High-Flying Graphics Cards

We pick 10 next-generation boards that make your PC soar.

Alexandra Krasne

Today's graphics cards do more than let the teenager in your house scream through first-person shooter games until all hours of the night. In fact, we tested a variety of boards that offer all sorts of options as individual as your computing needs.

Some cards let you save TV shows on your hard drive and record them onto DVDs. Another has a FireWire port into which video editing fans can plug a digital camcorder. You can find budget cards with TV tuners, video inputs, dual-display support, and excellent game performance; some high-end cards permit you to plug in any peripheral you own.

The Matrox Parhelia-512 lets you bump up your screen resolution to a roomy 3840 by 1024, effectively allowing you to stretch a spreadsheet, a browser, and a word processing app across three displays. (And while your boss isn't looking, you can play a little Flight Simulator.)

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Test Report: Top 10 Graphics Boards (chart)

For the past couple of years, NVidia has dominated mainstream graphics chips. The majority of boards and systems in our Top 10 Graphics Boards, Top 15 Office PCs, and Top 15 Home PCs charts have some flavor of GeForce chip set. But that's likely to change as a slew of new boards hit shelves over the next few months. Here's the current lineup.

Hoping to recapture its old standing in the performance graphics arena, ATI recently launched the Radeon 9000, 9000 Pro, and 9700 chips. Their specs look impressive (at press time, we had received only the 9000 Pro). Geared toward gamers on a budget, the Radeon 9000 should compete head to head with NVidia's GeForce4 MX 440. Currently, boards that are equipped with the MX 440 chip typically sell in the $100 range. Targeted at mainstream gamers, the slightly faster Radeon 9000 Pro graphics board (which performed well on our tests) sells for $129--still a relative bargain. All of the new ATI chips incorporate a technology called Fullstream, which is designed to smooth the blocky textures and rough edges that often show up in streaming Internet video. And unlike NVidia's GeForce4 Ti chips, the Radeons support DirectX 8.1, an updated version of Microsoft's application programming interface that allows the chip to render more textures in a single pass. (NVidia's current Ti chips support DirectX 8, but not 8.1.)

Hard-core gamers at this year's E3 convention were treated to a sneak preview of Id's Doom III, a DirectX 9 version of the cult favorite, running on ATI's Radeon 9700. It didn't disappoint them. ATI claims its new chip will be faster than NVidia's top-speed chip, the GeForce4 Ti 4600. The Radeon 9700 will provide support for 8X AGP, as well as full hardware support for games based on DirectX 8.1 and the upcoming DirectX 9 as they appear. DirectX 9 takes advantage of new hardware features that game programmers can use to create more complex and realistic lighting effects and textures.

For buyers watching their budget, graphics boards based on Trident's new line of chips should arrive in stores around the time this issue hits newsstands. According to Trident, the cards will be the least-expensive models on the market to offer hardware support for DirectX 8.1 and partial support for DirectX 9. Cards based on Trident's XP4 T1 chip will sell for a retail price of around $69, and promise performance similar to that of more-expensive cards based on NVidia's GeForce4 Ti 4200 chip. Video cards running on the Trident XP4 T2 should provide performance comparable to that of boards with NVidia's second-most-powerful chip, the GeForce4 Ti 4400; at $79, however, they will be priced about $30 to $40 less than the GeForce4-based boards. Trident's new line tops out with the $99 XP4 T3, which the company says will fall somewhere between the performance of NVidia's GeForce4 Ti 4400 and ATI's Radeon 9700.

Meanwhile, Silicon Integrated Systems is making its first serious foray into the 3D-graphics-chip realm with the midrange Xabre 400 chip. SIS says that the Xabre 400 will support DirectX 8.1 and 8X AGP. Like NVidia, SIS makes the chips and licenses them to partner companies that manufacture and sell the graphics boards. A reference version of the Xabre 400 that we tested was a bit slower than we had expected. Its speed scores matched those of budget-level graphics boards based on the GeForce4 MX 440. Boards based on the Xabre 400 chip will retail for about $150 and should be available in stores by the time you read this.

NVidia isn't sitting on its laurels, either. Its next-generation chip (code-named NV30), launching this fall, will support DirectX 8.1 and 9, as well as 8X AGP. At press time, NVidia wasn't publicly releasing details on price, clock speeds, ship dates, or card configuration.

