AlexHopmann.com

As I’ve been scoping out components for the new computers I’m building this summer I had been assuming that I would be using NVidia 8800/8600 video cards for the machines. The video card industry has been a story of incredibly progress over the past decade with NVidia and ATI leapfrogging each other just about every year. These guys have been leaving Moore’s law (which predicts 2x improvements every 18 months for CPUs) in the dust with roughly 2x performance improvements every 12 months for over a decade. The ability to apply parallelism to GPU operations has enabled them to beat the progress in CPUs where just adding more parallel execution has rarely improved raw performance.

For the past few months since the introduction of the GF8800 NVidia has been well ahead of ATI in raw performance, but the latest news is that ATI will be introducing their new generation based on the R600 chips within a couple of weeks. I’ll be looking forward to the comparison reviews and will certainly wait until the new mid-range NVidia and ATI boards are all out. For my “workstation” computer I’m looking for a fairly beefy card in the $300-$400 range that can do great 3d graphics and high-performance WPF on my 30″ LCD, and for the media center my goal is to get a nice card in the $200 range that is quiet and has enough performance to decoded HDDVD on a 24″ LCD.

When the reviews come out I hope that they provide a bit more focus on driver quality. As high-end accelerated graphics has moved beyond 3d games (where one game takes over the full screen experience and 100% of the GPU resources) to media center experiences and driving core UI in Windows (the Aero glass UI in Vista), the importance of quality video drivers has become way more important. So far most of the review sites like AnandTech and Tom’s Hardware tend to focus on just performance benchmarks. Lately they have added some noise stats which is welcome, but it would be great to have these guys come up with a good way to rank driver stability. Like I said- if you are running Vista, having quality video drivers can make the difference between multiple crashes a day vs. a great experience and for a media center box its just horrible when your TV stutters or even worse loses a program you were trying to record because of some failure.

I’d easily buy a video card from a company that put the effort into making solid drivers. Ok, maybe I wouldn’t buy a card that was half as fast, but this is probably #1 on my priority list, and the reviews barely mention it at all. What makes this situation worse is that the way the reviews are done influence the way the product gets built, so this cycle encourages the vendors to ship buggy but fast drivers early on to get the best benchmarks and so the revewiers are actually hurting consumers by not focusing on this.