{"id":4646,"date":"2013-05-31T00:01:31","date_gmt":"2013-05-31T07:01:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=4646"},"modified":"2013-05-25T14:19:49","modified_gmt":"2013-05-25T21:19:49","slug":"graph-a-bits-soup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=4646","title":{"rendered":"Graph-a-Bits Soup"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the most mysterious aspects of computer technology is the video hardware. It’s a soup of acronyms, a knot of numbers, a maze of mystery. It’s always been that way.
\n
\nIt must be a tradition, because the industry has always used weirdo terms and numbers to describe graphics inside a PC.<\/p>\n

I bring up this issue because I recently upgraded my PC with a brand spankin’ new graphics adapter. I don’t even recall off the top of my head the card name or number, because it’s just so bothersome to remember that stuff.<\/p>\n

My system was crashing, but just the video. The error logs showed the video driver was to blame (which I wrote about here<\/a>), but rolling back the driver didn’t work in the long run. So I ordered a new graphics card.<\/p>\n

For advice, I turned to an expert, my son Jeremiah who is very good (no kidding) at video games. (He routinely gets banned because the other players think he’s cheating. He’s not; he’s just very good.)<\/p>\n

Jeremiah recommended that I get the NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 690. At about $1,000, that was a wee bit too spendy. I can buy an entire computer for $1,000. So I opted for the less expensive but still quite impressive GTX 680. The sucker occupies two<\/em> slots on the motherboard and requires two<\/em> extra power hookups. Sheesh.<\/p>\n

The card works great, of course, and the games and graphics are lovely. But what the heck is a GTX 680? The card I removed — the older card — was an NVIDIA VERTO 9600GT. Is it just me, or wouldn’t the 9600 graphics card be a better, faster card than the 680?<\/p>\n

Apparently not.<\/p>\n

That’s because the card names aren’t really graphics standards, but rather brands. How NVIDIA is able to successfully entice gamers and others into knowing — instantly, just as Jeremiah knew — that the 690 is a better card than the 9600 is beyond me.<\/p>\n

When the IBM PC was introduced, it had one graphics standard: CGI, the Computer Graphics Interface. The graphics were very primitive by today’s standards. (The other standard was no graphics, just monochrome text.)<\/p>\n

After CGI came EGA, then VGA, then the acronym dam burst and anyone wanting to save their sanity gave up on remembering what the graphics standards stood for.<\/p>\n

I’ve attempted to commit to memory the NVIDIA graphics standards, but had to give up as they keep changing them. Their nomenclature is bereft of logic. I ranted<\/a> over the issue a few years ago.<\/p>\n

As with most high tech things, the bottom line always seems to be price. A $1000 graphics card, no matter what its acronym, is probably going to smoke. The $400 model, which may have the same amount of video RAM and similar manufacturer, is going to be good but not as good. Forget the acronyms, buy based on price!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why can’t the computer industry devise a simple, sensical method to describe the various graphics standards? Where is the logic!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[15],"class_list":["post-4646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4646"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4661,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4646\/revisions\/4661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}