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By Mindsoup (mindsoup@onepc.net) - September 21, 2000
As my first article for OnePC.NET, I figured an ATI vs Nvidia vs 3dfx match up was the best way to get my e-mail box filled with death threats and hate mail. It seems that video cards discussions have become the Ford vs Chevy debate for geeks. Of course I grew up in a town where the quality of a mans character was told by the brand of chainsaw he owned, so maybe I view the debate a little different (on account of inbreeding).
Before you start dreaming up ways to hurt me, this is not a "who's best" article, it merely points out each cards' strengths and weaknesses and dumps all the crap video card companies like to call marketing. If there's one thing I learned reading the various forums that I do, there's nothing you can do to change a zealot's mind. 3dfx could repackage an S3 Virge and people from the 3dfx camp would rave about its value compared to NVIDIA. NVIDIA could build a 47-processor 350-lb card that costs 409 million dollars and its zealots would rave about the 6000FPS you get at 640x480 in Quake III. ATI could, mmmm, actually nobody really likes ATI that much.
Why didn't I include Matrox? Two reasons, one, I don't have one. Two, Matrox hasn't released a truly new card in over a year, so it wouldn't be a fair comparison. Three, I just got my tongue pierced.
Note: All prices mentioned are based on estimated values found on Pricewatch as of the time of this writing.
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ATI, Baron of the OEM Market, largest video card maker in the world has never been known for having incredible high-end products, but due partially to NVIDIA creeping into their territory, they're fighting back--hard. The Radeon easily has the best balance of features, longevity, and speed of all cards available, but since ATI's driver reputation is so poor, many people opt for NVIDIA on that fact alone.That's unfortunate because the Radeon and its Charisma Engine currently has the greatest support for tomorrow's games (of course in the graphics market that means maybe a six month advantage). When new games (That's spelled "Tribes II" and "Halo") come out you'll see an incredible performance advantage over it's current competitors in speed and visual quality.
The Radeon made this possible by adding a third texture unit, and supporting nearly the whole lineup of DirectX features. So in many of today's games the Radeon is beaten by the Geforce2 GTS, but in many future games the Geforce2 GTS will have it's effective fill rate cut in half by it's need to make two passes to render each frame thereby making it slower, and DirectX features such as EMBM (Environmental Mapped Bump Mapping) used in Tribes 2 make this the ultimate "Eye Candy" video card (Though the quality of its FSAA falls well short of the Voodoo 5).
One of the Radeon's key advantages is a little something they call HyperZ. HyperZ, simply put, reduces the amount of bandwidth needed by determining what needs to be rendered and what doesn't. For example, if you look at the front side of a house, with a Geforce/Geforce2 or Voodoo Card all you see is the front side, but your video card sees the inside and back and renders them all, creating a tremendous amount of extra work for the card. HyperZ (I'm not going into very great detail here as HyperZ could fill all the room I've allotted for ATI in this article) determines what needs to be rendered and what doesn't, saving you some much needed bandwidth (This is why the Radeon performs so well at High resolutions)
That's not all; ATI also has near perfect DVD acceleration with the following features:
If you don't understand the above let me break it down for you, the Radeon provides the lowest CPU utilization score for any video card while playing a DVD, while providing image quality near that of a dedicated hardware decoder. Of course this only helps you if you actually watch DVDs on you computer (I do because my monitor is bigger than my TV).
