AlexHopmann.com

For my media-PC I purchased a silent video card. Gigabyte makes the SilentPipe series for several of the Nvidia models and it seemed like a good idea to be able to get a card with decent graphical power (not top, but at the time it was better than any of the other cards I had) and no noise.

The catch is that when building a Media PC you need to keep in mind the overall system. The SilentPipe GF8600GTS has two problems- first of all its form factor is kind of big- the cooling fins stick about a half inch over the normal height of a PCI-express card. In a full sized case this would be fine but in the Zalman media-case I have there is only the exact room for full height cards and the extra half inch means the top of the case doesn’t really fit right.

The second issue is heat. The card runs correctly, but overall it does run pretty hot and since its not blowing the hot air outside the case itself it places extra heat load on the rest of the system + relies on the existing case fans to create air moment through its fins and out its vent. I suspect this results in my overall case fans running higher more of the time, so in the end I fear that I’m actually running a more noisy system for trying to use a silent video card. Instead of adding one relatively slow running video card fan I’m pushing the main fans faster and higher RPMs create a lot more noise.

Reading my 500th video card review today I realized that the typical video card review sites don’t really cover the stuff that I care about. Also this stuff changes all the time and there are rarely good places to go to just figure out what is the right stuff to get now. So I decide to post a page that contains my Video Card Guide.

When I’m looking for a video card I’m interested in the following goals-

• Great basic support in Vista, etc, for large monitors. My current desktop rig is one 30″ LCD and a second 20″ LCD in portrait mode (so its the same pixel-height as the 30″).
• Support for common 3d games and applications at great visual quality. I’m running them at 2560×1600 so my ideal is to be able to run at the highest visual settings at full screen resolution with a decent (>30fps) framerate. Typical targets here for me at WOW, Half-Life 2, Flight Simulator X, Google Earth, etc.
• Great media support. It should support H.264 and VC1 acceleration so I can run high definition video at full screen easily without taxing the CPU
• Reasonable price. I’m unlikely to spend $600 on a video card (although sometimes I’ve been tempted to spend $400).
• Stability. If the drivers crash a lot I’m going to be very upset…
• Flexibility. SLI and Crossfire (dual card solutions) are a pain. Having said that I would consider them if the price is right, and especially for the flexibility of getting one card now and another later. The fact that the standard Intel chipsets don’t support SLI is a major mark agaisnt Nvidia.

Toshiba has introduced a 22-inch LCD that sports a 3840×2400 pixel resolution or I’d estimate about 220dpi. Nice! The bad news is they cost about $17,500 initially so this is clearly only for specialized applications, and I suspect you need a custom video card to drive the thing. Still, it makes me hopeful again that we will see high resolution come to the mainstream in a few years. I’ve seen some examples and its just hard to describe how much better computing is when the fonts and all the UI are rendered with so much more accuracy.

Fil posts about a cool library he made called Sistr that lets you use Silverlight to render high quality fonts. This is a good example of the power of Silverlight (since it really enables you to use markup for stuff in your normal HTML page way). But its also unfortunately the kind of thing that isn’t going to be adopted much until Silverlight gets deployed more widely. I suspect no one wants to force people to do a download just for somewhat better visuals.

Which brings up an interesting feature suggestion (which might already be there). If Sistr made it really easy to fall back to the standard HTML rendering (or a PNG file) when Silverlight is not installed rather than pushing the Silverlight install, this could be easier to adopt. Since it supports the same HTML markup already, that should be fairly straightforward, although the rendering can be so different that designers might not like that approach.

Or another approach would be a web-service that creates the PNG server-side for users that don’t have Silverlight. Cache it so you don’t re-render on every request, but make the developer story just as easy as putting markup in a page (as easy as the existing Sistr).

