The Power of Modern Technology: A Comparison of Ancient and Modern Graphics Cards

When it comes to graphics cards, we often find ourselves comparing the performance of old technology with that of modern marvels. In this article, we'll take a closer look at two such comparisons - one between an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 and AMD's Radeon Vega 3 graphics card. The GTX 285 is an older model from 2009, while the Vega 3 was released in recent years. On paper, it seems like the GTX 285 should have the upper hand, with its higher shader count and larger process size.

However, as we delve deeper into the details of these two graphics cards, it becomes clear that there's more to consider than just raw processing power. The Vega 3 is built on a 14 nanometer process, which is significantly smaller than the GTX 285's 55 nanometer process. This reduction in size has led to improved performance and efficiency for the Vega 3, making it a more formidable competitor to the older model. Additionally, the Vega 3 produces no heat in regards to its memory section, which is entirely dependent on the system RAM used.

The CPU portion of the APU is also worth noting, with the Vega 3 featuring a dual-core processor for threaded work. In comparison, the GTX 285 has a single core for general processing tasks. The motherboard used for these tests was a Gigabyte P450 board, which proved to be a decent but not outstanding platform. The cooler used, however, was a Reevoo Justice CPU cooler, which proved to be massive overkill for the Vega 3 and will likely provide excellent cooling performance.

Now that we've taken a look at the individual components of these two graphics cards, let's move on to some actual benchmarks. As mentioned earlier, I only ran four games in this comparison - Half-Life 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Crysis Warhead, and Metro 2033. The average framerate for each game was calculated, with the results showing that the GTX 285 seemed to perform better in terms of raw frame rates.

However, despite the GTX 285's apparent superiority in this area, it struggled with stuttering and frame drops throughout the games. This was particularly noticeable in Half-Life 2, which suffered from frequent frame drops even at lower resolutions. In contrast, the Vega 3 performed much more smoothly, with fewer frame drops and a generally smoother experience.

So what could be causing these differences? One major factor is the lack of VRAM on the GTX 285. With only 1 gig of dedicated memory, this card struggles to handle demanding games at high resolutions. In contrast, the Vega 3 has 2 gigs of system RAM available, which provides a much more stable and smoother experience.

Finally, it's worth noting that the driver support for these two graphics cards is also an important factor in their performance. The GTX 285 suffered from compatibility issues with modern games due to its legacy drivers, while the Vega 3 seems to have much better support and performance in this area.

In conclusion, while the GTX 285 may seem like a more powerful graphics card on paper, the Vega 3's superior performance and efficiency make it a formidable competitor. The combination of good driver support, sufficient VRAM, and improved cooling all contribute to the Vega 3's success in these tests. Whether or not you should spend money on a top-of-the-line graphics card is a question for another time, but one thing is clear: technology improves rapidly and sometimes it's better to wait for something that will be cheaper and more powerful in the future.

And with that, our comparison comes to an end. We hope you enjoyed this look at two very different graphics cards, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. If you liked this kind of content, be sure to subscribe to our channel for more articles like this one. You can also find all our social media links in the description below. Until next time, bye!

