Pickin' a processor

[Mark J. Dulcey]

Matthew Gillen wrote:
> 
> Honestly, at this point I just want to learn a single vendor's
> numbering/naming scheme so that I can keep my sanity.  Nvidia's system is
> maddening (who would think that a 7800 is a /much/ better card than a
> 8400?), I can't imagine ATI's system is much better.

The video card system actually isn't all that bad. The first digit tells 
which generation of hardware it is (a slight wrinkle from ATI, x, x1, 
and x2 count as first "digits"), and the rest gives some idea of the 
performance level of the card (higher is better). They do muddy the 
waters a b it with suffixes; for example, a GTX card is faster than a 
GTS which is faster than a GT which is faster than a GS, and an LE card 
is always the worst. But it's a little easier to sort out than the CPUs 
right now.

As for those first digits:

Current hardware is 8-series from NVidia and X2 from ATI. These have 
full DirectX 10 support. Most models also have HDCP outputs (required 
for BluRay and HD-DVD support, not that either of those are a factor for 
Linux at this time) and hardware MPEG4 and H.264 decoding (lower CPU 
load when playing video). Oddly, it's the HIGH END models that lack the 
hardware video decoding! There is also a major architectural change; 
these designs have moved toward generalized GPU elements rather than 
dedicated vertex and pixel processing units. Among other things, this 
will make them much better performers for applications that use the GPU 
as a math coprocessor -- yes, people are doing that now, because current 
GPUs are very high performance parallel floating point computation engines.

The previous generation is NVidia 7 and ATI X1. Complete DirecX 9 and 
OpenGL support, including fully programmable vertex and fragment 
shaders, but not full DirectX 10.

Before that were the NVidia 6 and ATI X series. Support most DX9 and 
OpenGL features; full vertex shaders, but fragment shaders had some 
limitations.

Anything earlier than that is a card that you don't even want to think 
about buying now for any system where you care about video capabilities.


Newer generations of cards tend to perform a bit better than older ones 
at any given level, though in most cases the gains are modest. Notable 
exception: the NVidia 8800, especially the GTX version, is considerably 
faster than its predecessors. Linux support for the NVidia 8 series was 
very shaky for a while, but I think they have sorted it out by now.


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