The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
At this time of the year, new video games are rolling off of assembly lines constantly. Now that most new movies have a game that is released at the same time as the movie, this season is filled with new releases. The generation of video games that are being released this summer are incredible, often combining footage direct from movies with top-rated graphics which are rapidly becoming video realistic. The trouble is that these games are requiring growing amounts of computing power. For gamers, a good graphics card is the one computer component which can make or break the experience. Cards only a few years ago averaged in the 16mb size, but as with everything else in the computing world, products now in the 256mb range top the line-ups. For a new, top-end video card like these, you will find yourself spending $450 to $600, but that's not really necessary. Very few of the games available today can use this much processing power, so you will find yourself paying top dollar now for one of these cards and then waiting another one to one and a half years before you can really use it. With what is on the market today, most consumers are best off to buy a mid-range video card with 128mbs of memory if they are thinking of upgrading. The video card market is crowded, constantly changing, and filled with products that are either quite specialized, or quite open-ended and relatively good at doing a number of tasks. Shopping for a new card, two hardware companies dominate the market, ATI and NVIDIA. Both of these companies make cards which compete exactly in the same market as the other, and both offer a very wide selection of cards, so make certain that you do your research before you hit the stores to buy something. Here's a few things to consider. First of all, what do you want your card to be able to do? Do you want a card that will support the latest video games? Do you want a card to do graphics work such as photography or web design? Do you want a card which will enable you to capture video from a camcorder and edit it down? Except for capturing video, all cards you buy should do all of these tasks reasonably well, but you should look at how you use your computer and think about what you want a card to be able to do the best. Capturing video is an entirely different issue and you require a video capture card for your computer to do that. The second thing to consider is, what type of video card is your computer able to support? Most newer motherboards have a special slot for a graphics card called an AGP (Advanced Graphics Processor) slot. But different motherboards will take cards running at different speeds ? 1X, 2X, 4X, and 8X are the most common. These speeds indicate how fast your card can communicate with your motherboard and the CPU you have on your computer. Obviously, the faster the processing ability, the better quality your graphics will probably be, but there is no use paying for an 8X graphics card if your motherboard maxes out at 4X. Dig out the book that came with your current graphics card and motherboard before you spend your money. The final thing to really think about (besides the cost) is how much work do you want to put into running the card? ATI cards running at the top end often offer a superior graphics experience, but you will find yourself tweaking your machine a lot more to ensure this. You may need to keep a number of drivers on your computer available for you to use as sometimes when you install a new computer game, you will find trouble with the display until you find the right match between the driver and the game. On the other hand, NVIDIA cards may have a display which is minimally different from ATI, but once the card is installed, and the software figured out, it will run with very few glitches or troubles of any kind. Graphics cards are becoming much more important in what we want our machines to do. We want to play games, and look at photos or video we have taken; this requires a lot of processing power and it isn't cheap. This is one thing to be very careful about when you are buying a complete machine. It may have a large hard drive and a fast CPU, but companies often try to put a weak video card into them thinking no one will pay attention, so be sure to watch out for this. ([email protected])
