BetterPhoto Q&A
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Video card for two monitirs.

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May 26, 2005

URLs:

http://www.ATI.com
http://www.nvidia.com

happy hunting!

Regards - Eric.

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June 02, 2005

As mentioned, ATI and Nvidia are you main guys. Personally, I'm an ATI guy but haven't looked at the new PCI express cards just yet. They are a big step up though so I'll be doing some more research to find out if the price is worth the benifit to me. It would require a new motherboard with a PCIe slot or two for me. (I'm also a gamer though, so I have more taxing demands and it may be worth it)

I'd recommend starting with the Radeon 9800 Pro. That's the card that I have currently and it performs great. The 128M version is only $160 on newegg.com (I do most of my shopping with them these days - awesome add on warrenty for cheap and I've had good support)

The 256M version (the one I have) is just a little more at $200 if that's in your budget. Too bad I paid more than that when I got mine...

The problem these days is that most all video cards are geared toward games (which helps me to some degree) and their 2D performance (what PS will be taxing) isn't explored much. The assumption is that any good 3D card will have good 2D performance, but historically this has not always been the case. I would imagine that the biggest factor for 2D performance between cards these days would be the memory clock as the core clock gets more use from the 3D side of things doing 3D rendering, but the memory would be heavily used in both 2D and 3D work.

Historically, Matrox has had some of the best 2D numbers, but I can't find much in the way of 2D performance tests these days. I haven't looked at their more recent cards so I can't say much other than they have a good past in the 2D performance world.

With any video test though, it almost always proves to be 'you get what you pay for' so regardless of brand or technology, most $150 cards will be pretty close in performance, as will most $300 cards be similar in performance.

You could debate all day long on companyA vs companyB, but I consider a 10 or 20 fps difference to be no difference at all until you get under 60fps because you'll never actually 'see' the difference between 150 and 200 fps. And that's pointless for 2D work anyway.

Bottom line, pick a price and go from there. The 9800Pro 256 works very well for me along with my Athlon XP 3200 and Gig of Corsair XMS RAM. For 2D work, the CPU and RAM are much more important than in gaming. In gaming, the video card is like 80% of your performance. In 2D work, it's closer to 50/50 - computer/video card.

Oh, and as mentioned, most video cards are dual output these days. I don't really understand that anymore as dual screens have really gone out of style in gaming circles and it was kind of gaming that promoted dual screens. (it's not pleasent to split the screen in the middle when a game crosshair is there so most gamers don't use the second output) Tripple screens have moved in somewhat, but even that isn't really picking up. It's just funny that every gamer card I see comes with dual outputs and nobody uses them anymore. Graphic people use them, but gaming cards aren't always the best choice for them so why do all game cards still have dual outputs...

Anyway, every card I've purchased in the last couple years (over 10 cards) has had dual outputs and comes with a DVI-VGA adapter. The adapters are cheap (less than $20 most places) though so if you don't get one with the card they're easy to come by.

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June 03, 2005

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June 03, 2005