Budget Battle: HyperMemory vs. TurboCache
by Derek Wilson on May 12, 2005 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Round 2: Performance
In an attempt to demonstrate the capabilities of these cards, we have run these game tests at their highest quality levels. This means that the cards will be pushed harder with more detail. Most importantly, the entire card will be well stressed. This will give us an idea of how these lower memory cards can deliver on the promise of an experience comparable to all other cards of the current generation.In the end, it will be up to the end user whether to enable the highest quality settings and run at lower resolutions, or to turn off a few of the bells and whistles and pump up the number of pixels packed on to the screen a bit. The tradeoff really comes down to preference. Even for the AT staff, the resolution vs. settings argument is addressed on a game by game basis.
We will be taking a look at 4 flavors of cards today. We have 3 different TurboCache models and 1 HyperMemory board. Our HyperMemory board is the 32 MB model while we have 16, 32, and 64 MB TurboCache cards. With the exception of the 16MB TC board, these boards have a 64-bit memory interface. The 16MB card's memory bus is only 32-bits wide.
Aside from memory size and bus width, speed is an important factor with these boards. Vendors are looking at cheap for these boards, so we won't be seeing <2ns GDDR3 here. Instead, memory speeds are at most 700 MHz (the speed of the 16 and 32 MB TC cards). The HyperMemory card runs with RAM clocked at about 665MHz while the 64MB TC card runs at a rather slow 550 MHz. This will serve to change the performance landscape of the TurboCache cards, as having faster memory will really help the boards with less memory. The advantage of the 64MB card then becomes the ability to run applications that require 256MB of graphics memory. This will not likely be as useful as having higher performance under a 128MB graphics memory setup.
It is also possible to create 32bit wide 32MB cards, but these will experience a definite performance hit. It will be important for the consumer to pay attention to the amount of graphics memory that their solution supports, the amount of RAM that it has locally, and the bit width of the local memory interface. Needless to say, we will probably be less than satisfied with the way that these cards are marketed. Of course, giving vendors a wide range of choices based on their needs will hopefully help to keep competition up and prices down in the market.
The test setup that we used was designed to put the most emphasis on the graphics cards capabilities. As such, we should keep in mind that we are very graphics card limited here and should see very similar performance on quite a range of CPUs (until we start becoming CPU limited in games). These cards will be most sensitive to RAM used in a system, and it is our recommendation that if these cards are intended to be used by the casual gamer, memory choice should be given careful consideration. Here's what the cards ran in:
Microsoft Windows XP SP2
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe
AMD Athlon FX-53
1GB OCZ PC3200 @ 2:2:2:9
Seagate 7200.7 HD
OCZ Powerstream 600W PS
The 32MB 304/665 (core/mem) HyperMemory card that we have is direct from ATI, while the 32MB and 64MB 350/700 (core/mem) TurboCache cards are from PNY. The 16MB TurboCache part was from NVIDIA and is clocked the same as the PNY parts.
This is quite a lot to keep in mind when looking at our performance tests. Unfortunately, it's not a simple matter to understand what we are seeing at first glance. But, that being said, what follows paints quite a good picture of the budget market as it stands.
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JarredWalton - Thursday, May 12, 2005 - link
Despite the fact that the system was high-end, the performance of the cards is the limiting factor. A 3.0 GHz or 3000+ CPU with the same amount of RAM would likely post similar scores. However, 512MB of RAM would have something of an impact on performance. Anyway, $100 gets you 1GB of RAM these days, so we're more or less through with testing anything with 512MB of RAM or less.Consider these tests as a "best case" scenario for budget graphics performance. It will work, but it won't be too impressive. Dropping detail levels will also help, of course. However, reduced detail levels don't really help out performance in some games as much as you might want. Doom 3, for instance, doesn't get a whole lot faster going from High to Medium to Low detail (at least in my experience).
patrick0 - Thursday, May 12, 2005 - link
A Budget-card comparision, with 1024MB System memory? I think it would have been better to use 512MB of system-memory.DerekWilson - Thursday, May 12, 2005 - link
Wellsoul2,The ATI solution does not have DVI -- just one HD15 analog port.
These cards are fine for running native resolution desktops, but you are not going to want to push them over 1024x768 even without AA/AF ... as you can see the numbers dropped off at that resolution for most tests and 800x600 is really the sweet spot for gaming with these cards.
If you really want to guess about the framerate, just remember that moving from 1024x768 to 1280x1024 increases the number of pixels per frame by a greater ammount and percentage than when moving from 800x600 to 1024x768. Eventhough we can't effectively extrapolate performance from our (fairly linear) graph, we can bet that we'd be getting < 30fps which is considered unplayable by our standards. As HL2 posts relatively high framerates (compared to other games of this generation), we made the call to limit our tests to 1024x768 and lower.
If LCD users want to game on a 1280x1024 panel with these cards, they'll need to do it at a non-native resolution.
Wellsoul2 - Thursday, May 12, 2005 - link
Again..anyone with an LCD monitor would prefernative resolution numbers. No amount of AA/AF
seems to make up for the crappy interpolated
video at lower resolutions.
At least give the numbers for Doom3/HL2..
Wellsoul2 - Thursday, May 12, 2005 - link
I'd like video reviews with 1280x1024 resolution.This is the native resolution of my 19in LCD.
It would seem more useful to have tests for the
low budget cards at high resolution for LCD and
using no AA/AF.
People I know are buying the new cheap cards because they have DVI output to use with LCD.
If you buy a cheap/mid priced computer they often
have built in analog video only.
I'd like to know if you can run Half Life 2 at
1280x1024 with no AA/AF on these cards and what
the frame rate is.
cryptonomicon - Thursday, May 12, 2005 - link
WTF?what is this thing? these puny performance cards with only 32mb memory can beat previous generations of retail mid-range cards??? how the heck...
KristopherKubicki - Thursday, May 12, 2005 - link
stevty2889 and others:The tests are run on the highest end components to assure the bottlenecks are the video card and not the CPU. Furthermore, since we test every single other video card and motherboard on the same setup, it makes sense for us to use the same hardware this time around as well.
Neither the X300 nor the 6200 will receive a magical advantage by using low end hardware instead of high end.
Kristopher
Hikari - Thursday, May 12, 2005 - link
The x300 is more like a neutered 9600 instead of a 9200 I thought. Given that the one tested here won in HL2, that would seem to be the case, no?Marlin1975 - Thursday, May 12, 2005 - link
^Ignore, just re-read :)
Marlin1975 - Thursday, May 12, 2005 - link
DerekWilson see my other post at 5. I then saw the graphs are not wrong, BUT you said the "The 16 and 32 MB TC cards round out the bottom and top of the pack respectively" which is not true. The 64mb and 16mb round out the bottom, while the 32mb is at the top.