Am I out right rejecting Dual GPUs? Again no. I have already out lined one special situation where a dual GPU configuration will come in (very) handy. And for anyone who must absolutely have the best experience in gaming this is the only way to go and the only way It Is Meant To Be Played!
Special Situation #4: Specialist card for PHYS-X
If you must experience Arkham Asylum in its full glory you need to have a phys-X card. It is possible to activate Phys-X on ATi cards, but again they will not be accelerated. A good option is a Nvidia 9800GT. If you must have Phys-X make sure you meet the requirements (Another primary Nvidia card + two Physical PCI-e x16 Slots)
Special Situation #5: A Graphic card not for Gaming
Which "ultimate" buying guide would be complete without addressing non gaming use of graphic cards. There are at least two situations where a consumer level card will be used in a non-gaming situation. As this guide is for consumer electronics, I am not going to include professional uses like rendering etc.
- Folding@home
- Home Theater PC (HTPC)
1. Folding@home:
This is a distributed computing program that helps scientists learn how proteins "fold" themselves. This is the process by which proteins become functional. If you keep your computer on 24/7 (or there abouts), you can run a folding@home client and let it utilize whatever hardware capability you have. However if you are building a dedicated folding box and want the best performance, you can pair your computer with a decent mid-range video card as well.
Folding@home client awards the user with points. Most clients are not run in isolation, rather as teams. e.g. you can make up a wccftech folding@home team. All the points earned by members would go towards wccftech folding@home team. The better your hardware, the more points you accumulate.
Here the choice is pretty straight forward. You should get a Nvidia card. They do much much better than their ATi counterparts. E.g. an ATi 4890 -1GB does about 2700 points per day. An entry level 9600GT does about 3200 points.
If you are assembling a dedicated folding box, get a Nvidia 9600GT.
2. HTPC.
HTPCs are dedicated entertainment centers. Though this is pretty uncommon locally, they offer amazing value. A mid-level home theater in a box (HTiB) costs around 30,000 to 40,000 rupees. You can assemble a decent decent HTPC for about half the cost (minus the speakers). HTiB's are "fixed" function and can not be upgraded. Almost none of them will play exotic video or audio formats (flac, quick-time etc). With an HTPC you get the versatility to play virually any video or audio format and output it to your display.
If all you need is mpeg II decoding, then really any video card will do. All of the recent video cards (dating back to the Nvidia GeForce 4, ATi 8 series) have enough power and features to decode DVD. Heck modern CPUs including some Atom processors can decode DVD. No special requirements.
If you are after High Definition Video, things get interesting. Again many mid-range processor can decode these, but at a high CPU activity (near 100%). Nothing wrong as long as your HTPC is *only* decoding video.
Again relatively inexpensive graphic cards are all you need to off load your CPU. ATi has an upper hand as it's budget range is better at this. ATi 4650 -1GB at around 5,300 Rupees is an excellent buy. Make sure you have all the proper cables to hook it up to your television. Almost all of these cards can output component video. Thus those with CRTs can also take advantage of a HTPC. (CRTs are a dying breed. I have not seen one with HDMI input or even DVI or D-Sub input, leaving Component as the only option).
Final Words
So there you have it. Graphics card are just a component of your entire computer system. The message that I have been trying to get across is "balance". Strike a balance between the components and you'll be a happy gamer for a long time to come.
Performance Figures
The cards that have been reccomended were done so by testing them in various games. They were tested at a relatively high resolution with eye candy turned on.
For Nvidia 9800GT Anti-aliasing was kept at 2X and Anisotropic Filtering at 8X. The rest of the parameters remained unchanged.
As you can see even the a sub 10,000 rupee card can offer decent performance. Though the processor used in these tests was an over clocked Core i7-920, if you refer to the CPU scaling graph, you'll see that the performance variation between processors decreases as the resolution increases (and eye candy is turned on).
The Lost Planet was used to test CPU scaling among various cards as the game's engine is very well optimized for Quad core processors.
Crysis was intentionally left out. There are games that can nearly match Crysis's graphical prowess but run much better (Far Cry 2, Resident Evil 5).
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