Graphics Cards for Every Budget

VisionTek Xtasy 6564
OK, so maybe you don't have $399 to drop on what might be the ultimate in luxury items. Fortunately, NVIDIA offers another GPU, the GeForce3 Ti 200, that provides performance for the rest of us.

Technically, the GeForce3 Ti 200 is a mid-range product, but it might offer the best dollar-for-dollar performance of any card available. By using the GeForce3 core clocked at 175MHz and pairing it with 64MB of 200MHz DDR RAM (effectively a 400MHz Single Data Rate-SDR-equivalent), the VisionTek Xtasy 6564 gives us all the benefits of DirectX 8.0, loads of RAM to store textures, performance that would have been considered top-of-the-line a year ago, and a $200 price point.

In testing, the Xtasy 6564 comes in right behind the GeForce4 Ti 4600 and RADEON 8500, with an 8 to 10 percent difference in frame rate between the Xtasy 6564 and RADEON 8500. Although it's a huge jump between the Xtasy 6564 and the Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600, I was surprised to see the GeForce3 Ti 200-equipped product faring so well because of the price difference. Expect to see close to 100fps when playing Quake III at a 1600 x 1200 x 32 screen resolution.

To keep the price as low as possible, VisionTek skipped any value-added extras when manufacturing the Xtasy 6564. The card has an S-video output for TV-out, but that's it—no flat-panel support and no video capturing. Because the Xtasy 6564 shares the same core as the Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600, you can expect the same level of support for DVDs-very decent quality, but playback that's not as crisp as what the RADEON 8500 provides.

In the end, the Xtasy 6564 is a genuine GeForce3 product that's priced to sell. If you don't suffer from PC envy and find yourself overclocking every part of your system to eke out those few extra frames per second, the Xtasy 6564 offers the perfect balance between features and price. Sure, compared with GeForce4 Ti 4600 cards, you're giving up a few megahertz here and there, a more efficient memory architecture, and an extra vertex shader, but the GPU (the real meat of the product) is intact so that you can play games the way they're meant to be played. And in the end, that's what makes this product superior to the GeForce4 MX line of cards. As you'll see, the "new" GeForce4 MX 440 boards can't compare.

ATI Technologies RADEON 8500
As ATI's second shot in the enormously competitive graphics card market, the RADEON 8500 is a serious contender marred by the same problems ATI faces every time it launches a new product. In essence, the RADEON 8500 presents a curious blend of powerful silicon coupled with dodgy drivers. The result is a good graphics card that hasn't quite reached its potential.

The RADEON 8500 is an AGP 4X part that includes VGA, DVI-I, and S-video outputs. You can use the included DVI-I to VGA adapter to take advantage of ATI's HydraVision technology for setting up dual displays. Unlike the older RADEON 64MB ViVo card, the RADEON 8500 doesn't support video capturing—a feature that's best left to a dedicated solution. The software bundle includes a demo of Half-Life and full versions of Team Fortress and Counter-Strike.

Going on specifications alone, the RADEON 8500 is very impressive. With the core and memory both clocked at 275MHz (effectively 550MHz with the use of DDR RAM), the RADEON 8500's four rendering pipelines and 8.8GBps memory bandwidth give ATI the muscle to win the raw fill-rate battle. As NVIDIA's only competition, ATI shows that its product engineering is more than capable of going 12 rounds.

Like the original RADEON architecture, the core of the RADEON 8500's GPU consists of multiple components. The CHARISMA ENGINE II serves as the card's T&L engine. Closely coupled with the CHARISMA ENGINE II is the SMARTSHADER engine-ATI's programmable vertex shader. If you're familiar with the GeForce4's vertex shader, you won't find anything new here. SMARTSHADER handles the geometry and math required to render a 3-D scene. SMARTSHADER works like a traditional co-processor. By off-loading this process to a dedicated engine, developers can take advantage of features such as key frame animation and vertex lighting, resulting in more realistic character models.

The RADEON 8500's PIXEL TAPESTRY II architecture lets the card make an evolutionary leap beyond its predecessor. As a DirectX 8.1-compliant programmable pixel shader, PIXEL TAPESTRY II's primary job is to apply textures. The catch is that the pixel shader lets designers apply far more advanced effects (such as Shadow Mapping to create more realistic shadow effects) to the textures within a 3-D scene. PIXEL TAPESTRY II can also perform reflective bump mapping, a technique that overlays a realistic bumpy surface over a polygon that also reflects light. Going a step beyond the GeForce4, PIXEL TAPESTRY II lets the RADEON apply six textures in one pass. By comparison, the GeForce4 can apply only four textures in one pass. This feature will be important when games such as the texture- and lighting-heavy DOOM III hit the market. The benefit? Pure eye candy.

Where the RADEON 8500 offers the most potential over the GeForce4 is in ATI's TRUFORM technology—a technique that promises to drastically improve the visual quality of new and existing games. Before I explain how TRUFORM accomplishes that, let's use computer-generated imagery (CGI)-rendered films as a point of reference.

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