Choosing a good video card manufacturer is very important because the video card determines the reliability of the entire system as a whole. This is especially true for gaming computers in which the video card is the most expensive part of the system.
Before choosing a video card manufacturer, one interesting fact should be noted - Nvidia and AMD are not video card manufacturers, as many people think. They design and manufacture GPUs for graphics cards under the AMD Radeon and Nvidia Ge Force brands.
These two companies have practically taken over the market, and all video card manufacturers use their chips in their devices. And since 80% of the functionality falls on the graphics processor, then first it is worth considering what technologies are offered by AMD and Nvidia.
Technologies from AMD and Nvidia
AMD and Nvidia strive to keep up with each other and are constantly proposing new designs to improve the performance and performance of graphics cards.
Nvidia SLI technology allows you to combine video cards installed in the PSI-express slots on the motherboard into one system, which significantly increases the performance of your computer. AMD offers a similar feature called Cross Fire, which is in no way inferior to technology from Nvidia.
Nvidia 3D Vision Surround technology allows you to connect 3 Full HD monitors to your graphics card for a more immersive 3D environment. AMD Eyefinity technology is more advanced in this regard and allows you to connect up to 6 monitors to the video card. And now a special system has appeared that allows you to connect 24 monitors into one stand. However, if you look from the point of view of a real user, then even 3-monitor systems are very rare, because you need to collect a powerful system unit and spend money on 3 monitors.
Nvidia CUDA is a software and hardware architecture that allows the GPU to be used for computing, helping the CPU to dramatically improve system performance. Although AMD offers a similar technology, Fire Stream, for some reason, CUDA technology has become more widespread.
Nvidia's cross-platform PhysX technology is designed to simulate physical phenomena. PhysX SDK deals with image processing of solids, liquids and tissues. If the video card does not support this function, then these tasks are transferred to the central processor. PhysX is an open standard, but due to competition between Nvidia CUDA and AMD Fire Stream, AMD has been using the Havok Physics engine since 2009.
Choosing a GPU and video card manufacturer
Since all video card manufacturers work under patents from AMD and Nvidia, the choice of manufacturer does not really matter. Choosing between AMD and Nvidia is difficult because their products are almost identical in terms of parameters and functionality. Overall, the Nvidia Ge Force line of graphics cards are more expensive than the AMD Radeon, but slightly faster. Therefore, users often choose between AMD Radeon and Nvidia Ge Force, more based on their own personal preferences.
The main manufacturers of video cards are currently:
- on GPUs Nvidia Ge Force: Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Zotac;
- on AMD Radeon GPUs: Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, XFX.
All of them produce fairly high quality products. Particularly noteworthy is Asus with a line of video cards based on AMD Radeon chips and Gigabyte with video cards based on Nvidia Ge Force chips. These firms offer a large selection of graphics cards in a wide price range and a 30-month factory warranty.