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin today's video we're going to answer the age-old question of PC gaming what's better a $50 modern APU or a 12 year-old flagship GPU really asking the hard-hitting questions on this channel at first look this seems like a fairly stupid comparison it's kind of like pitting Mike Tyson Mike Tyson in is 70s nonetheless but still Mike Tyson against a 15 year old wheelchair-bound dementia sufferer it's pretty obvious who's gonna win but it's actually not that stupid of comparison because the little $50.00 apu that could actually has a couple of things going for it first things first let's have a look at the two contenders just a quick disclaimer for you sticklers out there you know who you are Gary so always Gary I get that comparing the specifications of two completely different GPU solutions doesn't really tell us that much about potential performance but I still think it's a fairly interesting thing to do now the NVIDIA GTX 285 was a complete beast when it was launched and it was actually a die shrink of the GTX 280 down from 65 nanometers to 55 nanometers and they were very similar GPUs it was in fact the first NVIDIA GPU that had a 512 bit memory bus which is something we don't really find today anymore because it's quite expensive to do the graphics Scott also has one gig of gddr3 which is not very much and it's pretty slow so even with that huge memory bus we may still run into quite a big memory bottleneck in modern games and it seems like the graphics card didn't age very well because it only has 240 shader cores in it which is significantly less than even very modest modern GPUs another way in which this GPU has aged worse than a fruit fly is in the rear i/o because it's only got two DVI ports and an s-video port and that may become a bit of a problem later on now let's move over to the APU which is douwe I'd little lamb compared to the old man GTX 285 now the specific apu that we're gonna use for this video today is the AMD Athlon 200 GE and it's an APU that you can consistently get for around $55 and you can actually play some games on it now I just quickly want to clarify the the 200 GE was actually launched in 2018 so it means that there's only a 10 year difference between the age of the two GPUs which is actually more impressive if you think about it the thing is though the little Vega 3 GPU section of the 200 GE actually compares pretty favorably on paper to the GTX 285 because it's got 192 shader units which isn't very much but it's not significantly less than the 240 shader units on the GTX 285 it's also built on the 14 nanometer process which is significantly smaller than the 55 nanometer process of the 285 although it does have fewer ops and things like that and when you look at the base core clock of the Vega 3 at about 300 megahertz that's also way less than the six hundred odd megahertz on the 285 although that's a lot to do with very thermally restrictive situations and the Vega 3 will actually boost itself up to over a gigahertz on the core if it has that kind of thermal headroom and it will have that thermal Headroom available because it's a 200 GE it basically produces no heat in regards to the memory section of the Vega 3 graphics that's entirely dependent on what Ram you're using in your system so for this video I'm using 16 gigs of Dom plats it's ddr4 3000 megahertz which is actually not really fast enough for optimal APU performance but with the 16 gigs of system memory the Vega 3 graphics is gonna have access to 2 gigs of ram which is a lot more than the one gig of VRAM on the gtx 285 and that could be quite important later on and that's a pretty smooth segue into the system that I used for these tests and as far as the CPU goes I just used the CPU section of the to hunt ge which is a dual core for thread CPU and then in regards to the motherboard I'm using some gigabyte p450 board it's pretty terrible but I had it on hand and against the job done and then as far as the cooler goes I have a Reeve injustice - which is a very good CPU cooler and it's going to be massive overkill for the 200 GE and as I mentioned before we're using Dom Platts for the memory the system was just kind of running on the table like that so now let's get into the benchmarks and see how these two compare the first thing that you probably noticed while looking at these benchmarks is that I only ran four games now this isn't entirely down to me being lazy it's just that it's quite difficult to get games running on this GTX 285 because I think it's due to like legacy drivers support but yeah there's there's all kinds of compatibility issues with the GTX 285 which is something that you don't have at all with the 200 GE everything works really easily with it and I think it's probably due to the bad legacy driver support but even though the average framerate and a lot of these games seems way higher on the GTX 285 than it does with the 200 GE and its own Vega 3 graphics the thing is the games ran very badly on the GTX 285 even though the average framerate was quite high the games were very stuttery and they really struggled to run you just get huge frame drops in all of these games even half-life 2 I think another reason that the games ran so badly was because of a lack of VRAM on this card yeah so it's it's not looking good for the Tison graphics card so when looking just straight at the figures it seems like the GTX 285 stomped on the Vega 3 internal graphics but actually the games were quite a lot more playable on the AI GPU of the apu that means the combination of the terrible driver support the tiny frame buffer and the rear i/o from the middle ages we finally answered the age-old question of who would win in a fight old mike tyson or wheelchair bound 15 year old dementia sufferer and weirdly enough the answer in my opinion is is the wheelchair-bound kiddo this whole exercise just shows that technology improves really quickly and maybe you shouldn't spend that much money on a top-of-the-line graphics card because 10 years from now a $50 APU is going to be a better option yeah so with that sensational bit of consumer advice it brings me to the end of the video thank you very much for watching if you liked this kind of pointless video so subscribe to the channel for more like that I've got all my social media linked in the description below so you can check that out if you're interested and yeah