It’s me, live with it

So, a friend of mine came up with this question:

What is the graphics card that will give me comparable image quality with a PS2?*

*It is actually longer than that, but I need to simplify it.

Now, before we look at card specifications and compare, we need to see what the PS2 has under its hood.

From the very informative Wikipedia page we can see that the PS2 uses “Graphics Synthesizer” as its, uh, graphics processor.

Then we need to find out what the hell that is, since the Graphics Synthesizer isn’t available to pc and there’s no way to compare how it performs against PC video cards.

If it helps, the top-end graphics card released on the same year as PS2 is Geforce 256. But I don’t think they can be compared either.

The only way to compare them is to compare the games. After all, that’s what my friend is looking for. But the same game played on PS2 and PC will look different.

For example, EA released Need for Speed: Most Wanted for the PS2 and PC. When I played it on my PC, the graphics was amazing. Plaing the same game on my cousin’s PS2, my reaction was “huh?”. The graphics in PS2 is less exciting, not to mention frequent loading that annoys you, especially if it comes during a race.

Forget it then, I’ll just dig the system requirements for a soon-to-be-released PS2 game, Tomb Raider Underworld. It says that the minimum requirement cards are Geforce 6800GT/Radeon X1300XT, and the recommended cards are Geforce 9800GTX/Radeon 4800.

Ouch.

I played the previous Tomb Raider Anniversary smoothly with my 8600GT, so I think the card has no problem running it maxed. And I’m right.

Now, the 8600GT seems to be holding itself nicely until now, so I’d recommend it if you are tight on budget. However, shell out a little more cash if you can, and get a 9600GSO or a 4670.

No, I haven’t forgotten about this blog.I was just too busy, sorry for the lack of updates. I’ll start again by answering two questions:

What is the difference between a Geforce and a Quadro?

 Essentially, both of them is the same. for example, Quadro fx 4600 is somewhat equal to a Geforce 8800gtx. The price difference, though is between night and day. Quadro cards are labeled as ‘professional card’ by nvidia, they can accelerate performance in CAD applications and digital content creations (or so they said). But I have never tried any of them, so I can’t tell the difference.

Geforce cards, on the other hand, are usually described as gaming card. This is true and should hold true for sometime in the future. But now that Nvidia has this CUDA thing up and running (which also tickles my interest), a Geforce card can serve you more than just gaming goodness. They can be used as a physics accelerator for games, folding@home, and even video encoding device. There isn’t much use to them yet, but I ‘m pretty sure this technology will keep developing.

So if you only need to play games, get a Geforce card or two. If you are into CAD or other applications that can use the extra Quadro features, and you don’t mind paing for it, get one. 

If you are interested, there was a way to softmod a Geforce card into a Quadro, though it is not possible to do it on newer cards. Read more here. More info about these cards here (pdf download).

What is the best card in the IDR 400.000 price range?

This question is tough to answer, especially since dollar exchange value has just risen from around IDR 9.200 to around IDR 10.500. But if you want to know, I still recommend the radeon X1650pro. It is a very solid card for its price range, and it should let you play any game you want, though you will need to tone down the settings.

Yesterday, a friend of mine asked me this question:

“Do you think that 740GB of harddrive space will be balanced with 2GB of memory?”

A little weird, but I understand the meaning. He is concerned that adding more harddrive space to a PC will slow it down, because more harddrive space needs more memory so it doesn’t flog itself all day.

There is a little flaw in the logic, though, so I’ll give a short answer here. It is fine, you can add even 750 more gigabyte without worrying.

Now for the long answer.

First, we need to understand what RAM does in your PC. Wikipedia page here, you just need to scan through it.

Random Access Memory is used as a temporary storage that holds the data your CPU (processor, if you will) is processing. Pretty much all it does is just feeding unprocessed data from the harddrive to the CPU and sending back any data that needs to be written to the hard drive.

The data it needs to hold, by the way, depends on what you’re doing. Hammering away at Microsoft Word only adds a little memory usage from the amount already used by your operating system. Play Crysis, though, and you’ll need an extra gigabyte for keeping textures, levels, models, configurations, and so on. Using professional 3D applications like Maya or 3Ds Max needs a respectable amount of memory, too.

Your operating system also needs some memory space to run nicely. Older Windows version, like Windows 98 only needs a few tens of megabytes. Windows Vista, on the other hand, can use one gigabyte nicely. Sane people sticks with XP, which needs a few hundred megabytes, but is a mature operating system by now.

Even if you have five 500GB harddrives tied in JBOD setup, you don’t need much more memory compared to using one 250GB drive. Yes, you need some memory space to keep the JBOD setup working nicely, but that’s about it.

In conclusion, the amount of memory you need is not related to the amount of harddrive space you have. It correlates to what operating systems you are using, what applications you are opening, and what files you are actually working on.