X-bit labs - Print version

Most users are always very much interested in getting a not very expensive graphics card for their PCs. Since alot of questions on this matter usually arise, we decided to take a look at eight most popular graphics chipsets,which serve a basis for sub-$100 graphics cards.

Most users are always very much interested in getting a not very expensive graphics card for their PCs. Sincea lot of questions on this matter usually arise, we decided to take a look at eight most popular graphics chipsets,which serve a basis for sub-$100 graphics cards. Among these pieces we can list:

As we keep mentioning in our reviews, the performance of graphics subsystem (of course, we mean 3D graphics)directly depends on the CPU speed. In this respect we would like to stress once again: there is no need in buyingultra-expensive graphics accelerators if your system runs on a not very powerful CPU or with insufficient systemmemory, which is even worse.

Bearing this in mind, we suggest testing eight relatively cheap graphics cards in a system with a rather slowprocessor - Intel Celeron 366, which can be overclocked to 550MHz. We will show the performance of these graphicscards at these two CPU working frequencies. And besides that, we will also touch upon some aspects of graphics cardsoverclocking. Moreover, we find it useful to mention the problems with 3D graphics quality when describing theirpeculiarities. However, if you still have any questions after reading our roundup, you may check the correspondingreviews on our site concentrating on each particular graphics card. These reviews focus not only on the cards'performance but also discuss their 3D quality in greater detail and are accompanied with really illustrative screenshots.

So, how will we test our graphics cards? The test PC was configured with the following component parts:

To overclock all graphics cards we utilized an additional cooler fastened at the mainboard edge.

And now we would like to introduce our testing participants - the most popular graphics chipsets. We will describe inbrief their main features, show their scalability and overclockability. We are going to begin with the most expensive ofthem and continue in the descending order.

3dfx Voodoo3 2000

This chipset is used for the graphics card of the same name, which has an AGP interface and 16MB 7ns SDRAM. Thechipset is hid under a small pin heatsink. This graphics card is already almost a year old (its launching dates backto the spring of 1999) and costs about $100, however, if you make a certain effort you may find it for a smaller price,probably. 3dfx Voodoo 2000 chipset as well as the memory work at 143MHz frequency. One of the most vivid peculiaritiesof this card is 16bit color depth support in 3D, which is of a bit better quality, though, due to the postfilter used.This postfilter is said by 3dfx to provide the image in 22bit color mode. The matter is that this chipset processes 32bitcolor, however, the color depth reduces to 16bit when the end frame is formed. This process involves dithering, thetechnology smoothing the borders between different colors of the image. Sometimes, you may notice slight blurring effecton the color borders or even a grid, which is especially noticeable on semi-transparent objects. The mentioned postfilterserves exactly to reduce the negative effect made by these artifacts. You can enable it in the drivers if you set the imagequality to High. Besides, the drivers also allow operating dithering for semitransparent objects, i.e. during alpha-blending.There are two different Dithering modes: smoother mode and sharper mode. In the first case you get rid of the grids, however,the transition from one color to another is also quite visible. And in the second case, you get almost no problems with colors,but see the grids instead.

Of course, it would be much better to have 32bit color instead of laying yourself out to improve the 16bit quality. However,3dfx Voodoo3 2000 chipset, as well as the entire 3dfx Voodoo3 family, doesn't feature this color depth mode. Besides, there arenot so many games in the today's market, in which 32bit or 16bit really matter. That is why the graphics cards of this family arequite competitive.

Voodoo3 has one more drawback: it does not support textures larger than 256x256. All the textures beyond this size areconsidered as equal to it, which results into significant quality worsening.

Nevertheless, this graphics card didn't come off second-best. 3dfx Voodoo3 2000 is a relatively cheap product, the driversinstall without any problems and besides, 3dfx provides this card with its very thorough technical support.

