We say relatively because Nvidia's card still consumes more than watts under load. That's more power draw for a 3D card alone than required by most budget desktops. Still, the GeForce card is measurably more efficient than the Radeon. This relative efficiency is another benefit of moving the GTX chip to the nanometer manufacturing process mentioned above.
The GTX requires one six-pin and one eight-pin connection to your PC's power supply, and because we'd recommend a watt or better power supply to go with this card, we can't exactly argue that it's the greenest component out there. There is, of course, more to the story of the GTX and graphics cards in general. Nvidia has been particularly vocal about capabilities of its 3D cards beyond mere triangle processing.
For example, Nvidia made a physics driver available earlier this week to allow support for its PhysX accelerated game physics software in the PC version of Mirror's Edge. The GTX was able to handle the added processing work without a hitch, but we can't say we found the added effects that worthwhile.
Yes, cloth and particle effects like shattering glass and smoke behaved more realistically, bouncing off surfaces and responding to your actions. But in very few cases do the added effects have more than a cosmetic improvement to the game experience, and even then they feel tacked on to the Mirror's Edge world which already has a modular, impersonal feel.
This is not to say we're against PhysX, accelerated game physics in general, or Nvidia's other efforts to differentiate its hardware beyond simple frame rates. What we'll call the parallel programming effort, as represented by Nvidia's CUDA, Apple's OpenCL, ATI's Stream processing, and Microsoft's forthcoming parallel computing support in Windows 7, via DirectX 11, will likely affect commonly used software in the coming years, and we're excited to see what develops.
But while Nvidia and ATI both offer some parallel processing in dribs and drabs now, we have yet to see an implementation of this capability that compels us toward one vendor's hardware over another's. You still need to wire the audio signal from your PC's digital output to the card itself a hassle ATI avoided by integrating an audio chip into all of its new 3D cards , but once that's done, connecting the GTX to an HDTV or a projector should be simple.
Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 bit; 3. Rich Brown. Jan Still a power hog, despite its relative efficiency. Added bonuses like power efficiency and PhysX support sweeten the deal, but even without those extra benefits, we'd still recommend this card for its processing power and comparative value.
Asus EAHX2 Far Cry 2 ranch medium, DirectX 10, very high Longer bars indicate better performance. Power consumption Shorter bars indicate better performance. Score Breakdown Design 8 Features 9 Performance Vista Aero and 2D Applications.
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