--- On Thu, 1/20/11, Uwe Soltau <[email protected]> wrote: > I want to go one step further and get > a CUDA graphics card. > Everybody mentions NVIDIA. > I see now that these cards are also manufactured by > different companies > like Gigabyte, Leadtech, EVGA etc. > (eg Gigabyte Nvidia Geforce GTX 470) > > Would you recommend to get a genuine NVIDIA card or are the > others just as good?
Here's a page to study before buying a video card with an nVidia GPU. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units nVidia doesn't make cards. They do make what they call "reference designs" and may even supply unpopulated circuit boards to some manufacturers to put the nVidia chips on while sourcing the rest of the components elsewhere. The lower priced cards tend to be built on reference design boards or the manufacturer makes their boards as exact or nearly exact clones of them. The mid to high end cards use the GPU makers' information but the entire board is an in-house design. What you need to look at on a video card is the exact version of the GPU. nVidia has long made "feature reduced" versions of their chips starting soon after each new design is released. You don't want to get stuck with one that has fewer pixel shader units or half the pipelines than the top of the line GPU in a given series. In some cases, one or two chips of a new design generation have been worse overall performers than the best of the previous generation. Many companies have been nothing but designers and producers of board kits they'd sell to any other company to solder together. Trident Micro did it for a long time with their video cards. Almost every board with a Trident video chip had an FCC ID registered to Trident, but they "weren't the manufacturer" because it wasn't assembled in a Trident owned factory. PC Chips is still going strong doing the same as a non-manufacturer of PC motherboards, even though some of them have a PC Chips label. I'm not so certain they actually assemble anything. There are several mid to low end board brands that use mostly PC Chips designs and big OEMs like HP and Compaq have had PC Chips design their boards. ATi and 3DFX did make nearly all of the video cards using their video chips and GPUs. 3DFX basically ran out of both engineering talent and money, on their last prototypes they couldn't get the power consumption down to usable levels and their then current production designs were getting eclipsed by nVidia's latest. nVidia bought 3DFX, threw a bunch of their money at what 3DFX had been working on at the end and pushed it out as the GeForce FX 5xxx series - to near disaster as the drivers still needed a ton of work to get decent performance. I don't know what was happening at ATi, why they sold to AMD. Maybe AMD just waved a large enough amount of money at ATi's owners. But for GPUs, nVidia and ATi (as a division of AMD) are pretty much it now for laptop and desktop discreet GPUs. AMD also produces chipsets (nForce) with integrated nVidia GPUs. Intel made some noises recently about returning to the discreet GPU business, but AFAIK nothing's come of it yet. People still remember their utterly horrible i740. Intel has made chipsets with integrated GPUs for a long time, but their best is still behind even the midrange nForce chipsets. ------------------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Adobe-Premiere/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Adobe-Premiere/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