I’ve been rethinking what video card to put in the new workstation that I’m going to build this fall. Since this machine will also be something that I want good high-end 3d on (for high end WPF work, games, Flight Simulator, etc) I want a step up from the NVidia 8600GTS that I put in the media center box (which I’m using as a workstation in the short term).

My initial thought was to go with the NVidia 8800GTS (640MB version). Many of the reviews say the 320MB version is just fine and the extra memory is unnecessary, but I run on a Dell 30″ monitor at 2560×1600 pixels so I’m going to opt for the extra memory.

The 640MB NVidia cards run about $360, but at right about the same benchmark scores and price (about $380) is the top of the line AMD (ATI) Radeon HD 2900XT. Most of the write ups score the two cards just about equal head-to-head.

But the balance might tip to the Radeon because the Intel chip-sets (the current P35, and the X38 that I hope to get) only support the AMD “Crossfire” dual-card option and don’t work with NVidia “SLI”. Its pretty ironic that the Intel chips are likely going to tip me towards an AMD video card, but there you have it. I’m not planning on buying two cards right away, but it gives me the option to get a second one a year down the road (although by that time there will probably be a new generation of cards and I’d be better off just replacing it with a single new card).

In my earlier post on High Resolution LCDs I mentioned one of the problems is that with a true high-resolution display often applications don’t work right.

It turns out that Vista does have support for helping in this situation, but it only turns on if you say your display is 120dpi or greater. Kam has the step-by-step instructions for enabling high-DPI support on Vista on his blog as well as more details about what is going on.

Back in 2001-2002 as we were starting out the Avalon (WPF) project, we made several projections about the future course of technology. When you are building a fundamental long-term technology, it makes sense to project out a few years. The last thing you want to do is spend 5 years building something that is already obsolete by the time it ships.

We considered the expected progress of GPUs, CPUs, and many other factors. It was a bit contraversial since many of the things we were building needed my graphic horsepower than was commonly available in 2003. However I’m happy to say that the GPU designers met (and exceeded) our expectations and in 2007 even integrated graphic chipsets have plenty of power to drive rich media experiences.

One area however disappoints me. We expected that LCD screens wouldn’t just increase in size but would also increase in resolution. IBM had a display that was 204dpi, and some laptops were pushing 150dpi. My 30″ LCD at home is great and I love the 2560×1600 resolution, but imagine that same resolution in a 20″ display? Text would be soooo easy to read. Nice high-res photos and art would be beautiful. There are lots of great new huge displays but so far the marketplace has let me down and desktop LCD displays all have pretty much the same DPI, basically in the 100dpi range. Some laptops do better than this, but rarely exceed 150dpi.

Part of the problem is a classic chicken and egg one. Super-high-resolution displays are hard to use unless the applications compensate and use more pixels for basic UI elements. But traditional applications have been crap at doing this right. Its a pretty basic thing they should support since people with accessibility needs often need larger UI elements, but its still very inconsistently done. At one point we hoped tht the Vista desktop composition could automatically scale old applications that didn’t suppor this themselves, but its unclear to me whether that made it into the final release.

In the meantime support for Window management on a large display still sucks in Windows. Its much easier to use 3 displays with different windows maximized on each than doing a clean layout of your desktop on a 30″ monitor.

I remember when the NVidia 7800GS AGP version came out and it was predicted to be the end of the line for AGP video cards. Since then we have been lucky enough to have two newer generations come out including some AGP models, the second being the AMD/ATI 8600XT that should be available in an AGP version from Sapphire. This isn’t the top of the line card but might be a nice choice to upgrade some of my existing AGP machines so they can support HD-quality video and all that stuff. I’m looking forward to seeing how it compares to my existing GF 7600GS for gaming. I’m planning on upgrading the base machine anyway soon but its nice to know that there is an option to put a real DX10 video card in my various AGP-based machines.

ATI also has the same problem NVidia does that the high end cards are missing the full video-decode support. So that makes it a lot less bitter that this card is the mid-range one which IS supposed to have the full video decode.

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.