The Dude wrote:
> Cheers for the info. What is the main thing that determines a graphics
> card's performance? (apart from price!)

Gobs of memory bandwidth, tons of parallel resources inside the chip.
A video card, is a massive parallel processing device.

To review the vital statistics for a card, you can look at the charts
on Tomshardware, to get some idea of how effective the card is. Or
go to a site like this, to see all the numbers.

http://www.gpureview.com/

Some games are CPU limited, some are GPU limited. And some are
hard on all resources.

The cheapest, performant card of late, was the 9600GSO. The manufacturers
seemed to have a glut of chips, and needed to get rid of them. (The chip
is relatively old, and the design is a rebrand.) In the US, the card was
available for a final cost to the consumer of about $55. I think the glut
of chips has been cleaned out, because I don't see the most desirable
models of those any more. There are still some left, but
you have to check the parameters very carefully, to avoid getting
one of the poorer ones. There were cards with 192 bit wide memory,
384GB total. Or 192 bit wide memory, 768MB total. As well as some
128 bit wide ones, with 512MB total. The latter would be the one to
avoid, as the memory bandwidth would be lower. Also, some of the
cards were listed with fewer internal parallel resources enabled,
but I can no longer even find web pages noting that fact.

But no matter how cheap a card is, there is no point buying a card
which is not suited for the application. If you know a game really
needs more resources to play well, then would you be happy with
a "slide show" ? I've seen the odd person, who insists on replacing
one cheap card, with another cheap card. And in the end, spending more
money than needed to get where they're going. It wasn't long ago,
there was a mismatch in the graphics card industry, between the
games and the cards. Virtually, only the high end cards were worth
buying, as the others just stunk. So check the benchmarks carefully,
before concluding you've pulled a fast one on the graphics card
makers.

Paul