Budget graphics card roundup

We used a restricted version of our usual test suite – 3DMark06 SM2.0, Quake IV and Half-Life 2 with all options set to maximum @ 1280x1024, 4xAA, 8xAF; and 3DMark06 SM3.0/HDR at the same settings with no AA, so NVIDIA and ATI cards could play on a level field. Quake IV is our OpenGL test, Half-Life 2 our DirectX 9 and 3DMark our synthetic. We used the 6.10 beta Catalyst drivers for the ATI cards (except the X1950 Pro, which required a modified 6.9 Catalyst to be recognised), and ForceWare 91.47 for NVIDIA. This was partnered with an ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe, 2GB of OCZ PC-4000EB RAM and an Athlon 64 FX-60.

Now for a lot of these cards, the above tests are a pretty hard slog – a lot of them don’t have any business in doing HDR or AA – they simply don’t have the chops, but that’s our standard bench and allows us to compare to top end cards. Keep in mind that a low score here doesn’t mean that a game is unplayable by any means on a certain card – if you strip off anti-aliasing for instance and bump down to trilinear filtering instead of anisotropic you could quite nicely buy yourself anywhere between eight and 25 frames per second. Not to mention bumping texture details down and other options means that playability shouldn’t be too much of a stretch, except maybe for the very bottom cards on the latest games. Mind you, we won’t be held responsible for your game looking like the smeared vision of a mud-stricken hobo after being hit by a semi-trailer carrying a boat filled with epileptic rednecks having a rave party.

Prices
We realise that RRPs aren’t often met – heck, no matter what price we put in, it will change by the time you read this. For this Head to head, we’ve taken the lowest 10 prices we can find and averaged them to supply a ‘street price’, that will hopefully be more indicative of the product cost.



ASUS X1900XT 256MB

Street price $500	Supplier ASUS
Clocks 625/1450MHz	Memory 256MB GDDR3
Outputs 2x DVI, video breakout	Needs power Yes
Pixel shader processors 48	Vertex pipelines 8

The X1900XT 256MB is exactly that – an X1900XT that’s been cut down to half its memory, and takes a price hit as a result. Apart from that it’s identical, meaning that you can get a hefty card if you’re willing to stretch your dollar a little further. Unfortunately this also means it inherits the loud-arse cooler that makes your teeth vibrate, small children cry and prophets of doom claim the divine wind has come to lift us all to heaven above when it hits full volume. This card comfortably smashes the 7950GT all over the park performance-wise in everything but one area – price. You can get other brands for about $100 cheaper, making it viable for the average Joe.