Speedy and Good Looking, Too

The release of the first DirectX 8 games gave us the opportunity to upgrade our graphics test suite. We tossed out Id's Quake III, Interplay's MDK2, and Infogrames's Test Drive 6, and we replaced them with NovaLogic's Comanche 4, Discreet's 3D Studio Max (a 3D modeling application), and a pair of OpenGL game titles--Croteam's Serious Sam: The Second Encounter and Id's Return to Castle Wolfenstein (which uses an advanced version of the Quake engine). We also upgraded from Epic's Unreal Tournament to the new DirectX 8 version, Unreal Tournament 2003. (In part, we selected these games because of their built-in benchmarking capabilities.)

The PC World Test Center put 17 graphics boards through their paces with the new benchmark, testing each at different resolutions: low (1024 by 768 at 16- and 32-bit color depths) and high (1280 by 1024 and 1600 by 1200, at 32-bit color). We also ran Unreal Tournament 2003 with antialiasing (which smooths the jagged edges on graphics) turned on, to gauge its effect on frame rates and image quality. Each card was scored for image quality and speed, as measured by frame rates. And in antialiasing tests, a panel of judges assessed the boards' effectiveness in smoothing images.

MSI's G4Ti4400-VTD won top honors among power boards. It was a solid performer in all of our tests, and it has extra features like dual-monitor support and bundled games, along with toll-free technical support. Scoring a doubleheader sweep, MSI also prevailed in our value category with the G4MX460-VTP. That board is a mixed bag for gamers, however: It screamed through some of our tests and lagged a bit in others (see chart). Though it's slower than power boards we tested, it's a solid choice if you're looking for a good value.

Our performance tests revealed some of the differences between high-end boards and budget models. The more-expensive products--those in the $200 to $300 range--sustained higher frame rates than did their less-expensive cousins, especially at resolutions of 1280 by 1024 and above. In almost all cases, the value boards could run our suite of games, but they generally couldn't maintain more than 60 frames per second at resolutions above 1024 by 768. For game performance, 60 fps is the magic number: The farther above 60 fps your board can go, the less likely you are to see stuttering or other image-quality problems in complex scenes as your frame rates bounce up and down.

But speed is only one factor of good performance; image quality is another. To test image quality for each card, our three-person panel watched demos of all four of our test games and of our 3D modeling application running at 1280 by 1024 in 32-bit color--the resolution and color depth typically used with 19-inch monitors--and noted each video card's ability to render complex textures and to display colors and contrast. In these areas, the panel observed little difference between the high-priced boards and the budget models. Occasionally, a board would render a scene particularly quickly, or it would make water look especially realistic and rippled. Overall, however, our jury of observers found only minute differences between the various power and value cards in DirectX 8 test games.

The Frame-Up

Why should you care about frame rates? Unlike a computer with the fastest overall processing speed, a graphics board with the fastest overall frame rate may not win.

"The game doesn't run at 150 fps all the time," says Tony Tamasi, general manager of desktop graphics products at NVidia. "The reason why people shoot for high rates is because they want the frame rates to be above the [60-fps] minimum at all times." Because graphics processors can't guarantee sustained frame rates, he points out, "You never know when your frame rates will suddenly decrease. You could be walking down an empty hallway in Quake III, and turn the corner to find that there are a hundred people in battle." When that happens, your frame rates take a sudden dive.

Furthermore, as screen resolutions go up, your graphics board has to work harder to pump out pictures. A power card typically has more memory and a faster processor, so it's better equipped to handle the challenges of high-resolution gaming. If you plan to run at lower resolutions, such as 1024 by 768 (the resolution typically used with a 17-inch monitor), a budget card will suffice.

Generally, games with more-complicated textures and lighting, and with faster-moving images, put more stress on your graphics card and your CPU. For instance, in our Unreal Tournament 2003 tests, all of the cards (except the Radeon 7000) managed better than 60 fps at 1280 by 1024 in 32-bit color, but no card cleared 60 fps on Comanche 4 at the same resolution and color depth.

