The Panthers Choice

Looking at the whole picture its hard to decide which card is the best and which I would choose in my machine. Graphics cards these days have been advancing at an alarming rate. Much faster than the CPU industry. Taking that in to account, you have to wonder how much of these graphics "power" is actually being utilised? The most probably answer in most cases is certainly not all of it. Having a card that can do Millions more pixels per second that you need and can run games in resolutions that your monitor cannot even handle is a little pointless.

There is of course the point of "Future Proofing", the idea behind buying something that's a lot more powerful than what you need in order to allow yourself to give the card a longer life before having to make another purchase. While this can work, I always found it better to wait and buy what you need at the time. As soon as a new product comes out onto the market, the prices of all the other cards drop significantly. It can work out cheaper than a future proof top of the range card. 

Looking at the other end of the scale, buying cheap cards is not for me either. Games technology is not moving as fast as the graphics technology is, but its still going at a steady rate. Buying a graphics card that does not have the technology that the games are allowing to be used can not only degrade performance but it can degrade picture quality as well. After all, if you are buying a new graphics card, you are likely to be using some sort of multimedia.

So what do I recommend, well in the light of all I've said before, I would have to go for a compromise between the two extremes, one of the cards from the value section. My choice in the value section is the Geforce 2 MX. Reasons behind this choice are simply that this card offers everything you want for today real world multimedia and gaming experiences, plus it comes with a more than reasonable price tag of around £60 (Q1 2002). Together that is certainly the best card for me. 

In the top range section I prefer the Radeon 8500 to the Geforce 4 Ti series. I don't doubt that the fastest card is the Geforce, but once the drivers on the Radeon are sorted I believe the picture quality technology's are far more appealing to me than the raw power. Also with the Hyper Z II technology saving on the memory bandwidth, which is the biggest bottleneck in most cards, I would shell out for this card given the choice.

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