3D graphics cards (3Dfx, ATI, Creative, Guillemot, Pine)
“Graphics! Get your luvverly graphics ‘ere… going cheap; 32MB of gigatexel rendering pleasure, just ‘alf a donkey to you, madam…”
The world of graphics cards is as fast moving as the frame rates of the latest 3D games. Keeping pace with all the latest developments can be tricky, as new technologies and boards come out almost every quarter.
However, the market has been simplified recently in some respects, in that Nvidia’s dominance of the sector (particularly the top end) means that the choice is now primarily between Nvidia-powered cards and 3Dfx (which used to be the biggest force in 3D graphics accelerators).
These two may be the main players, but they aren’t the only choices, as you can see from our group test entrants. ATI also has a new high performance model out, plus Pine is represented with a budget offering for those still running PCI graphics in older motherboards.
We’ve benchmarked all the cards here and compared them in terms of features, price and technological capabilities. Of particular interest was Full Screen Anti-Aliasing, a new technology which smoothes out jagged edges in 3D graphics, giving the visuals an extra edge (or rather, taking it away) of realism.
We chose a mid-range Pentium III 450MHz system as our benchmark machine, as this can benefit from the high-end performance of cards like the GeForce2 GTS and also sits well with the lower end, budget boards.