For our tests we used 1.04.00 drivers. First, let's consider the dependence of the graphics subsystem performance on the CPUspeed. The third column on the chart below (and further on) denotes the results obtained on the overclocked graphics card:

As you can see, in the system on Celeron 366 the card showed almost similar results at all resolutions: 32fps. In Direct3Dthe results were a bit better. On the one hand, we can't take this value as hundred percent acceptable, because it shows theaverage fps rate, while the minimum can be even under 20fps and hence the gaming performance will hardly appear satisfactory.As soon as we switch to Intel Celeron 550, we can notice a really impressive upsurge in performance. However, the processorfrequency is still insufficient, because there is almost no difference between the results shown at 640x480 and 800x600. Andeven if we overclock the graphics card up to 175/175MHz, it won't help here. But in Quake3 at the resolution of 1024x768overclocking brought a quite tangible performance gain.

SiS300

This chipset is relatively new and there are not so many graphics cards built on it in the today's market. Totest SiS300 we used Leadtek WinFast VR300 with AGP interface and 16MB 7ns SGRAM.

SiS300 works at 125MHz. Unfortunately, the memory of this graphics card also works at only 125MHz, although it is7ns memory. Most of you, guys, probably know that all previous chipsets from SiS were not only slow but also didn'tsupport a lot of really important 3D-functions. However, when SiS300 came out, we were given to understand that itwould support the full set of features and perform close to NVIDIA Riva TNT2. Well, let's see what we've got here:

As we can clearly see, the performance is shockingly low. On Intel Celeron 366 the gaming performance of this graphicscard is absolutely unacceptable. But why? Why is the performance so low if the working frequency is quite high? In fact, itlooks as if SiS300 had only one pipeline, although nobody mentioned it openly. A single pipeline means that there is only oneTMU texturing module, which totally excludes the use of multitexturing. Nevertheless, SiS definitely did a great job to makeits chip so incredibly slow that in Direct3D it showed 43fps and in OpenGL - 33fps at the most even with Celeron 550 at 640x480.Besides, SiS doesn't provide any utilities for graphics cards overclocking. Moreover, the drivers properties page contains anoption enabling 32bit Z-buffer, which seems to be a total mockery at users, since they will get a slide-show instead of live 3Dgraphics in this case. By the way, this seems we have revealed everything worth mentioning about the drivers. The only existingutility, PowerStrip, doesn't know this chipset. To be fair, we should admit that there were no problems with 3D quality. All thefunctions such as MIP-mapping, dithering, bilinear filtering, etc. were fully supported.

NVIDIA Riva TNT2-A

NVIDIA Riva TNT2-A chipset is a fresher NVIDIA Riva TNT2 modification made with 0.22 micron technology and supporting143MHz frequency. There are quite a lot of graphics cards on this chipset now, such as Leadtek WinFast S320 II Pro, whichwe actually tested. This graphics card is provided with AGP interface and 16MB 7ns SDRAM clocked for 150MHz. In general, theonly difference between graphics cards on TNT2-A and more expensive ones on NVIDIA Riva TNT2 is the chip. And the cost of LeadtekWinFast S320 II Pro - $90 - gives us every right to include it into our roundup.

TNT2-A chipset on the mainboard we had at our disposal can be overclocked to 183MHz. The graphics memory managed to reach thesame top value - 183MHz.

Before passing over to the performance of this chipset we regard it as essential to give a quietus to the argument: whichdriver is better for cards on NVIDIA Riva TNT/TNT2 - from 2.* or 3.* family. Let us briefly remind you what was going on. WhenNVIDIA GeForce 256 appeared, NVIDIA released a new driver family 3.*. Besides GeForce, these drivers also supported older chipsetsincluding Riva TNT2. However, the cards performed with these drivers a bit worse compared to 2.*, namely compared to the lastofficial release - 2.08. The mentioned performance differences are not significant enough to consider the drivers from 3.*family absolutely unfit for older graphics cards, but we can't deny that they do exist:

The charts clearly show that there is every reason to regard 2.08 drivers as more suitable for NVIDIA Riva TNT2 based cards.That's why all the results for NVIDIA Riva TNT and NVIDIA Riva TNT2 chipsets further in the roundup are obtained with 2.08 drivers.We would like to remind you that if you wish to get access to certain settings, to Vsync, for instance, and if you wish to enablemultitexturing in OpenGL you should slightly edit the registry in the following way:

And now let's take a look at Leadtek WinFast S320 II Pro in the system with Celeron CPU working at different frequencies:

Here we can notice that with Celeron 366 the speed remains on the same level of 37-39fps in Direct3D and varies between29-35fps in OpenGL. The situation is, actually, very similar to that of 3dfx Voodo3 2000, when the gaming performance was ata quite acceptable level (slightly above the minimum value) no matter at which resolution you actually played. Overclockingthe graphics card made sense only with powerful processors and resulted into real performance gain at 1024x768. Thanks to ityou could play with 32-bit color depth not only at lower resolutions, but even at 1024x768. Everything witnesses that thisgraphics card and NVIDIA Riva TNT2-A chipset correspondingly are real hunters for leadership in our roundup. As for the 3Dquality, there is not much to say here, actually: you can find all the details in our reviews. The only reproach here seemsto be the poorly realized tri-linear approximation.

ATI RAGE 128 PRO

This chipset is used for ATI RAGE FURY PRO graphics card manufactured by Canadian company - ATI Technologies. We reviewedthis graphics card not so long ago actually, but at that time it supposedly cost over $100. However, they launched a versionof this graphics card with 16MB memory instead of 32MB. It costs about $90 that's why it also falls into our roundup.

The mainboard is based on AGP interface, has 16MB 7ns SGRAM. If you look at the reversed side of the PCB, you will seeempty spaces intended for another 16MB. That is why both models (with 16MB and 32MB memory) have a unified PCB. ATI RAGE 128PRO chipset is covered by a massive pin heatsink (we still can't make out why ATI has totally given up fans). Besides, we havealso mentioned the company's inconsistency in setting the chipset and memory working frequencies. There are a lot of graphicscards of the same kind, which seem to be very similar to each other, but which clock absolutely differently. Now when we knowthat the working frequency of ATI RAGE 128 PRO has been announced equal to 125MHz, we are very surprised to find out that inreality it is only 118MHz. The memory working frequency is 140MHz. Bearing in mind that the graphics card with 32MB memory wehad reviewed before worked at 140/159MHz, we can expect a pretty sharp performance reduction compared to what we obtained lastNovember. Nevertheless, let's not move ahead of time. Well, the today's 16MB ATI RAGE FURY PRO graphics card is quiteoverclockable - up to 145/150MHz. For our tests we used 6.31 CDH40 drivers.

As we can see from the diagrams, in the system with Celeron 366 the situation is very similar to what we have just seenwith the previous graphics card: the fps rate remains stable at a quite acceptable level (in 32bit color mode, too). As wehave mentioned however, the gaming performance is just a little bit above the lowest rate. In OpenGL things are even worse.Since ATI software developers have always been just "in love" with OpenGL drivers, the satisfactory performance is granted onlyat lower resolutions.

On Intel Celeron 550 the situation improves a little. The gaming performance is quite OK even in 32bit color. When overclocked,the graphics card demonstrates a good gain in performance at high resolutions.

Touching upon the 3D quality, we have to say that compared to the state of things by the end of 1999, the situation hassignificantly improved. There is practically no censure, only superposition of lightmaps in OpenGL is made with a few artifacts,namely the lit fragments are striped. But despite this small drawback, we have to admit that the graphics card makes a reallyfavorable impression. And with the potential of this card in DVD-Video playback, which helps to free the lion's share of computingresources during MPEG-decoding, this graphics card appears another candidate for the leader's position.

S3 Savage4

This chipset, to be more exact, its version - S3 Savage4 Pro+, is now used in quite many graphics cards. One of the mosttypical products on it is Diamond Stealth III S540. This card is made with AGP-interface, 32MB 7ns SDRAM. The chipset hidesunder a pin radiator. The picture shows, that there is a special empty space intended for TV-out system. The card costs about$65-75 depending on the supply. The chipset works at 125MHz and memory - at 143MHz. The card can be overclocked up to 150/150MHz.

