Budget graphics card roundup

A selection of graphics cards for the cash-deprived but performance hungry.

We’re guilty of pushing the hardest, hottest and fastest things in Atomic, and often neglecting the far larger mainstream market, in which a veritable plethora (say that 10 times quickly) of cards exist. In fact it’s here that the two big vendors make their money, and the reason Matrox still exists. The top end ‘crown’ card is purely there for bragging rights – being on top, at the very top, creates an image that the rest of a company’s cards are pretty dang hot as well, and helps it sell to the mainstream.

The reality of the situation is many of us can’t buy the top dogs, let alone two of them for SLI or CrossFire purposes. So we’re resigned to grabbing something in the sub $600 range, which has its own pitfalls – namely having to wade through almost every graphics card suffix known to man trying to make sense of which one suits. GT, GTX, GTO, XT, XTX, LE, SE, GS, Pro… it all gets bloody confusing. So if you’re a generation or two behind and all you want for Christmas is your two more frames, read on and we’ll separate the mouse from men, the crap from crisp, the groans from the grunt... well, you get the idea.

There’s been a rash of DirectX 9 card revisions lately from both ATI and NVIDIA, no doubt in the attempt to stake claim to the highest performance in each relevant financial tier before Vista hits and makes them all obsolete. Or in short: when the big bang happens, they want to be on top. Kinky.

While the X1950XTX has made the jump to GDDR4, nothing else in the mainstream has, nor has anything massively changed architecturally – with the exception of the X1950 Pro, which has been developed on an 80nm process, the first of its kind. We’ll be seeing an X1650XT shortly from ATI also built on this process.

The X1950 Pro also marks the birth of ‘native’ CrossFire – no longer do cards have to be connected through an awkward and time consuming split DVI cable, CrossFire can now be achieved through two flexible SLI-bridge styled connectors – this is the way of the future folks, as the old style will eventually be phased out.

There are essentially three segments to the mainstream – entry, mid and high – the fourth enthusiast segment of course being eliminated here and kept for those with pockets deeper than Bill’s gambling addiction.

CrossFire has learnt from SLI, and things are now nicer to set up. You'll need two of these to do the job though.