The Hard Stuff
The Radeon has far too many features to be covered in-depth in this article. Try
this article for a more in-depth review of each individual feature, but here's a quick run-down:
The Radeon hard three texture units each with 2 rendering piplines, and was created using .18 µm Process Technology. It has a core/memory clock of 166/166MHz for 32MB and OEM and 183/183MHz for the 64MB retail version. ATI had originally set their sights on a 200/200MHz core memory clock but was forced to scale back due to a worldwide shortage of high-speed memory. This gives the Radeon up to 1.1-GigaTexels/s (or theoretically 1.5-GigaTexels/s when using their HyperZ technology), 366-MPixels/s theoretical fillrate and 30-million triangles/s
Overclocking
ATI has never been overclocker friendly. They still do not now, or have any plans to ever include software to change the core/memory clock. The Radeon runs cooler than most other video chips in its class, despite having more than 30 million transistors (ATI says the fan is merely cosmetic and the cool design is for the eventual transition of the chip to pc notebooks where ATI still has no real competitors for OEM sales) which you think would be a boon to overclocking, but since ATI locked the core and memory speeds together for data transfer optimization, you're overclocking performance is limited by the memory's tolerance, not the video chip. Powerstrip will allow you to change the core/memory but because of the hefty optimizations made by ATI, overclocking has small benefits in game play (but it sure can make your numbers go up in 3DMark2000).
Bottom Line
If you like eye candy and are getting a card now there is no better card for you; the Radeon does it all, and it does it all with style. If you want to brag about your 3DMark scores, this is not the card for you. ATI has a smart, well designed card that will make your computer shine. Though the card is very fast, you may find yourself waiting some time to truly see what it is capable of since, as of this writing, no game really takes advantage of its true capabilities.
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NVIDIA, the usurper. NVIDIA came from less than a stellar beginning to produce some of the finest cards on the planet. After dethroning 3dfx as the speed king and tearing some very large OEM contracts away from ATI, NVIDIA is the company to watch. The company's stock soars while many in the high-tech community compare it to Intel. Not only did NVIDIA steal the speed crown from 3dfx, it added some semi-innovative features at the same time. The real innovation has been done by NVIDIA's marketing who are legendary for their underhanded tactics, and ability to get the public excited about their new features. Still, the Geforce256 and its siblings are incredible pieces of engineering.NVIDIA does not make video cards, only video chips which it sells to various board manufactures. This allows NVIDIA to be more flexible then their competition. Asus makes a multimedia version, Hercules make an overclocker version and a budget version. Creative bundles more software. Then competition between these companies forces the price down and more people buy NVIDIA-powered products--we all win (well, maybe everyone but 3dfx).
While the Geforce family may have been out-classed in the features department by the Radeon, the Geforce certainly stomps the Radeon at low resolutions. At high resolutions they're very close, with the exception of the Geforce2 Ultra which makes everything else it's bitch (unfortunately it's not currently shipping and it costs 66% more than it's competitors, but hey, it's only money and you'll enjoy the bragging rights for weeks). The Geforce also lags behind in DVD acceleration and 2D image quality. It certainly doesn't do a bad job in either of these fields, it just isn't up to par with Matrox and ATI. So if you spend your day looking at an Excel document, and play Quake on your lunch break, this is not the card for you.
However, if you want the highest frame rates at all resolutions and like the features this card provides, (I'll expand on those features a little later), there is no better card this one from NVIDIA.
The Hard Stuff
A brief list of features can be found on Anandtech. Go to this article of his for a full in-depth review of all the features
NVIDIA has the same problem as all other video companies; actually getting their card's features into games. Though its list of features is not nearly as large as the Radeon (the above list uses the new NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer to cover many of ATI's supported features such as Dot-3 Bump mapping) it is impressive none the less.
The Geforce2 GTS uses .18 µm Process Technology, and has two texture units with four rendering pipelines each. The core/memory speed varies by the card and by the manufacturer but as an example, the Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS has a core/memory speed of 200/166MHz. As such, the 3D Prophet II GTS can process up to 25 million triangles/s and 1.6-GigaTexels/s. In an ideal world, however, memory bandwidth problems hold the Geforce2 GTS back from its true potential.
Overclocking
NVIDIA's cards have always been at the top end when it comes to overclocking. Most video card companies that use NVIDIA products provide their own tools for overclocking your card (to be used at your own risk of course). Since the core/memory clocks exist independent of each other you can set each on as high as possible and squeeze every last possible frame out of your card. A market even exists full of ramsinks and heatsinks for the video processor to let you go that extra bit.
