Other graphics cards

There has been a lot of fuss around ATi’s X800 and nVidia’s GeForce 6800 lately so I thought it might be interesting to hear about some other graphics cards that has been reviewed lately.

First up is the very affordable, at least compared to the X800 and GF 6800, Gainward FX Power Pack! Ultra/1300XT Golden Sample. It’s a Geforce 5900XT (duh!) that doesn’t follow the ordinary XT-cards standards. It uses the same PCB the more expensive 5900-version and is equipped with specially selected GPUs. It uses quite fast memories (2.2ns) that together with the rather massive cooler makes the card very overclockable.

Read more at Xbitlabs and pctweaks.de (german site, you can use babelfish to translate)

Remember Diamond Multimedia? Back in the good old days before we had hardware T&L-support they were a third party manufacturer and gave us such unforgettable memories such as the Viper 550 (based on the TNT 1) and Viper 770 (TNT2). However they always remained neutral and supplied us with cards based on chips from various companies. They retired from the graphcis card scene in 2001 when S3 bought them.
Well now they’re back. More or less. Their new line up consists out the Stealth S60 (Radeon 7000), S80 (R9200SE), S100 (9600SE) and S110 (9200). As from what we can tell know Diamond will maintain their neutrality, thus supplying the consumer with cards from more than one chip manufaturer and there will probably be a series of Viper cards later on, I.e. High end cards. Now that Hercules has left us some time ago Diamond Multimedia is a much welcomed addition to the scene.

”Though most enthusiasts wouldn’t give either of these cards a second look, there is a large market of end users seeking cost effective upgrades to their ”non-recreational” computer, that these cards could prove to be a modest step in the right direction.”

Read more at Xbitlabs and HotHardware

Remember S3’s DeltaChrome S8 then? After five years S3 finally return to the graphics card market, but they have no intention on competing with Ati’s and nVidia’s high end cars. Their goal is the consumer who is looking for the most performance per penny. However the DeltaChrome S8 Nitro doesn’t perform as good as it should and considering that there will be low budget versions available of the new cards (X800SE and 6800XT) things don’t look all that good to be honest.

”S3’s performance improves considerably when we turn off AA and AF at 1280×960, and gets another bump when we dial the resolution down to 1024×768 with AA and AF enabled. Of course, ATI and nVidia would both see similar bumps in their respective performances if we lowered the bar for them as well. While S3 trails ATI and nVidia by a sizable margin, it is still possible to get playable frames with this GPU, though some resolution/render state compromises are unavoidable.”

Read more here at Extremetech and Xbitlabs