The graphics cards on S3 Savage4 chipset first appeared in the market in spring 1999. Right away they proved a seriouscompetitor to the graphics cards on other chipsets, which were launched at that time too. Now you can find graphics cardson Savage4 with 32MB graphics memory, as well as with 16MB and even 8MB, which cuts down their cost and makes them morepopular and preferable. However, time passed and S3 didn't care to develop a correctly working and complete driver, which wouldn'trequire constant setting and resetting of certain parameters. As for S3's own drivers, they don't offer the user any settings tochange, so that you need to resort to some extra utilities configuring the driver's work where you can simply get lost. And beforeyou actually manage to find the most suitable solution, which will ensure high speed of your graphics card, you will pass throughall the possible combinations. This is especially acute for OpenGL. The drivers pack includes a mini OpenGL driver and ICD OpenGL.In all tests this mini-driver provides a much higher performance than ICD OpenGL, however, you will hardly be able to play with itwith Vsync disabled. As soon as you enable Vsync, all the advantages of this mini-driver will immediately vanish. Therefore you'dbetter play with a slower ICD OpenGL, which produces a relatively high image quality, though is not that fast. So, this is whatyou can choose from. We have to admit that this graphics card stood all the tests quite successfully, although playing with Vsyncenabled in real games we noticed that the performance was no longer that bright. Frankly speaking, we were not very satisfied withthis card: it seemed unfinished or something like that. However, make your own opinion. The tests were run with S3 drivers ver.8.10.33.

On Intel Celeron 366 the gaming performance in Direct3D lies within the limits in 16bit color at all resolutions and in 32bitcolor at 640x480 only. And in OpenGL the situation is dramatically bad: you can play more or less normally only at low resolutions.When we passed over to Celeron 550, the performance got better, not so sharply, though, as we saw by the previous cards. However,the gaming potential of the card became quite OK at the resolutions higher than 640x480, especially in Direct3D. As for ourcriticism of the 3D image quality, we have some censure concerning OpenGL: some textures disappear in quite many Quake3 scenes,for instance. Except that, we don't have any more comments here. In our previous reviews on S3 Savage4 based graphics cards, wehave already expressed our disappointment with the fact, that very good image quality sinks so greatly in our estimation becauseof very bad performance. The graphics card we tested supports API MeTaL worked out by S3 particularly for the games like Unrealand Unreal Tournament. Their engine is optimized for MeTaL that is why S3 Savage4 based cards perform very fast in these gamesat high image quality.

NVIDIA Riva TNT2 M64

This chipset also became very interesting to a lot of graphics cards manufacturers due to its low cost. We chose a typicalgraphics card on this chipset, which combines all the most characteristic features of this family, - Creative 3D Blaster RivaTNT2 Value. This card has AGP interface and 16MB 7ns SDRAM. There is a ribbed heatsink of silver color on the chipset. Themainboard also has empty spaces for a TV-out. The graphics card is clocked for 125MHz chip and 150MHz memory frequency. Youcan overclock the chipset on this particular graphics card to 150/170MHz.

We have already reviewed graphics cards based on this NVIDIA Riva TNT2 chipset modification. Their memory bus was reduced to64bits for economical reasons, which was reflected in the name of the chipset: NVIDIA Riva TNT2 M64. By the way, NVIDIA Vanta ispractically the same thing, and for over 3 months already they have been making chips under a combo name - NVIDIA Riva TNT2 M64Vanta. The only difference between these two chipsets is the chip and memory clock frequency (Vanta based cards are slower). So,how does the reduced memory bus tell? It results into more problems with 32bit color because in this mode the memory bus isutilized greater. Let's study the diagrams:

With Celeron 366 the gaming performance of our hero is acceptable only at 640x480 and 800x600, and in 32bit color - only at640x480. But this is just the beginning. See the performance gain in 32bit color when we shift to Celeron 550? Correct! It'salmost nought at the resolution over 640x480. It means that already at 800x600 the narrow memory bus starts affecting theperformance. Besides, in 16bit color the performance is also not so evident as we saw by a card on NVIDIA Riva TNT2-A.Overclocking helps slightly, however, it does not save the situation. To tell the truth, this card performs quite adequatelyto its cost - $65 - although we still believe it is a bit too high.

As for the 3D quality, nothing to discuss here, because the chipset core is the same of NVIDIA Riva TNT2, which hardlydeserves being criticized that much.

