[ILUG] Graphics card choice

[Liam Bedford]

In message <199904301428.OAA14001 at sced.esoc.esa.de>, Niall O Broin writes:
>Given a choice of ATI Rage Fury, Creative Labs 3D Banshee or Creative Labs TNT
>Blaster, which would you go for ? There must be XFree support, of course, but
>as this is primarily for a machine for the kids to play games on whatever is
>good for that is most important. I'm not a big gamer, so I don't keep up. I
>have a Millenium in my main machine - great XFree performance, though I don't
>think it's so hot for current games (esp. N64 and Playstation emulators :-) )
Depends on your processor... if you want the best performance on a slow 
machine,
get the banshee every time. If you have a machine > PII-300, then the TNT 
probably shades it, but the Rage Fury is a seriously good card (in Windows).
>P.S. If the choice is a rage, is there a big reason to buy a 16M RAM version i
>nstead
>of 8MB. What do they do with all that memory - off screen textures, double/tri
>ple
>buffering or what ?
It's used for texture memory, if they're running 1024x768x16bit in 3d you'll
need the memory, otherwise you can make do with the 8Mb version....

Therefore, the jury sez: Celery/PII-400 TNT whips everything except the SLI V2
AMD anything, 3dfx cards whip everything in sight badly
Intel P classic, probably go with the 3dfx, as the processors in them seem
to be slightly better... the banshee isn't a bad card, just not great.

Regards
L.
-- 
Liam Bedford		System Administrator
WBT Systems		Phone: 01 4170153
Block 2, Harcourt St, Dublin 2