GPU review, done, Half Life 2 here I come

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• mbonus - Wednesday, December 8, 2004 - link

  Anand,
  
  There are lots of great roads to drive in CT. You just have to live there long enough to know them. One of the roads in my home town was this old indian trail converted to a road. In some spots, you had to get up on the bank to let another car pass. But at night, it was a great thrill to hug the winding road until you saw lights coming. A great rush!
  
  I am now living in Florida, and let me assure you, I long for the roads up north. Everything here is straight runs or highway. Of course, with a family now, I am not as much of a risk taker.
  
  Be Well,
  
  M

• The_Necromancer - Saturday, December 4, 2004 - link

  i who am about to upgrade my crap pc was wondering if you could try more benchmarkings of older 9600 xt or 5900 ultra gpus or even the 6600 gt or non gt, try benchmarching computers that do not cost $3000 like a 3000 amd 64 939-pin 1 gig of ram 9600 xt brave ed., and a asus mobo, just for us cheap bums.
  thanks again by.

• Appu - Friday, December 3, 2004 - link

  Hey Anand and team, great work again as usual on the GPU article.
  
  I've been noticing one thing in your past few articles. There are a lot more spelling and grammar errors nowadays. Earlier all articles were 100% perfect. It really stands out right now as there is, on an average, an error on almost every page. I know you guys have been having a rough time and really working overtime and slogging it out to give us all these great articles in time for holiday season shopping.... really appreciate that. But please do pay attention to these (very) minor glitches.
  
  Once again, excellent work, and AT remains my best source for hardware reviews. Thanks for all the insightful articles.

• Fricardo - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link

  (sry for the double post)
  
  ...benchmark would be incredibly useful. EQ2 is built on a very stressful DX9 engine. I (and many others) would like to know how it performs on current hardware. If you guys can find the time and get past the problem of it being an online game without a released benchmark, it would be quite informative.

• Fricardo - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link

  I really agree with #1. Having a good MMORPG

• A - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link

  I really don't see a reason to whine about graphs. They have been doing the graphs like that for quite some now and besides you, only a few other people are whining, if even that.

• AtaStrumf - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link

  While I commend your efforts to improve the presentation of benchmarking results (e.g. % tables) I believe there is still much more that could be done with some more thought put to it.
  
  You work very hard to get all those numbers, but then you just stuff them in some PLAIN tables (you used some colors a while back, why are they gone???) or even worse bar graphs. Just about every college teaches statistics, because it is very important that you interpret the data that you aquire in the correct manner. Its not the simplest of exams that I've passed and there's a good reason for it. It can get preety complicated! So I'm thinking why don't you use some of what, I'm sure you've learned at statistics lessons, to figure out what all those large sets of data REALLY say. % is a very good start but there's more. What is a significant difference and what is not, who is the winner of which category (DX8, DX9, new, old games, ...), who is the overall winner , etc. SUPPORTED BY NUMBERS!
  
  And please take a few minutes to think about how to better present the results. Those scaling graphs and their legends are hard to read, very hard! Put the legend somewhere more convenient, where I can find which color represents which GPU/CPU/... quicker, like on the right hand side, right next to where the lines end, pick colors that differ more and for crying out loud MAKE IT BIGGER.
  
  I really feel strongly about this, so If you want, I can try and do something for you to evaluate, just sent me some numbers to my e-mail (settledATemail.si).

• Mike - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link

  BTW, I like your reviews much ..
  Thx for your hard work.

• Mike - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link

  My usual comment to thoses who plans to do CPU scaling tests..
  
  can you do the benchmarks on "levels" of computer techs?
  
  ex:
  Level 1
  P4 1.5 + Radeon 9x00
  P4 1.5 + Radeon X800 ..
  P4 1.5 + Nvidia 5x00
  P4 1.5 + Nvidia 6x00
  AMD XP 2000 + (same as above)
  
  Level 2
  P4 2.5 + Radeon 9x00
  P4 2.5 + Radeon X800 ..
  P4 2.5 + Nvidia 5x00
  P4 2.5 + Nvidia 6x00
  AMD XP 3000 + (same as above)
  
  Level 3
  P4 3.5 + Radeon 9x00
  P4 3.5 + Radeon X800 ..
  P4 3.5 + Nvidia 5x00
  P4 3.5 + Nvidia 6x00
  AMD A64 3000 + (same as above)
  
  etc..
  
  The idea: having a system close to the one specified, what should I upgrade first.. CPU or GPU ?
  
  Also, don't forget to test DeathMatch.. I played yesterday and found that even if my system perform "well" in the single player levels, multiplayer deathmatches are impossible to play.. I suspect that it is more CPU bound than in the single player.

• AEnigmaWI - Thursday, December 2, 2004 - link

  just one comment on this and other reveiws..
  
  First I have to say that I have never found any reviews to be better or more complete and objective than those posted on this site.
  
  My little comment is just... Do y'all always have to end the tag line for the reviews (on the main page) with a question such as, "Does x really perform better than y?" or "How does x really effect n?"
  
  I know its quibbling, but one could say something like "We will examine how x performs in comparision to y and discuss n." or "We intend to explore the effect x really has on n to see what all the hype is about." etc etc..
  
  Not really important, but it would add some variety for those of us who notice such things.
  
  Thanks again though--to all the staff of AT--for creating and maintaining a superb and exemplary hardware review and tech community site.