About → User Interface

So it’s video card upgrade time for me, all the newest games starting to really chug along on my computer, struggling to maintain a playable frame rate (but really giving each frame a really good hustle). So what does one do when they need a new video card? Go buy a new one of course!

Well that’s easy enough, right? WRONG! FUCK YOU! Why don’t you go fuck yourself? And eat a dick too while you’re at it. No, make that a whole bowl of dicks. This is the feeling that everyone, including you, will inevitably get when looking to buy a new video card.

I fought this battle a couple of years ago. I was tasked with trying to find a good bang-for-my-buck deal across awesomely named products such as: Radeon x800 XT, Radeon x800 XT Platinum Edition, Radeon x850 XT, GeForce 7800 GT, GeForce 6800 Ultra, Radeon x1800 GTO, GeForce 6800 GS, Radeon x800 XL, Radeon x800 GTO2, GeForce 7800 GTX. Huh?

Also, that’s JUST CHIPSETS. That doesn’t even skim the surface of comparing pixel pipelines, texture units, memory, how 3rd party manufacturers implement/tweak the core architectures, major chipset revisions, etc. Yes it’s important information, but these are seriously the best naming schemes they could come up with?

I will now point you to a chart I found on Tom’s Hardware. It’s from their article “The Best Gaming Graphics cards for the Money: December 2007“. This article perfect for complainers like me who are in the market for a new video card. It basically summarizes everything I would of had to spend at least half a week easy researching. Thankfully they are paid to do that for us so we don’t have to, yay them. Anyways, the whole point here is the table I found on page 6 - it’s a list I’ve been wanting to see for years. It has probably been around for a while but I just discovered it so it is amazing and exciting to me.

So I present to you what I like to call, ‘buyer confusion’:

(The rows represent approximate performance levels. Chipset generations shift about every 2 rows.)

Here’s a great example of how even more confusing this can get: Around the time Doom 3 (a huge release) came out for PC, NVidia had launched their GeForce 4 line of cards, one of these being the GeForce 4 MX. This was a low-priced budget card designed for people that would maybe play a game or two occasionally, but that’s it. Doom 3 was one of the first games to use all the fancy-pants programmable pixel / vertex shaders in newer video cards. Older cards could produce similar looking effects but did so in ways that were extremely rigid and limited. Wanting to be able to play Doom 3, people would go to stores and see rows of boxes, GeForce 3s on the bottom and 4s on the top. Well hey, 4 is higher than 3 so those must be better right? Yes…unless they bought the 4 MX. The GeForce 4 MX was basically a GeForce 2 Ti (yeah Ti) with a GeForce 4 Ti-series memory controller. No programmable shaders AKA it was missing features the GeForce THREE had. So that pissed a lot of people off when they realized they literally couldn’t play the game when they got home, it wouldn’t let them, the card didn’t have the hardware necessary to run it.

I haven’t heard of this happening since then, but the naming is still out of control. None of this is a big deal really but I just find it sort of silly stupid that we can’t have reasonably named products.