Which video card?

[Jade Falcon]

I'm thinking in getting a new video card, which would be better for gaming. A Geforce 8800GT or a Geforce 9600GT?

[phongn]

8800GT 512MB.

[Ace Pace]

What resolution are we talking about? For anything 1280x1024 and up, take what phongn said, but below that...the differance won't be serious.

[Seggybop]

Don't get 9600GT if you have enough money for the 8800GT 512. If your funds are more limited, check out the 8800GS, which is an extremely good deal for the money right now if the prices here are comparable to where you live.

[atg]

I can wholly recommend the 8800GT, the only game I've been able to not play on max settings (on a 1680x1050 res) with mine has been Crysis. It handles everything else brilliantly.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

It just depends on how much $50-60 is worth to you. The 8800 GT is markedly faster, but the gaming experience and longevity aren't going to be significantly different. Personally I chose the 9600 GT.

[Sputnik]

The 8800 GT is markedly faster, but the gaming experience and longevity aren't going to be significantly different. Personally I chose the 9600 GT.

If you take a look at Tech Report's article and benchmarks, you will see that the 8800GT is only technically faster in some applications. For most current-day titles, you are not going to notice a difference between the 9600GT and the 8800GT (unless perhaps playing at super-high resolutions).

HOWEVER, the 8800GT has more than twice the number of stream processors, arguably edging out the 9600 in potential longevity. Whatever you do make sure you go for the 512MB of video ram - do not waste your money on 1GB, likewise 256 won't give you the bang for your buck with one of these cards.

(Side note: Another interesting read from TR is regarding excessive video ram here - save your $$)

[Jade Falcon]

Thanks guy, an 8800gt it will be then. The 1GB cards certainly don't seem to be worthi it either.

[Dominus Atheos]

(Side note: Another interesting read from TR is regarding excessive video ram here - save your $$)

Those guys are dumbasses. They stuck 4gb of ram in their test machine, and think it would be a really good idea to run the whole rig on the 32-bit version of windows.

And then to top it all off, they do a comparison of MEMORY AMOUNTS! Fucking goat-fucking retards.

[phongn]

Those guys are dumbasses. They stuck 4gb of ram in their test machine, and think it would be a really good idea to run the whole rig on the 32-bit version of windows.

There's nothing particularly wrong with doing that, aside from the whole issue where idiotic driver writers forced Microsoft to ensure that you couldn't use more than ~3.25GB or so in XP SP2 and later.

Furthermore, the test system in question had 2GB of RAM, not 4GB.

And then to top it all off, they do a comparison of MEMORY AMOUNTS! Fucking goat-fucking retards.

Er, where?

I've also found TR rather reliable when it comes to benchmarking, as well.

[Dominus Atheos]

Those guys are dumbasses. They stuck 4gb of ram in their test machine, and think it would be a really good idea to run the whole rig on the 32-bit version of windows.

There's nothing particularly wrong with doing that, aside from the whole issue where idiotic driver writers forced Microsoft to ensure that you couldn't use more than ~3.25GB or so in XP SP2 and later.

Furthermore, the test system in question had 2GB of RAM, not 4GB.

Looks like thats my bad. I saw TWIN2X2048 and assumed they had two 2 gig sticks. (2 x 2048 meg)

And then to top it all off, they do a comparison of MEMORY AMOUNTS! Fucking goat-fucking retards.

Er, where?

The review I quoted. They compared the performance of video cards with different amounts of memory. Not as much of an issue since they actually were only using 2 gigs in the system memory, but they still tested SLIed gig cards, and then call it "inexplicable" when it delivers lower frame rates then the 512 SLI rig. Well no shit, you got one card with 1 gig, and one card with about 256 megs of accessible ram.

[phongn]

The review I quoted. They compared the performance of video cards with different amounts of memory. Not as much of an issue since they actually were only using 2 gigs in the system memory, but they still tested SLIed gig cards, and then call it "inexplicable" when it delivers lower frame rates then the 512 SLI rig. Well no shit, you got one card with 1 gig, and one card with about 256 megs of accessible ram.

I'm still trying to figure out what the hell you're talking about. The comparison looks entirely straightforward: 256MB, 512MB and 1GB cards in single or SLI configurations, compared. Nothing indicates that they're attempting heterogeneous memory configurations, and I'm not even sure if you can make SLI work that way.

And the "inexplicable" part was referring to 1GB vs. 512MB configurations in either single-GPU or SLI configurations, not 1GB single-GPU vs. 512MB SLI. No mention is made of 256MB configurations in that paragraph.