Tim Sweeney, a developer at Epic Games who helped program Unreal Tournament 2003, says that new games based on the Unreal engine will run well on any 3D card with hardware transform and lighting. (T and L is the process of transforming 3D textures to a 2D screen environment and calculating how light falls on a particular object.) With cards that have DirectX 8 hardware acceleration and T and L support, the game can be written so that computing occurs in your graphics processor rather than in the CPU, in theory making the game run faster and look better. If the card's hardware doesn't support the version of DirectX that the game was programmed on, the card will offload the task to your CPU. All of the chip sets in the graphics cards we tested, except for ATI's Radeon 7000, support hardware T and L. (Systems with integrated graphics generally don't support hardware T and L.) "Right now we run at over 60 fps on NVidia's and ATI's latest and greatest cards. Last time we tried the game on the [NVidia] TNT2, we saw around 9 frames per second--this shows that games are capable of running on that older hardware, but not very well," says Sweeney.

Fast Play or Fantastic Scenes?

Games look more realistic when images are smooth and contain natural curves instead of rough, pixelated edges. Most graphics cards offer antialiasing to refine and soften the jagged edges that mar 3D images. At higher resolutions--1280 by 1024 and above--curved and diagonal edges of objects appear smoother, so you probably won't need to use antialiasing. Once you step your resolution down to 1024 by 768 or less, though, jagged edges frequently appear on both text and images. Running games with antialiasing slows performance, but as graphics boards get more powerful, this becomes less of an issue.

Typically, antialiasing works by sampling and then coloring pixels based on an average of those samples. Though it usually smooths edges effectively, it can also blur images. Graphics vendors employ various levels of sampling: ATI's Smoothvision takes up to six samples per pixel (though ATI asked us to use two-sample mode for faster performance), and NVidia's Quincunx takes five. On the other hand, Matrox's fragment antialiasing works in a completely different way--taking up to 16 samples but smoothing just the pixels on the edges, reducing the number of processing cycles.

Another way to improve image quality in games is to use anisotropic filtering, a method that smooths scenes in which a textured image (like a tiled floor) starts in the foreground and extends into the background. But this method relieves only blurriness--not jagged edges, as antialiasing does.

For our antialiasing tests, we asked each graphics card vendor for the settings that would provide the best balance between speed and image quality, and then we ran tests with Unreal Tournament 2003 at 1024 by 768 resolution with 32-bit color. Overall, the higher the sample rate, the better (and smoother) the game looked--and in most cases, the lower the frame rate. The image-quality leader was Matrox's Parhelia-512. That card hit only 48 fps, however--about two-thirds of the 71 fps the EVGA.com E-GeForce4 Ti 4600 card earned using four-sample mode, although edges remained somewhat jagged. MSI's G4MX420-T board scored the lowest in image quality because rough edges didn't improve much with antialiasing.

AGP Xtraneous

Support for the new 8X AGP interface is creeping into graphics boards. The 8X AGP interface doubles the transfer rate from about 1GB per second (4X AGP) to about 2.1GB per second. But will this improvement result in faster performance? Motherboards with 8X AGP support weren't available when we started testing, but graphics experts we interviewed about the speed increase that 8X AGP provides were not optimistic.

"AGP hasn't been a performance bottleneck since the day it was created," Peter N. Glaskowsky, editor in chief of the Microprocessor Report, says.

Matrox's Sebastian Macdougall agrees with that assessment. "Most applications don't need 8X [AGP] bandwidth, and right now the graphics card isn't transferring that much over the bus." The graphics card's processor handles most of the heavy lifting.

The bottom line: For the time being, 8X AGP is not a compelling reason to upgrade.

DirectX 8 and 9 Update

If you're an avid gamer, the promise of hardware support for Microsoft's DirectX 8 would seem a compelling reason to upgrade (budget cards support it in software). However, DirectX 8 didn't make that big a difference in our image quality tests, as our three-judge panel saw only minute differences between boards using DirectX 8 and DirectX 7. Even though DirectX 8 games have just arrived, DirectX 9 games--including Doom III--and graphics boards with hardware support for them will appear soon.

OpenGL, an open-source API, lets programmers create games for both Windows and non-Windows platforms, unlike games built solely with DirectX. OpenGL 2.0 is coming, and it promises hardware programmability not offered in previous versions.

Surround Gaming and More

The first consumer-level card to support up to three displays at once, Matrox's Parhelia-512 lets you experience a new level of immersive gaming--or a wide-screen view of large spreadsheets.

