Top 10 Graphics Boards for Gamers

This month, a bumper crop of new high-powered cards replace half of the Top 10 chart. ATI's Radeon 8500 earns top honors, and VisionTek's Xtasy 6964, Xtasy 6564, and Xtasy 5864 land at fifth, sixth, and tenth places, respectively. Gainward's GeForce2 Ti/500 XP Vivo Golden Sample earns the seventh spot.

In our tests, ATI's card wasn't the fastest (that honor goes to VisionTek's Xtasy 6964 card, which is based on NVidia's GeForce3 Ti 500 graphics chip), but the Radeon edged its competitors in overall image quality.

In most test games, the VisionTek Xtasy 6964 (GeForce3 Ti 500) and Xtasy 6564 (GeForce3 Ti 200) achieved similar frame rates at all but the highest 1600 by 1200 resolutions. The VisionTek Xtasy 5864 and Gainward's GeForce2 Ti/500 (both GeForce2 Ti cards) kept up with those boards in test games at lower resolutions, but dropped farther back at the highest resolution.

Quake III Testing--and Retesting

This month's boards came with NVidia's new Detonator XP drivers, but a problem with version 1.2 of Quake III (which we've used in our testing for the past year) caused a disco-ball effect that rendered the game virtually unplayable. Luckily, this problem does not persist with the 1.3 version of Quake, so we retested all boards with that version and have incorporated those test results into our ratings. Nevertheless, other games, such as Test Drive 6, still show some image-quality problems that we attribute to the NVidia drivers.

It's common to see glitches and bugs in early releases of any vendor's drivers (even ATI's Radeon 8500 drivers showed a couple of minor bugs in test games). As NVidia works to smooth out its latest drivers and releases new versions, we're bound to see better image-quality scores for all of the NVidia-based boards we test.

Beyond the Top 10

None of the recently tested boards listed below ranked high enough to secure a spot in our current Top 10. Where possible, we link to reviews of these models, either from PC World magazine's Top 10 Graphics Boards or from a previous month's version of PCWorld.com's Top 10 Graphics Boards for Gamers.

• Matrox Millennium G550
  
  
• Hercules 3D Prophet 4500
  
  
• Matrox Marvel G450 eTV
  
  
• Videologic Vivid