video-card posts

The big news of the past week for desktop gamers was the official release of Nvidia's GTX 295 dual-GPU card to the wild. Not content to sit on their hands, AMD announced, via the ever-thrilling Press Release, that they're undertaking development of a platform to provide high-shiny graphics to devices that don't sport the hardware to create them, as well as a realtime rendering system for photorealistic content that developers and cinematographers can utilize.

So, it looks like both ends of the spectrum are getting some love. Maybe even a three-way kind of thing.

At some point, BI's mind will leave the gutter it currently inhabits, but we don't advise anyone to hold their breath waiting for that to happen. (Hey, at least there hasn't been a "Two chips, one card" joke made yet. Oh, wait....)

FPS (as in frames per second, not first-person shooter) is a quick-and-dirty way of judging whether or not your rig has the cojones to support your chosen display resolution and eye candy predilections. Simply put, can your system churn out the graphics fast enough to keep up with the demands of the game(s) you're running?

If the answer is "yes," do you have any headroom to up the graphical ante? If the answer is "no," what are your options? Okay, options other than spending lots of money; spending money is always an option, but we do occasionally want to be practical around here.

Yesterday, Nvidia launched its new GTX 200 series graphics cards. Despite their hefty prices, they're the fastest graphics processing units on the market right now. Nvidia published a press release on Monday to promote the new hardware, but a lot of it was sales-speak. What do these new GPUs really do to push the envelope forward for gaming, and how do they do it?

Gamasutra had a man on the ground at the unveiling event in Santa Clara, CA, and he reported more detailed information than that which was found in the press release. Read the coverage of the event for developer quotes and plain descriptions of the nature of the new technologies and their potential applications -- gaming and otherwise.

Accoridng to Nvidia marketing VP Tony Tomasi, the GTX 200 series cards run at 93.1% of the hardware's theoretical limits -- much higher than previous generation GPUs. Developers working on everything from Far Cry 2 to Bionic Commando to Folding@home described applications of these new, 240-core beasts for their particular projects.

As gamers, unless you're a Minesweeper junkie with an epic Peggle jones and no further aspirations, you're going to have to have a dedicated video card in your rig to get any kind of decent graphic performance.

Wait, what?

The short answer for why that's the case is: "Math is hard; let's go shopping." However, it's not us saying that, it's the CPU.

I know what you're thinking. "BI, the central processing unit... all it does is math!" Or perhaps, "You cheap bastard, you still owe me five bucks for your share of the beer last week." You're right, of course (about the CPU, anyway...). In terms of raw computational horsepower, a modern processor is a potent customer. However, of necessity, it's also a generalist.

In order to obtain truly prodigious performance, we need to bring in a specialist. That specialist is your video card. Think of it like this -- an Olympic decathlon competitor is in phenomenally good shape, and a world-class performer in ten different events, but in any single one of those, their lunch will be summarily eaten by someone who makes that their sole pursuit.

We here at Big Download naturally assume you like free stuff. That's why we've got that enticing heap of files up there, batting its eyelashes seductively at you (or maybe I need to switch to decaf that isn't laced with wormwood). But, chances are, free (as in beer) stuff is lurking on or under your desk right this moment. No, not the cans with the five cent deposit. No, not that copy of Daikatana you forgot to take to the pawn shop, either.

Unless you're already at the bleeding edge, got exceedingly unlucky, or are highly risk-averse, there's extra performance to be had out of the components you've already got by running them faster than their rated, factory-set speed. This practice is known as overclocking, and has grown from a lunatic fringe cottage industry into big business, frequently with the tacit approval of component manufacturers, and occasionally engaged in by some brands themselves.

In a nutshell, overclocking allows you to get the performance of a more-expensive part -- CPU, video card, or RAM module -- out of a less-expensive one by the strategic application of brains, willpower, voltage, cooling, and luck.

Here in the Big Iron room, we're going to be throwing around a lot of computer acronyms and terminology. So, for those folks who may be new to the notion of taking a screwdriver in hand to see what's inside their system, or when it's time for you to upgrade for the very first time, here's a quick list of the components we'll be making reference to and what their roles are.

CPU: Central Processing Unit. This is the processor itself, the expensive bit of silicon that performs a bunch of math very, very quickly. Intel's Pentiums, Celerons, and Xeons, along with AMD's Athlons, Durons, Semprons, and Opterons. Most of us are going to have some flavor of Pentium or Athlon (yes, even Mac users have Intel chips under the hood nowadays, though you PPC folks are a bunch of die-hards). When referring to processor speeds, we'll typically be speaking in terms of gigahertz (GHz), or billions of cycles per second.

Both Intel and AMD have, independently and somewhat confusingly, moved away from coming right out and saying how fast their CPUs are in terms of raw clock speed. Instead, each of them has come up with an arcane and obscure "performance rating system" that sort of, kind of, using a perverse combination of marketing, advanced differential calculus and a lot of handwavium, gives you a vague idea of how your new CPU would stack up to a first-generation Pentium IV. This may not, in fact, adequately express how arbitrary and confusing this practice is, and I'm going to stay well clear of that particular morass. You'll be getting clock speeds in this space for the sake of everyone's sanity.

Cores: Recently, both Intel and AMD have begun offering CPUs with more than one processor tucked into a single package. Such dual-core or quad-core (and, in some cases, triple-core) chips allow the system to do two (or three, or four) things at the same time, and more games -- and applications in general -- are beginning to take this into account with their programming -- a practice known as multi-threading or symmetric multi-processing (SMP).

RAM: Random Access Memory. This is where your system stores the information its actively working with, and is typically measured in Megabytes (MB) or Gigabytes (GB). There are two main types of RAM in most current PCs today -- DDR2 and DDR3 (DDR stands for Double Data Rate -- the practice of transferring information on both the "up" and "down" cycle of the memory clock. More detail for those who really want to investigate it is in the links).

HDD: Hard Disk Drive. Main storage, measured in Gigabytes (GB), and occasionally in Terabytes (TB). This is where everything is saved - from operating system files to games to music - everything that takes up space when it's saved.

Video Cards: Arguably, the single most important component when it comes to determining how well a PC will perform a video game in terms of frame rate (often called FPS -- frames per second -- not to be confused with the same acronym used to refer to first-person shooters). There are two major players in this arena - nVidia and ATI (which was recently purchased by CPU maker AMD). The players in this field have also been engaged in a bit of marketing and naming chicanery, but at least they're numbering their offerings sequentially, so you can be pretty confident that a 9-series card is faster than an 8-series card from the same manufacturer most of the time, for instance.

SLI / Crossfire: The respective "multiple video cards in one PC" implementations supported by nVidia and ATI.

There are a lot of variables that go into building and optimizing a gaming rig. It's our hope here at Big Iron to demystify some of what goes on under for you, and allow you to share in the hardware enthusiasm. There's a lot of pride in craftsmanship when you do build your own PC. Hop in, it's a hell of a ride.


Rafe spends his days wielding a phone in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. When not causing friends and enemies alike to /facepalm electronically, he can be found extolling the virtues of the weird peripherals in his life, from kettlebells to the Trackman Marble. If you have any hardware, performance, or upgrade-related questions you'd like to see in future editions of Big Iron, the target coordinates are rafe.brox AT weblogsinc DOT com.