We tested the Parhelia with three Samsung LLT1620-B analog LCD monitors. We began the setup by connecting cables from the monitors to the board. Then we installed the drivers and Matrox's PowerDesk display management utility, which also required Windows.Net Framework (a 20MB download from Microsoft). After we completed those tasks, modifying the settings to allow the Windows Desktop to span three monitors was easy. Getting Quake III to work with three displays, however, required an additional tweak from Matrox: We had to modify a Quake III configuration file and add a binary value in the Windows Registry--not something to attempt unless you know what you're doing. We played Microsoft's Flight Simulator 2002 with only a change in resolution, though it topped out at 1920 by 400.

Multiple-monitor support isn't the only extra feature worth considering. ATI's All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500DV thinks it's a TiVo: It includes a TV tuner and DVD software, so you can record TV shows and save them onto DVD media or a hard drive. It also has an RF remote control, so you can change channels from another room.

NVidia's Personal Cinema, bundled with some new GeForce4-based graphics cards or available for $49 by itself, gives you an assortment of add-on multimedia options. The package comes with a remote and a lime-green AV/tuner box that connects to the card. By hooking a cable or antenna to the box, you can watch and record live TV, skip over commercials, replay scenes, and save TV shows. The unit also provides ports for a camcorder, VCR, or Webcam.

Boards packing even more multimedia features are sure to appear in the future.

Proceed With Caution! A Lesson in Overclocking

Ask any hard-core gamer to name the easiest way to turbocharge a PC's graphics, and the answer is likely to be: "Overclock it!" But is it safe to run a new $250 board faster than the manufacturer intended? In most cases, yes--if you are cautious--but it's probably not worth the effort.

Most cards we tested for this roundup--models from Asus, Hercules, and MSI, for example--include overclocking utilities. But the leading graphics chip manufacturers we talked to frown on the concept. ATI put it most bluntly: "If you overclock your chip, that voids the warranty," says David Nalasco, technology marketing manager for ATI. "That doesn't mean products won't run properly when they're overclocked."

Warns Matrox spokesperson Liv Stewart, "Overclock your memory too far, and that can result in corruption of the memory or could cause permanent damage." What's more, pushing your graphics clock too much can potentially hang your system or fry the graphics processor, she says.

That's overclocking to the extreme. Less obvious is the long-term damage that overclocking can do to your graphics board--primarily due to overheating.

Keep It Cool

Most vendors put their chips through a series of performance and torture tests to determine the ideal balance of speed, reliability, and longevity. (One of ATI's grueling tests involves running the chip at 131 degrees Fahrenheit).

"When you run your engine [or graphics card] in the red, you are reducing the lifetime of that engine," ATI's Nalasco says. He points out that many serious overclockers modify their PCs to keep components cool.

Overclocking by 5 to 10 percent isn't uncommon, says Tony Tamasi, general manager of desktop graphics products for NVidia. "In really extreme cases, people overclock by 20 to 30 percent." But if you don't provide proper cooling or enough power, he cautions, pushing your board's processor just 2 percent beyond the manufacturer's speed could fry it.

As you turn up clock speed and add fans, your PC consumes more power. Tamasi recommends adding a higher-wattage power supply if you take that route.

If you want more speed but worry about voiding your warranty or crashing your PC, some vendors--Gainward is one--actually ship slightly modified cards. Gainward says it adjusts some cards' designs and adds faster memory so the boards run reliably at faster speeds. In our tests, however, the Gainward Ultra/650XP Golden Sample card showed only a slight performance boost over other NVidia GeForce4 Ti 4200-based graphics cards we tested.

"The boards usually have another 20 to 30 MHz of room to push the engine clock and 40 to 50 MHz of room to push the memory," says Hans-Wolfram Tismer, managing director of Gainward in Europe.

If you're dying to squeeze extra juice out of your card, be sure to use fans and heat sinks to keep things cool, and add a beefier power supply to compensate for the extra power the components will require.

Top 5 Reasons to Upgrade Your Graphics Card

1. If playing Unreal Tournament feels like real torture, try the MSI G4Ti4400-VTD. (If price is no object, go for the EVGA.com E-GeForce4 Ti 4600.)

2. If you want to transform your PC into a video editing and multimedia command center, look at the ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500DV.

3. If it's time to ditch your TiVo, try a card bundled with ATI's Remote Wonder or NVidia's Personal Cinema hardware.

4. If you find that day trading works better on dual displays, opt for an MSI G4Ti4400-VTD, MSI G4MX460-VTP, or ATI Radeon 9000.

5. If you want the ultimate surround-gaming (or surround-working) system, get the Matrox Parhelia-512.

Alexandra Krasne is an associate editor for PC World.