Bottom Line
It's all about the speed baby. You can't go wrong with a Geforce2 GTS for games. Its fast stable drivers, and its untouchable raw fill rate have made NVIDIA number one in the high-end 3D gamer department.
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3dfx, who started out as 3Dfx, was once posed to rule the 3D video card market when it was blind-sided by NVIDIA. 3Dfx, in its race to be the fastest, left out 32-bit colour, and only had support for 256KB textures in its Voodoo3 card. The result was a fast card with poor image quality compared to its competition. On top of that, NVIDIA's TNT2 was nearly as fast as the Voodoo3 and supported 32-bit colour and 2MB textures. Furthurmore, 3dfx's acquisition of STB didn't go as well as planned and 3dfx had some problems releasing some of its cards (namely the Voodoo3 3500). Then the company's CEO stepped down and after all the above, 3dfx started missing product cycles (ahem, the Voodoo5 6000 anyone?).In spite of all that the Voodoo4 & Voodoo5 are good cards, but not what a lot of people had hoped for. The Voodoo4 is a single-processor card, and the Voodoo5 is a dual-processor card (someday, we're told, the Voodoo5 6000, 4-processor card will ship); all are powered by the VS-100 chip. Though this allows for a faster card at lower frame rates, it causes problems at higher resolutions/colours because all the chips share the same memory and memory bandwidth. It also prevents the card from going any higher than 1x AGP.
FSAA (Full Screen Anti-Aliasing) improves visual quality for some, while it worsens it for others--it seems to depend on what you find important in your image. Simply put, FSAA renders an image larger than you've set your display for and then shrinks it down to fit. In this process, jaggies at the edge of polygons are greatly reduced--unfortunately, so are many fine lines. While both NVIDIA and ATI have FSAA support, neither have the image quality nor the speed that 3dfx has in their Voodoo4/5 products.
[Ed: Correction - A few readers have mentioned that the method for FSAA on the Voodoo4/5 is different from the above-mentioned. I had known about this fact, but didn't catch this mistake in the editing process.
The method that 3dfx uses is called RGSS (Rotated Grid SuperSampling) and works by rendering the same frame a certain number of times (2 renderings per frame for 2X FSAA and 4 renderings per frame for 4X FSAA) and then places them offset by a pixel on the screen. This, in effect, blurs the scene.]
3dfx also has other "T-buffer" effects such as motion blur, but has yet to really show them off other than one (quite large) video download of Quake III with motion blur on. For a more in-depth review of the Voodoo5, try this article.
The Hard Stuff
Though the features that 3dfx has listed for its chip looks impressive, it's actually smaller than the Geforce2, way to go marketing :)
The Voodoo5 has a core/memory clock of 166/166Mhz, with each chip having two texture units with two pipelines. Though the Voodoo5 is listed as a 64MB card, its two processors each use part of the memory, so it isn't all available for textures. I couldn't find much information on true fill rate, or triangles per second. I suspect that two processors make the information hard to really decipher. Or maybe I'm too lazy to really look for it.
[Ed: The theoretical fill rate for the Voodoo4 is 333-367-MPixels/s, 667-733-MPixels/s for the Voodoo5 5000/5500 and for the yet-to-be-released Voodoo5 6000, 1.32 to 1.47-GigaPixels/s. Source - 3dfx website]
Overclocking
Like the Radeon, the Voodoo5 has its core/memory synced, so they must be moved together. Everything I have read states you might get up to 200mhz, but you'll hardly notice the speed difference. Of course free speed is free speed...
Bottom Line
Good card all around. A great card if FSAA is your bag (absolutely fantastic with older games like
Half-Life). If FSAA doesn't turn your crank, go elsewhere.
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