A Roundup of 45 PCI-E video cards, Q'3 2006

Two years have passed since the start of first PCI-Express x16 video cards at Computex 2004. At that moment, merely six models were available to users - see our review PCI-E VGA Roundup 2004, but a year after there were already 23 solutions like these - see the review PCI-E VGA Roundup 2005 Q2. Today, one more year afterwards, we are reviewing twice as more PCI-Express x16 video cards.

Our today's tests were not run for the purpose of direct recommendations on selection and purchase of a video card. By now, the two leaders of the 3D market have already released the third generation of PCI-E graphic chips for al the three segments, and the number of "canonical", i.e. reference solutions alone have approached to 50. The assortment of whatever unheard-of suffixes - GS, GTO, XL, XTX - has been expanded essentially, and even not every specialist will immediately recall what follows what in the lines of both companies, and which performance level matches to which performance level.

The purpose of the presented graph is to give an approximate idea of the general situation, on the positioning of a topical video card of yours in the general line of all the existing PCI-E solutions. And of course the other goal is to help you make up your mind as to the necessity and expediency of whatever upgrade, thus to of you "trade bad for worse" as a result of another hasty "fork-out".

A few key notes prior to reviewing the graphs

Of the whole variety of "non-traditional" solutions, we took only SUS GeForce 7800 GTX Top 256 MB as a truly "overclocked" version of GeForce 7800 GTX. It's not frequent these days when manufacturers please us with official overclocking of cards for the top-end sector, and we were really amazed when this card was released.

Currently, there is no such a universal chipset which would offer simultaneous support for both SLI and CrossFire. The reason is solely related to marketing, and until these artificial barriers are abandoned, we won't present a direct test of these technologies on the graphs. To be more precise, the CrossFire mode on our test configuration based on the motherboard ASUS P5WD2-E Premium (i975X) is there, and we were even able to read the results for the upper combination of CrossFire, but ATI CrossFire master cards are still unavailable in wide retail either in Taiwan or Moscow. Therefore, the urgency for this solution is almost zero.

The latest topical flagship, NVIDIA's "sandwich" card 7950GX2, at first persistently refused to run, but update with the motherboard's BIOS of most recent version 0601 did save the situation. The card is not a simple one, and before making up your mind to buy it, you'd better study the compatibility page for motherboard on NVIDIA's web site.

The video card S3 Chrome S27 wouldn't run on our test setup. We did not include the card to the list of cards to be tested until the causes are found out, but admit it, it would be really interesting to look at its ranking among other solutions. Let's hope that by the next roundup this issue will be settled.

We used rather aggressive setting just in order to produce more relevant results for video cards of the top-end sector. Under soft settings, we are unlikely to see any difference between today's hi-end and mid-end solutions. So, you don't have to draw your attention to the complete unfitness of inexpensive video cards for games - these are merely tests and no more than that. Having lowered the bar of resolutions, effects, antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, we can get by even with these resolutions.

We do welcome sound criticism of this material on our forum and would be willing to listen your suggestions and ideas with appreciation.

Test setup

A full-featured test of today's top-end video cards, let alone the CrossFire mode and the doubled GeForce 7950GX2 requires a most top-level powerful CPU of all the available. To start with, we had to conduct a curious experiment for detect such a specimen.

Of course, with the start of mass sales of most recent desktop CPUs based on the Conroe core - Intel Core 2 Extreme and Intel Core 2 Duo - the leadership will certainly be with absolutely different chips rather than those which took part in our tests. However, if we don't escape from the reality, for now let's target what is there and is really available.

Clearly, the major competition hostilities in the line by Intel are expected to go on between P4 3.73 Extreme Edition and P4 670 Prescott 3.8 GHz (support for two cores is still poorly implemented in the gaming sector of applications). Nevertheless, we included the 2-core P4 D820 (2.8 GHz, SmithField core) into the tests. And of course, to observe the so-called "justice" we took the "folk" CPU Celeron D 331 2.66 GHz.

Here are the detailed specifications of all the four CPUs used:

Processor	Logo	HT	EM64T	L2 cache	FSB	2 cores	Price
P4 3.73 GHz Extreme Edition		+	+	2 MB	1066 MHz	-	$1078
P4 670 Prescott 3.8 GHz		+	+	2 MB	800 MHz	-	$640
P4 D820 SmithField 2.8 GHz		-	+	2x1 MB	800 MHz	+	$160
Celeron D 331 2.66 MHz		-	+	256 K	533 MHz	-	$57

These are brief specifications of the video cards to take part in today's tests:

Benchmarking. Synthetic tests

It is interesting to note that "verdicts" of various applications regarding the leadership among the processors to attain maximum performance are opposing. Further, you will be able to estimate the results yourselves and see where, e.g. the "CPU-bounded" Half Life 2 gives in the performance crown to P4 3.73 Extreme Edition released a year ago at a price over $1000 and still just a little bit cheap since then. At the same time, PCMark 2005 with ATI X1900 XTX CrossFire Edition assumes that Prescott 3.8 GHz is somehow more powerful, what FarCry later "confirms".

Nevertheless, further tests were run mainly on the platform of P4 3.73 Extreme Edition. Now with the release of most recent processors built on the Conroe core, including the flagship Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93 GHz), the situation with leadership is even more evident - the very first tests demonstrate a substantial performance boost over those based on the NetBurst architecture, and the long-awaited breakthrough has been finally achieved. But that is a separate topic for future tests.

Now, the test results themselves.

GLExpress

Tests. Games. Half-Life 2

Far Cry

Comanche 4

HALO

DOOM 3

Summing up.

In the eternal race for the top performance, the epoch of another calm has come to an end. We might think like "What's the point of further chase? Will that end eventually?" It's always like that - the new generation of system memory is coming as a replacement for the outdated leader, then the new graphic bus calls for a radical new approach to the change of the main components, then a new generation of processors in no time drives the leaders of the past which cost several hundred dollars unmercifully into a category of cheap "Celerons". And producers of 3D graphics release their newbies which immediately discard the former smashing super-hits. When on earth shall we stop for a short respite to upgrade without a fuss (like it used to be ten years ago) and enjoy the maximum system performance for at least half a year?

Alas, but only not now. Very soon, we will see new 2-core Intel Core processors on the retail shelves, whose performance and power consumption will bring the new systems built on their base over to the category of unbeatable leaders. Thereafter, we can expect a new generation of graphic chips, then - once sales of the new Microsoft Windows Vista have been launched, the desktop systems will be supposed to meet absolutely different requirements, not only in terms of performance but also compatibility to the requirements of new platforms. Out there in the distance, looming are new games whose hardware requirements are even hard to imagine today.

So, what to do - it to upgrade, then what is it that we should check first of all?

The answer to this question is directly related to the capabilities of the other components of your system. If there is a hope that the chipset of your motherboard as well as other critical unit of the PC "survive" the certification for Microsoft Windows Vista, in other words, if you are seriously up to moving to a new operating system on today's hardware slightly improved with some "cosmetics", it does make sense to choose a new video card not only on the base of its level of potential performance, but also in terms of its further compatibility. In fact, the same is topical for those who are not planning to chase for the requirements of MS Vista for at least this year, especially for its Pro version with the AeroGlass GUI - it suffices to simply choose a maximum affordable and powerful 3D card, and that's it. At the same time, it always makes sense to think about the future...

Lastly, those whose current PC components definitely don't fit within the requirements of Microsoft's new-generation operating system, will anyway have to think not about upgrading the video card, but follow a more balanced reasonable approach to the migration towards more advanced modern platform. But how? We will explore this matter in detail in one of our forthcoming reviews...