NVIDIA Riva TNT

This chipset is an ancestor of Riva TNT family. It appeared quite a while ago, in autumn 1998. However, graphics cardsbuilt on it are still demanded in the market. A lot of manufacturers have launched their products on this chipset. For ourtests we chose a card, which had been at the very beginning of the chipset's career, - Diamond Viper V550. It has AGP interfaceand 16MB 7ns SDRAM. The chipset is provided with a pin heatsink and is clocked for 90MHz. The memory working frequency is 110MHz.The card can be overclocked to 110/120MHz chipset and memory correspondingly.

NVIDIA Riva TNT chipset is made with 0.35 micron technology, which seems to be the reason for its low overclockability. RivaTNT has a dual-pipeline architecture and 2 TMUs (texturing modules) that is why it supports multitexturing.

Another significant difference between NVIDIA Riva TNT and its successor TNT2 is 250MHz RAMDAC (instead of 350MHz). Besides, alot of graphics cards on Riva TNT chipset were designed with errors, which told on the 2D graphics quality at 1024x768 and up: it wasvery low.

Judging by the card's results in the system with Intel Celeron 366, we can be quite satisfied with the gaming performance in 16bitcolor at the resolutions under 1024x768. In 32bit color you can play normally only at 640x480. In the system with a faster Celeron 550in 16bit color the gaming performance starts growing at first but as soon as we reach 1024x768, the gain disappears and thefillrate is very low. In 32bit color mode the things are more disappointing: even with Celeron 550 the only possible resolutionto play at turns 640x480. Fillrate prevents the graphics system performance from improving, and even overclocking makes noeffect.

The 3D quality is quite OK and all our censure again concerns only tri-linear filtering.

These graphics cards are available for $60-65. However, you should keep in mind that these cards are no longer manufacturedthat is why they are little by little disappearing from the market, which hardly gives us any hope for further price reduction.

3dfx Velocity 100

Well, we finally came to discuss a chipset, which serves a basis for the today's cheapest graphics card - 3dfx Velocity 100.The graphics card is of the same name and it is relatively small, as if it were embodying its low cost. It also has AGP interfaceand is equipped with 8MB 7ns SGRAM.

When we just started reviewing this graphics card last year, we were sure that it was built on a chipset different from 3dfxVoodoo3 2000. However, now we have every reason to say that it is practically the same chipset working at 143MHz. These are justthe names that differ. All the latest graphics cards from 3dfx work at the equal chipset and memory frequencies. Therefore, thememory frequency of 3dfx Velocity 100 is also 143MHz. Nevertheless, we managed to overclock the test piece up to 175/175MHz.

Here we have to ask one question: what is the difference then between 3dfx Velocity 100 and 3dfx Voodoo3 2000, except thememory size? Why are the prices so different (3dfx Velocity 100 costs $60)? In fact, 3dfx positions these two graphics cardsfor different market sectors: 3dfx Voodoo3 2000 goes as a purely gaming card, while 3dfx Velocity 100 - is a card for businessapplications and low-cost office PCs.

Like NVIDIA with its Riva TNT2 M64, 3dfx didn't transform the chipset by cutting down the memory bus. They simply locked thesecond TMU (only for Glide/OpenGL applications). They explained that since the card wasn't intended for gaming but for seriouswork in office applications, then the gaming potential should be reduced. We don't think it was the best way to do it. There arealways some skilled guys who will find a way to enable the second TMU, which will bring all 3dfx's efforts to nought. We checkedit. If you modify the following lines in the registry, you will get both TMUs working perfectly:

However, we have to warn you right away that in some cases it doesn't help and the users may fail to enable the second TMU.We can't give any explanations to it, maybe it is the drivers, maybe BIOS locks something... We just want to you to know that youmay get no desired result.

Well, the last but not the least. The cheapest graphics card of all we considered proved the fastest. In fact, everything wesaid about 3dfx Voodoo3 2000 will be absolutely fair in respect to this chipset that is why we won't repeat. For a much lowerprice you get the same performance. However, this chipset inherited all the drawbacks of the entire 3dfx Voodoo3 family: itworks only in 16bit color in 3D, doesn't support larger textures and suffers a slight blurring effect, which is typical of all3dfx chips. That is why if you can't put up with this 3D quality, we would recommend you to collect a bit more money and todecide on a graphics card built on NVIDIA Riva TNT2-A or ATI RAGE 128 PRO.

