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Loading ...Budget DirectX 10 cards - you can’t polish a turd
garethogden
Image from Guffsturdpolish
Now that ATi has finally released a competitor to Nvidia’s GeForce 8600-series in the form of the Radeon HD 2600XT we have a clearer picture of how the mainstream DX10 market has shaped up. And the shape resembles a brown swirly thing that is usually left behind on the pavement by a member of the species Canis lupus familiaris. Basically, mainstream DX10 cards are all a bit cack.
Our graphics card Labs test in the August issue (issue 47) already showed that similarly-priced cards based on DirectX 9 GPUs, such as the Radeon X1900XT, outperform these new DX10 GPUs in current games, which leaves DirectX 10-compatability as their only real ‘trump card’. However, even high-end DX10 cards have hardly distinguished themselves in the first batch of DX10 demos and patched games, which means DX10 support is little more than a ‘tickbox’ feature for the weedier mainstream cards.
Perhaps I’m wrong and Nvidia and ATi will work wonders with their drivers and boost the performance of the cards significantly over the next few months, but this would be a major feat indeed. History shows that the first batch of GPUs sporting a new architecture are rarely much cop; you only have to look at Nvidia’s first DirectX 9 card - the infamous GeForce FX 5800 Ultra from 2002 (or the ‘Dustbuster’ as it was known, due to its Hoover-like noise levels) - to see this. Despite Nvidia claiming that its first DX9 GPU architecture was ‘revolutionary’, and performing a variety of driver tricks to keep its performance in DirectX 7 and 8 games up to speed with ATi at the time, when DX9 games appeared, it was shown to be a dog - a really big, fat, lazy dog.
Then came the GeForce 6800-series in 2004, which was a vast improvement, and Nvidia was quick to dismiss the GeForce FX series (and drop the cursed FX name), but not before plenty of people had bought FX cards on the promise of ‘unprecedented 3D graphics performance’. And, even though the GeForce 6-series was good, it took a further two GPU revisions to the GeForce 7900-series in 2006 before the GPU was actually really good at playing DirectX 9 games. That’s over 4 years from the launch of its first DirectX 9 GPU to the point when the architecture was actually fit for purpose. That doesn’t bode well for the current DX10 GPUs.
ATi doesn’t come out of this smelling of roses either - its first decent DirectX 9 GPU was the Radeon X1900XTX in early 2006, which was itself a revision of ATi’s X1800XT, and a full four revisions after its first DX9 GPU, the Radeon 9700 Pro from 2002.
If history repeats itself - and I really hope that it doesn’t - we may be looking at Radeon HD 3900-series cards and GeForce 9900-series cards before DirectX 10 is really a reality. That’s not to say that all of the current crop of cards are no good, because many are, particularly the mid-range GeForce 8800 GTS cards - just don’t expect them to tear through DX10 games when they arrive, or you may be disappointed.
Budget dx10 cards??
I bought an 8400gs 
Though it is only because it was similarly priced to other budget cards (£30 ish) and had HDCP and HDTV support
You can’t polish a turd, but you can hide it in something small 
I kinda saw this coming… Though I hoped with the R600 delays that ATI were working some kind of voodoo magic on their new cards that would sink Nvidia’s battleship. But apparently not…
Peace!