Computer Graphics Card Comparison Essay

1500 Words3 Pages

A Comparison of Computer Graphics Cards

In today’s world of advanced computer games, the requirements that computers must meet to run these games are very, very steep ones. A major requirement of almost all high tech computer games is a decent graphics card. With most of the games today being developed in 3-D, unlike the games a decade ago which were almost always 2-D, an advanced graphics card is a must to get any amount of fun from these games. Two companies that are heavyweights in the ring of computer graphics are ATI and NVIDIA.

ATI and NVIDIA are two main suppliers of almost all computer graphics cards in the U.S. and abroad, and while they supply cards for many different clients (engineers, graphic …show more content…

If there is one factor that can kill a graphics card or any other computer chip for that matter, it is heat. Heat is a computer’s nemesis. It can ruin computer components over time and destroy a CPU in an instant. The X800 has done a wonderful job in dealing with heat. Like any other graphics card of its kind it is going to give off a significant amount of heat. Unlike the 6800 though, the X800 has managed to keep the heat sink almost the exact same size as it has been on the RADEON 9XXX series. The heat sink is a component that helps to dissipate the heat from computer processors. The 6800 has to deal with an enormous heat sink due to the fact that it gives off significantly more heat than the X800. This is partly because of the power requirements of the card that was mentioned earlier. Now this wouldn’t be a problem except that most standard heat sinks use fans which get to be extremely noisy the bigger they become. What does this all mean? It means that the X800 has a smaller heat sink than the 6800 and therefore doesn’t make as much noise. This is huge bonus for the X800 since most gamers will look for anyway possible to keep their computer quiet. Once those two broader issues have been looked at, it is time to delve deeper into the technical specifications that were mentioned …show more content…

At the core of DirectX are its application programming interfaces, or APIs. The APIs act as a kind of bridge for the hardware and the software to "talk" to each other.” What this means is the X800 and the 6800 both use DirectX to talk to whatever game, or any other graphical software, is being run at the time. When looking at the X800 and the 6800 it appears that both support Microsoft’s DirectX version 9.0. But when looked at more closely, the 6800 makes more use of this support than the X800. NVIDIA has chosen to run many new features that are offered by the latest version of DirectX while ATI has chosen to simply optimize and improve the features of DirectX that their past RADEON 9XXX series used. This may seem to give NVIDIA the edge but in fact it falls short. While having some of the newer features of DirectX implemented by NVIDIA is nice, ATI’s approach of “if it isn’t broke don’t fix it” seems to work and run much more smoothly. What has been fixed, and increased significantly, are the speeds of each of these

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