Technical data

or budget line, the mid-priced or mainstream prod-
ucts, and finally, the higher-end enthusiast cards.
Again, within each of these there are two versions
offering different performance levels -- one is the
standard version, while the other runs at higher
clock speeds. ATI denotes these faster cards by the
addition of a “Pro” or “XT” to the card name,
while NVIDIA’s nomenclature uses the “GT” and
“Ultra” suffixes.
Low-cost products are often tagged as SE or LE
parts. However, these budget cards sometimes don’t
carry any special tag at all, making them hard to tell
apart from “the real deal”. In these cases, only care-
ful attention to the technical data
will help you from mistakenly
purchasing the wrong card.
NVIDIA is a chipmaker only,
focusing its attention solely on
designing and producing graphics
processors, while leaving the pro-
duction and sale of retail cards to
its board partners. ATI, on the
other hand, is quite active in the
retail market as well, albeit only
in the United States and Canada.
Its cards are usually designated
“Built by ATI”, while those pro-
duced and sold by other compa-
nies are “Powered by ATI.”
Another factor further compli-
cating any attempt to categorize the cards by price
alone are the graphics cards from older generations,
which keep getting cheaper due to the introduc-
tion of newer models.There are especially pro-
nounced differences between NVIDIA and ATI
here. ATI’s second to last generation of chips
(Radeon 9500, 9700, 9800) is still very much up-
to-date from a technological perspective, with
DirectX 9 support and multisampling FSAA. Only
the Radeon 9000 and 9200 cards are the exception
here, as they are still based on the DirectX 8 design
of the Radeon 8500 along with its slower super
sampling FSAA implementation. Shader Model 3.0
is not supported by any ATI card at this point.The
only cards that actually can take advantage of it are
those of NVIDIA’s GeForce 6xxx
line.
In contrast, NVIDIA’s second
to last generation of cards are, by
today’s standards, technologically
outdated (DirectX 8 and multi
sampling FSAA on the GeForce 4
Ti, DirectX 7 on the GeForce 4 MX).The last iter-
ation of the GeForce FX 5xxx series performed
very well in DirectX 8 titles, but drops to mediocre
levels in current DirectX 9 games. As mentioned
before, this weakness has been corrected in the new
GeForce 6xxx line (note the absence of the “FX”
designation).
Price Categories
Let’s now take a look at the three main price cate-
gories.We begin with the cheapest cards, which are
the entry-level or low-budget products.These fall
either into the sub-$100 category, or the price
bracket between $100 and $150. The second cate-
gory, usually called the “mainstream”, begins at
$150 and reaches up to the $300 mark. In this cate-
gory, the largest selection of cards can be found
between $150 and $250. Last, we have the enthusi-
ast category which starts at around $300 and
extends to $500 (and well beyond, in some cases.)
This is where the latest top models from ATI and
NVIDIA are to be found.
In the following overview, we have also listed
cards from older generations that are still available
in the market.The prices quoted here are current as
of mid-October 2004; we take no guarantee for the
correctness of this information.
Note that in some cases it is rather difficult to
determine which models actually exist in the mar-
10
For some further reading about
image quality, check out these
articles:
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/
graphic/20040603/index.html

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/
graphic/20040414/geforce_6800-
43.html

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/
graphic/20040504/ati-x800-32.html