[Dominus Atheos]

The review I quoted. They compared the performance of video cards with different amounts of memory. Not as much of an issue since they actually were only using 2 gigs in the system memory, but they still tested SLIed gig cards, and then call it "inexplicable" when it delivers lower frame rates then the 512 SLI rig. Well no shit, you got one card with 1 gig, and one card with about 256 megs of accessible ram.

I'm still trying to figure out what the hell you're talking about. The comparison looks entirely straightforward: 256MB, 512MB and 1GB cards in single or SLI configurations, compared. Nothing indicates that they're attempting heterogeneous memory configurations, and I'm not even sure if you can make SLI work that way.

And the "inexplicable" part was referring to 1GB vs. 512MB configurations in either single-GPU or SLI configurations, not 1GB single-GPU vs. 512MB SLI. No mention is made of 256MB configurations in that paragraph.

The 3.25 limit applies to all memory in the system, including the system ram, the CPU cache, the buffer on the hard drive, and the video memory. You haven't heard about it? This website provides a good explanation:

Windows users can see all of the reserved memory areas on their PC in Device Manager, using the View -> Resources By Connection option. This is what that view looks like for the PC I'm using now.

The addresses are all in hexadecimal, which makes it less than instantly obvious to the untutored viewer which reserved areas are tiny (and usually old) and which large (and all relatively new). Spend the time to figure it out, though, and you can see the old backward-compatibility stuff and the new 3Gb-barrier stuff, plain as day.

Hex addresses A0000 to BFFFF, for instance, are still assigned to the video card (a GeForce 7800 GT, in this case). That's addresses 655360 to 786431 in decimal, 640 kilobytes to 768k. This is the old 128 kilobyte reservation for the monochrome, CGA and EGA graphics buffers, still there in case you find your old Leisure Suit Larry disk and want to see if it works.

In the above picture, though, you'll see a much more considerable reservation from C0000000 to CFFFFFFF, that's also assigned to my video card. That's 268,435,456 bytes, equal to the 256 megabytes of memory on the card, and it's the chunk of memory addresses that system devices use when they want to access the card's memory.

If I had a video card with 512Mb or 768Mb of memory on it, it'd take up even more space in the 3Gb-to-4Gb memory map.

And if I were still using an AGP graphics card, there'd be another block of memory reserved for the AGP aperture, used when devices on other buses in the computer want to talk to a graphics card on the AGP bus. I've got a PCIe graphics card, though, which sits on the same bus as all of the other stuff and so doesn't need an aperture.

(If you've got a computer with one of those cheap graphics adapters that uses system memory instead of having RAM of its own, it will of course eat some of your RAM no matter how much you've got installed.)

Power users with a hankerin' for dual graphics cards may be experiencing something of a sinking feeling, at this juncture. Yes, the 256Mb reserved for my little old graphics card means exactly what you think it means: Those two 768Mb graphics cards you can totally justify buying will eat one point five gigabytes of your 32-bit memory map all by themselves, cutting you down to a 2.5Gb ceiling before you even take the other reservations into account.

This also explains why 1Gb graphics cards haven't hit the consumer market yet. Nobody yet needs anything like that much memory on one card for any desktop computer purpose, but some people would still be very happy to pay for such a card just for the pose value. It'd eat the whole of the fourth gigabyte of their system memory, though. And then they'd probably demand their money back.

(This fact has apparently not stopped certain unscrupulous companies, coughDellcough, from allowing people to buy a computer with WinXP, 4Gb of RAM, and a pair of Nvidia's oddball 1Gb GeForce 7950 GX2 cards. Result: 56.25% of the installed memory absent without leave. You might as well have only bought 2Gb.)

[phongn]

The 3.25 limit applies to all memory in the system, including the system ram, the CPU cache, the buffer on the hard drive, and the video memory. You haven't heard about it? This website provides a good explanation:

Dan's Data, while a fine site, is not particularly accurate on the matter. The 3.25GB limit does not apply to all memory in the system, fullstop. And why would CPU cache use memory addresses? Or hard drive buffers? Think about it.

[Beowulf]

Hmm... I think the explanation is mostly accurate, it's just he's misinterpreting it. It's a 4GB limit, and it's only the memory mapped ranges that end up eating out of RAM. The largest of which, by far, is the GPU. Everything else adds up to less than a MB, typically.

[phongn]

Hmm... I think the explanation is mostly accurate, it's just he's misinterpreting it. It's a 4GB limit, and it's only the memory mapped ranges that end up eating out of RAM. The largest of which, by far, is the GPU. Everything else adds up to less than a MB, typically.

Well, that part isn't too bad, but good chunks of the whole article are problematic.