until the next video bye byein today's video we're going to answer the age-old question of PC gaming what's better a $50 modern APU or a 12 year-old flagship GPU really asking the hard-hitting questions on this channel at first look this seems like a fairly stupid comparison it's kind of like pitting Mike Tyson Mike Tyson in is 70s nonetheless but still Mike Tyson against a 15 year old wheelchair-bound dementia sufferer it's pretty obvious who's gonna win but it's actually not that stupid of comparison because the little $50.00 apu that could actually has a couple of things going for it first things first let's have a look at the two contenders just a quick disclaimer for you sticklers out there you know who you are Gary so always Gary I get that comparing the specifications of two completely different GPU solutions doesn't really tell us that much about potential performance but I still think it's a fairly interesting thing to do now the NVIDIA GTX 285 was a complete beast when it was launched and it was actually a die shrink of the GTX 280 down from 65 nanometers to 55 nanometers and they were very similar GPUs it was in fact the first NVIDIA GPU that had a 512 bit memory bus which is something we don't really find today anymore because it's quite expensive to do the graphics Scott also has one gig of gddr3 which is not very much and it's pretty slow so even with that huge memory bus we may still run into quite a big memory bottleneck in modern games and it seems like the graphics card didn't age very well because it only has 240 shader cores in it which is significantly less than even very modest modern GPUs another way in which this GPU has aged worse than a fruit fly is in the rear i/o because it's only got two DVI ports and an s-video port and that may become a bit of a problem later on now let's move over to the APU which is douwe I'd little lamb compared to the old man GTX 285 now the specific apu that we're gonna use for this video today is the AMD Athlon 200 GE and it's an APU that you can consistently get for around $55 and you can actually play some games on it now I just quickly want to clarify the the 200 GE was actually launched in 2018 so it means that there's only a 10 year difference between the age of the two GPUs which is actually more impressive if you think about it the thing is though the little Vega 3 GPU section of the 200 GE actually compares pretty favorably on paper to the GTX 285 because it's got 192 shader units which isn't very much but it's not significantly less than the 240 shader units on the GTX 285 it's also built on the 14 nanometer process which is significantly smaller than the 55 nanometer process of the 285 although it does have fewer ops and things like that and when you look at the base core clock of the Vega 3 at about 300 megahertz that's also way less than the six hundred odd megahertz on the 285 although that's a lot to do with very thermally restrictive situations and the Vega 3 will actually boost itself up to over a gigahertz on the core if it has that kind of thermal headroom and it will have that thermal Headroom available because it's a 200 GE it basically produces no heat in regards to the memory section of the Vega 3 graphics that's entirely dependent on what Ram you're using in your system so for this video I'm using 16 gigs of Dom plats it's ddr4 3000 megahertz which is actually not really fast enough for optimal APU performance but with the 16 gigs of system memory the Vega 3 graphics is gonna have access to 2 gigs of ram which is a lot more than the one gig of VRAM on the gtx 285 and that could be quite important later on and that's a pretty smooth segue into the system that I used for these tests and as far as the CPU goes I just used the CPU section of the to hunt ge which is a dual core for thread CPU and then in regards to the motherboard I'm using some gigabyte p450 board it's pretty terrible but I had it on hand and against the job done and then as far as the cooler goes I have a Reeve injustice - which is a very good CPU cooler and it's going to be massive overkill for the 200 GE and as I mentioned before we're using Dom Platts for the memory the system was just kind of running on the table like that so now let's get into the benchmarks and see how these two compare the first thing that you probably noticed while looking at these benchmarks is that I only ran four games now this isn't entirely down to me being lazy it's just that it's quite difficult to get games running on this GTX 285 because I think it's due to like legacy drivers support but yeah there's there's all kinds of compatibility issues with the GTX 285 which is something that you don't have at all with the 200 GE everything works really easily with it and I think it's probably due to the bad legacy driver support but even though the average framerate and a lot of these games seems way higher on the GTX 285 than it does with the 200 GE and its own Vega 3 graphics the thing is the games ran very badly on the GTX 285 even though the average framerate was quite high the games were very stuttery and they really struggled to run you just get huge frame drops in all of these games even half-life 2 I think another reason that the games ran so badly was because of a lack of VRAM on this card yeah so it's it's not looking good for the Tison graphics card so when looking just straight at the figures it seems like the GTX 285 stomped on the Vega 3 internal graphics but actually the games were quite a lot more playable on the AI GPU of the apu that means the combination of the terrible driver support the tiny frame buffer and the rear i/o from the middle ages we finally answered the age-old question of who would win in a fight old mike tyson or wheelchair bound 15 year old dementia sufferer and weirdly enough the answer in my opinion is is the wheelchair-bound kiddo this whole exercise just shows that technology improves really quickly and maybe you shouldn't spend that much money on a top-of-the-line graphics card because 10 years from now a $50 APU is going to be a better option yeah so with that sensational bit of consumer advice it brings me to the end of the video thank you very much for watching if you liked this kind of pointless video so subscribe to the channel for more like that I've got all my social media linked in the description below so you can check that out if you're interested and yeah until the next video bye bye