Pickin' a processor

[Mark J. Dulcey]

Matthew Gillen wrote:
> Mark J. Dulcey wrote:
>> Matthew Gillen wrote:
>>> Honestly, at this point I just want to learn a single vendor's
>>> numbering/naming scheme so that I can keep my sanity.  Nvidia's system is
>>> maddening (who would think that a 7800 is a /much/ better card than a
>>> 8400?), I can't imagine ATI's system is much better.
>> The video card system actually isn't all that bad. The first digit tells
>> which generation of hardware it is (a slight wrinkle from ATI, x, x1,
>> and x2 count as first "digits"), and the rest gives some idea of the
>> performance level of the card (higher is better). They do muddy the
>> waters a b it with suffixes; for example, a GTX card is faster than a
>> GTS which is faster than a GT which is faster than a GS, and an LE card
>> is always the worst. But it's a little easier to sort out than the CPUs
>> right now.
> 
> That was a great post with lots of good info, but I still don't see how you
> are supposed to know which card will be better for you (unless there's
> difference of 1000 or more in the model number, in which case the newer
> generation is always better):  going back to the 7800 vs. 8400, I think it's
> sort of silly that I have to go to Tom's Hardware to figure out how they
> compare.  And that's within the same vendor's product line!
> 
> Thanks for the detailed info though, that was great :-)
> 
> Matt

In the recent cases, cards with the same last three digits are at about 
the same performance level, but the new ones support more graphics 
features that don't do much for you when the card is introduced but will 
a year or two later. This rule doesn't hold as well for older cards 
(NVidia 4 and 5 series, and ATI cards without X in their model numbers).

So, an NVidia 6600, 7600, and 8600 are fairly comparable in speed when 
running software that doesn't use the new features in the newer cards. 
The newer card will perform better when running new software that uses 
its extra capabilities, and there have been incremental improvements in 
quality of video output as well. For that matter, an ATI X600, X1600, or 
X2600 are also roughly comparable to those NVidia cards; some 
applications like NVidia better, others run especially well on ATI. (But 
watch out for the suffixes.) The 8800 is a special case; it's really a 
big performance leap over its predecessors.


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