The best graphic card

[irwinfx]

What is the best graphic card on earth?

[lost1]

Uh oh, here we go again....... /forum/wink.gif

[Pantion]

Yeap... you're right lost1... the question of the million dollars: which card is better?

Hmm... well depends on what concept you have of best; best in visual quality (nvidia), best on fps (3Dfx), best on features(3Dfx V3500TV and ATI), and so on.

If you only want it for games just take money out of your pocket and pick a V3 or TNT2/TNT2 ULTRA. Or wait a few months for reviews on Savage 2k, V4, etc.

For gaming, but hard on the bill is TNT2/TNT2 Ultra. Glide has a dark or no future, since wrappers are as good as the real thing.

For specilized graphic applications, bla , bla, bla ask someone else. (don't have the money to get one /forum/smile.gif ).

[AndreBranco]

i have seen screenshots of tnt2 and i didn't like it very much .. picture quality is not as good as voodoo3 is.
if u want something now, buy voodoo3 3000 or 3500.
but if u want something that is going to be better than everything else, wait for voodoo4!

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3dfx is the one

[AuraEdge]

NOT TRUE AT ALL!
Are you comparing D3D and Glide or OpenGL and Glide?
OpenGL looks so much nicer than either of the other 2!
I had my friends comp (armed with a V3 2k)tweaked out the displays, and it doesnt look as good as my TNT does on Q3Test or Halflife.

[AndreBranco]

voodoo4 is gonna have 32bit opengl! /forum/wink.gif

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3dfx D best there is

[AuraEdge]

My CL TNT made last year also has OpenGL 32bit /forum/smile.gif

okokok
sorry
Didnt mean to start another NV-3dfx war

[RobRich]

Aura, your right. I used to be a big 3dfx supporter, but their lagging too far behind with this 16 rendering junk.

Also face it, GLide is almost dead. 3dfx even relizes their mistake in making it a proprietary API. Their new texture compression technology is an open technology. GLide does look good, and has high fps, but it limited to mostly games and screensavers. The same thing happened with Renditions Redline and VideoLogic's PowerGL. Both were cutting edge technology when released, but soon died because they were limited to a single chipset. When's the last time you bought 3d drafting software that used a GLide rendering engine.

OpenGL is by far the most complete 3d API to date. It has support for gaming, CAD, and design. It' supported on a variety of platforms, and is easily implemented.

Direct3D is coming along, esp. with the development of DirectX 8.0 (Farenhiet). D3D 8.0 will be a mixed implementation of OpenGL and DirectX code, thus providing the best of both worlds.

As for the best graphics card config on Earth (outside SGI and virtual reality setups), I would recommend the Merlin setup. It consists of four Obsidian X-24 voodoo2 cards in SLI interface. This equates to 8 v2's with 16 rendering pipelines. This is what 3dfx uses for their new technology demo's. Their is even a marketplace implementation of this setup planned for in the near future. It is meant to target poeple that can't afford upper class SGI systems. Still kinda sad that your can have this type of fillrate and still only support 16bit and 256x256 textures.

[Pantion]

RobRich is right OpenGL is by far the most complete and powerfull API. It maybe the most complex and incredibly big, but it has all and many other features not supported by standard 3D cards.

Glide is going out due to its limitation of 16-bit rendering and 3Dfx private API.

DirectX is gaining strength and with the mixture of DirectX's wide range of drivers and compatibility with OpenGL long list of features DirectX 8 should and most be the best API around. But we gotta wait to see if what Microsoft says will be true /forum/smile.gif