PureBasic Forums - English

ok well i bragged about getting the 3D Labs 512 meg card, but upon further inspection, its a CAD/DIGITAL CREATION CARD!!!!!!! not a gaming card. so what is the absolutely positively best video card out there with 256 megs memory? ive got the nVIDIA geforce FX 5600 w/ 256 meg, but i keep hearing about better cards. well, what say you guys about the ultimate gaming card. or should i just wait until nVIDIA comes out with its new 512 card?

nvidia sux!
ati rules

thefool wrote:nvidia sux!
ati rules

Agreed! Nvidia cards are getting massive! reminds me of 3dfx before they bit the dust!

In former times nVidia was better than ATI, because ATI didn't support Cg Shaders correctly. And now: nVidia supports GLSL not correctly and ATI supports GLSL.

If you are working with television, only nVidia can produce a legal broadcast signal... ATI cannot. So in my books ATI sux

The quality of a card depends on the application. For a 3D workstation both of those cards suck as they cannot do true OpenGL. A true OpenGL card is required (which of course is useless for playing games)

what do you mean about "true opengl"
my Blender uses it and runs totally perfect. Also all demos, cad apps and other have used worked nicely with my 256mb radeon card

All those cheap cards install OpenGL drivers that emulate OpenGL. Real OpenGL cards are very expensive and very fast !!

i have been reading about PCI express and NVidia SLI where you can link 2 adjacent PCI express video cards together in a dual fashion. so you can link 2 256 PCI express cards and they run in tandem, BUT it still isnt like having a 512 meg card because the frame buffer wont ever be able to fully intergrate 2 separate cards. on the other hand, Gigabyte has created a card with dual NVIDIA 6600 gt processors on one board, which currently has the 3dmark record with like 14500 points.

still there is NO motherboard out there that has dual PCI express AND dual Xeon processors. i cant figure that out. each processor could drive a PCI express card and have 1/2 the available RAM on the motherboard which would create the ultimate machine. the quadrupile AMD 64 processor boards have up to 32 GIGS of RAM, with each processor having 8 GIGS. why not do that for video cards as well?

@Paul: Any links re "legal broadcast signal" and nvidia/ati issues? Not disagreeing with you but I fail to see where/how the output of a card relates to a bc signal. Re "opengl emulation" (ogl on top of directx?) - I've heard this rumour before and suspect manufacturers may have tried it at one time but I doubt it actually happens, evidence being I run nvidia's drivers on Linux with no mention of directx. As for speed I think what's going on is that if you are prepared to pay the extra you get, as well as some "hw" extras, a highly optimised driver. I suspect it's the driver which is the real "product" and I even suspect the hw extras are nothing more than sw enabled hidden features (re the nvidia Quatro type hacks).

what is it about the Legal Broadcast signal?

dmoc wrote:Re "opengl emulation" (ogl on top of directx?) - I've heard this rumour before and suspect manufacturers may have tried it at one time but I doubt it actually happens, evidence being I run nvidia's drivers on Linux with no mention of directx.

This has got nothing to do with DirectX....

Professional GFX-Cards (~1500$) support OpenGL in Hardware and also
speedup 2D-graphics which the typical gaming-cards don't. Did you ever see
an SGI in action?

Paul wrote:If you are working with television, only nVidia can produce a legal broadcast signal... ATI cannot. So in my books ATI sux

Just to make sure: Are you talking about NTSC here? PAL isn't that restrictive, is it?

there are VERY few 'commercial / high volume' cards (if any) that would generate an acceptable broadcast quality signal, that is if you want to go the real time route

tbc's can do wonders though