Another year is upon
us; the time to
upgrade your com¬
puter is at hand. We
could think of
nothing better to start the
upgrade cycle than a new video
card. This cycle will probably be
the last time you will need an AGP
card. For one, you will definitely
upgrade to a DirectX 9 based card,
which will be good for at least two more years, and by then, PCIExpress (PCI X) cards would be common and ready to buy!
Of course, PCI X has already made an appearance in our market, but the technology is still finding its feet. It will take PCI X at least two more years to go mainstream from the niche it currently enjoys. Another point to note is the fact that games scheduled for release in the near future will not be able to take
advantage of a PCI X solution. They will perform just as the would with an AGP card making your investment in AGP 11 somewhat future proof.
If you are a gamer demands the latest and the greatest right now, you can opt a high end video card, which W. serve you well for a while ensuring that you do not need change platforms for at least while. However, if PCI Express what you are looking for, you will
need to upgrade your motherboard and CPU as well!
Another telling factor is that the upcoming Microsoft OS, code named Windows Longhorn,
will need a DirectX 9 compliant
video card, if you wish to appre¬
ciate its interface in all its glory.
It has lots of eye candy which can be experienced
through hi a DX 9 card.
BUDGET VIDEO CARDS
The budget segment consisted of eight cards that had the same chipset, which was the FX 5200 from nVidia. This category was specifically created for users who
are more into using their computers for general purposes, with a little bit of gaming thrown in. We look at what the cards had to offer to us.
Their Features
Half the cards we received were of the XFX brand, and they offered a versatile range from the absolute minimum in video memory to the maximum possible available in this category. Only two out of the eight cards featured dualmonitor connectors. On the bright side, all the cards featured video out, which can be used to connect a TV. And why would you connect a TV to your computer? Try watching a DivX movie on a TV, and you probably wouldn't ask that again.
The XFX Personal Cinema was the only card in this category to offer a TV Tuner chip on board. This definitely gave it a plus, since you need not install a separate TV Tuner card for watching TV on your computer. However, that does not explain the Rs 11,000 price tag, since you can easily get a 960OXT at that price. That was about all that the cards in this category had to offer. The rest of the cards were all just vanilla, and expectedly so, since they are not priced high.
Their Performance
The performance of the cards across the board ranged from mediocre to excellent, given the price these cards retail at. The MSI and the XFX reigned in this category. Surprisingly, the XFX GeForce FX 5200 64 MB posted excellent results compared to most 128 MB cards, and in fact, beat both the models from XFX itself The MSI TD 128 FX 5200 was another good performing card in this category.
The Gigabyte did relatively well, but was not good enough to get ahead of the above three cards. The 5200s by themselves are crippled, going by the number of pipelines and core and memory speeds.
Most users will have to make do playing at a resolution of 800 x 600 using these cards.
We ran Half Life 2 and Doom 3 as Tier 1 tests (See box "How We Tested and Decided the Award Winners" on page 62 for details on Tier 1 and Tier 2 tests) on these cards, because these are the latest games available and if the cards we are the best performers were the MSI and the XFX with the Gigabyte following closely
tested are not able to play the even at low resolutions, they may not be worth investing in at all. Doom 3 is a real resource hogger. All the cards suffered and posted unplayable frame rates at 800 x 600, but were okay at 640 x 480 (although 21 frames is still very jerky for playing a game), giving reasonable frame rates. With HalfLife 2, the cards were more than happy and posted good framerates, with the XFX 64 MB giving 35 fps at 1,024 x 768. (These frame rates were posted after the DX9 fix was applied for the cards in the game. See Box "OEM Deals and How They Affect Your Gaming Experience" on page 78)
A similar scenario was observed with Far Cry, with the settings at Medium in the game. The frame rates at 800 x 600 were enough for any user to play the game smoothly. The XFX FX 5200 128 MB (non TV Tuner) card was disappointing, and gave some of the most rock bottom frame rates amongst the whole lot. In our performance tests, the best performers were the MSI and the XFX, with the Gigabyte following closely.
First time entrant PNY gave good frame rates, but could not hold its own against the abovementioned cards.
Overall, in the budget category, the cards gave us the expected results, and we filtered out the best amongst them to arrive at the winners.
The Winners Are...
From the results of the perform¬
ance tests, it is clear that the win¬
ners were going to be from the
XFX stables, given the frame rates
that they posted in each game.
Agreed, the frame rates in Doom 3
were nothing to write home
about, but it does prove a
point: if you want to play
games like Doom 3, an FX 5200
is not the card for it and you
will definitely need to spend
some more in the graphics
department On the
other hand, with games such as Far Cry and HL2, the 5200 proves to be more than enough for that few hours of weekend gaming.
The XFX GeForce FX 5200 256 MB and the XFX GeForce FX 5200 64 MB were the overall winners in this category not only because of their price but also because they performed well. These two get the Digit Best Buy Gold Award and the Best Buy Silver Award respectively.