In conclusion, we would like to briefly cover some 2D graphics peculiarities of the mentioned chipsets and graphics cards.Certainly, almost all graphics cards of those discussed are good enough for 2D graphics at up to 1024x768. The only exceptionsare those based on NVIDIA Riva TNT and S3 Savage4, which 2D image quality leaves much to be desired: at 1024x768 the clearnessof the image vanishes.

And now take a look at a few general diagrams showing the performance of our roundup participants in Expendable and Quake3:

As we can see, a card on SiS300 appears an indisputable outsider (to say the least of it!). The cards on NVIDIA Riva TNT andNVIDIA Riva TNT2 M64 perform on the similar level and at low resolutions beat 3dfx based cards in 16bit color, though at 1024x768the latter defeats them easily. We have to say that the graphics card on S3 Savage4 Pro+ managed to surpass almost all itscompetitors practically in all the tests, and yielded only to ATI RAGE 128 PRO and NVIDIA Riva TNT2-A. However, we have todraw your attention once again to the fact that you will need to work really hard sorting out the most effective settings tomake your card on S3 Savage4 fly. Besides, we would like to point out that if you want to play on S3 Savage4 you will have toenable Vsync (which was disabled during the tests) and this will definitely tell on the fastness.

Here we have the same picture: graphics cards on NVIDIA Riva TNT2-A and ATI RAGE 128 PRO are again ahead of all, andSiS300 chipset is lagging in the very end. However, the card on S3 Savage4 Pro+ performs quite poorly in OpenGL: it succeedsepisodically only at 640x480 and in all other cases appeared the last but one. The cards based on NVIDIA Riva TNT2 M64, NVIDIARiva TNT, 3dfx Voodoo3 2000, 3dfx Velocity 100 are very close to each other.

So, it appears that if you have a CPU working at 350-366MHz you can make a really good purchase:

Well, there is no need to write about the leaders and outsiders here, don't you think so? :) And in the meanwhile, 3dfxVelocity 100 and 3dfx Voodoo3 2000 managed to strengthen their positions in 16bit color mode. They left behind NVIDIA RivaTNT and Riva TNT2 M64. The graphics card on S3 Savage4 Pro+ also proved pretty nice. This is especially well seen in 32bitcolor:

And here the situation is totally different. We don't think we should say anything about the leader of the competition aswell as the slowest participant. Let's take a closer look at all the rest. ATI RAGE 128 PRO lost a bit in 16bit color andyielded to 3dfx cards, which appeared the second. The graphics cards on NVIDIA Riva TNT and Riva TNT2 M64 follow them andlet S3 Savage4 based graphics card surpass them only in 32bit color. We have to admit that S3 Savage4 can boast a much better32bit color optimization than the cards on the chipsets from NVIDIA. However, you have to bear in mind that the performance ofgraphics cards on S3 Savage4 by different manufacturers may be also very different, because changing some settings in suchwell-known programs as S3 Tweak and the like may result into doubling of the performance.

How will our recommendations sound if you are using a 500-550MHz CPU? The conclusions will hardly differ from theprevious ones.

Well, let's sum up. The leaders of our competition are the cards on NVIDIA Riva TNT2-A and ATI RAGE 128 PRO. We wouldadvise those of you, who are ready to pay about $85-95 for a card to take one of them. If you cannot afford to spendthis sum of money then you should probably decide on a card on NVIDIA Riva TNT2 M64 or 3dfx Velocity 100. As for 3dfxVoodoo3 2000, we don't think it is really worth buying, since there is a cheaper version with the same performance. Asfor the memory size of NVIDIA Riva TNT2 M64, we wouldn't hunt for 32MB on the cards like that, because the narrowermemory bus won't let you use the local graphics memory to the full extent.

As for S3 Savage4 based graphics card, we could recommend this card only if you can't live without Unreal/UnrealTournament, where it will definitely prove better than anything else. And if you are fond of other games, you'd betterforget about these graphics cards at all. S3 seems to be unable to improve its software for S3 Savage4 chipset.

Low-End Videocards Roundup