expect e.g. the Diamond Viper V550 to be particularly faster with the Diamond drivers than with the nVIDIA reference drivers. The trend seems to be the same as with the Voodoo²: The chip manufacturer provides the drivers, and the card manufacturer just adds some sliders and their logo. The best Riva TNT board is the one with the best active heat sink and the fastest driver release, currently it looks as if Asus made the race with its excellent AGP-V3400TNT board. 3Dfx has recently presented Voodoo3 and I expect it to regain the performance crown for 3D game accelerators once it's released.

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