What is the fastest 2d card available right now?

[hcforde]

In this world of 3d it looks like 2d is forgotten. I have an ATI 1900xtx for my gaming rig but also do financial trading.

For this machine running Windows 2000 I currently have an AGP workstation card PNY 900XGL (128MB-dual DVI)and a PCI quad card PNY NVS 400(4 port VGA, 64MB) hooked up to 6 LCD's all this machine does is look at financial foreign currency data, 2d graphic charts. I am running a 2.4 Ghz P4 overclocked to 2.88. 2 gig ram on an ASUS motherboard. SATA I Hdd.

Is ther a bottleneck for 2d output other than the current PCI graphic card? I want to change views from looking at a set of 6 views of say the Yen to looking at a set of 6 views of the Euro but it takes quite a while.

Is the PCI bus saturated with the power of the current GPU's of the current video cards that it does not make a difference?

Do I need to look at a faster CPU would SCSI or RAID be the answer or am I taxing the system to its limit and need to reconsider a system?

Thanks in advance.

 

[IVAces]

Might consider a new card setup.

You might consider a pair of these.

http://www.allstarshop.com/shop/simprod.asp?pid=12306&ad=pwatch

Good Luck!

 

[sixbone]

2D graphics on mainstream video cards reached their performance plateau about 10 years ago.

Consider Matrox Triplehead here

Also consider upgrading to XP Pro if your financial software is compatible. XP's graphics subsystem is better than Win2k.

 

[cleeve]

2d speed is pretty much maxed out with any discrete videocard nowadays.

If browser refreshes aren't happening fast enough for your liking you're probably being limited by your internet connection.

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

If browser refreshes aren't happening fast enough for your liking you're probably being limited by your internet connection.

Or maybe even a driver issue depending on how it presents itself, could even be just bloat.
I've seen some right fast setups come to a screeching halt in 2D and it was all the junk on it. I had a 2D issue with Mozilla and fastwrites for a short while.

 

[1Tanker]

2D graphics on mainstream video cards reached their performance plateau about 10 years ago.

Consider Matrox Triplehead here

Also consider upgrading to XP Pro if your financial software is compatible. XP's graphics subsystem is better than Win2k.

Yes, Matrox have widely been regarded as the best 2D cards for many years.

 

[hcforde]

We may have a winner. I had a "duh" moment and did a search for 2D + benchmarks I found this site right off the bat

http://www.karpfenteich.net/colorful/bitblt.html

I tried to copy and paste the benchmarks but they did not come out formatted correctly

In short the ATI 9700 kicked "A" then there was a lesser ATI lineup followed by the Matrox P650.

Then there was the Intel Extreme Graphics 2 855 GM (64MB Shared) I think it was a laptop though.


So there must be some life being squeezed out of the 2D setup - now to see if I can find some bonafide PCI benchmarks for current cards "HA-yeah, right"


Maybe my best option at this pioint is to get a new motherboard with 2 pci-express slots. at least I can have 4 ports that are blazing fast and the other 2 port don't have to share as much bandwidth between them so their speed will not be as compromised.

 

[1Tanker]

We may have a winner. I had a "duh" moment and did a search for 2D + benchmarks I found this site right off the bat

http://www.karpfenteich.net/colorful/bitblt.html

I tried to copy and paste the benchmarks but they did not come out formatted correctly

In short the ATI 9700 kicked "A" then there was a lesser ATI lineup followed by the Matrox P650.

Then there was the Intel Extreme Graphics 2 855 GM (64MB Shared) I think it was a laptop though.

So there must be some life being squeezed out of the 2D setup - now to see if I can find some bonafide PCI benchmarks for current cards "HA-yeah, right"


Maybe my best option at this pioint is to get a new motherboard with 2 pci-express slots. at least I can have 4 ports that are blazing fast and the other 2 port don't have to share as much bandwidth between them so their speed will not be as compromised.

You can't quantify 2D performance with benchmarks really. It's more abouty quality of render, and there the Matrox usually clean up, ALTHOUGH most 3D cards have closed the gap considerably.

 

[hcforde]

My purpose is not photoshop or the like, just financial charts. So the "quality of render" is not that important just speed even 256 color is fine. I just want the speed.

 

[MarkG]

You can't quantify 2D performance with benchmarks really.

Yep. If your 3D card can write 50 gigabytes per second to video memory, you can potentially redraw a 2048x1536 display 4,300 times per second.... even if your benchmarks ran that fast it would be a bit tricky to read .

The reason why you can't achieve that in real life is down to hardware inefficiencies (e.g. read/modify/write operations and writing to non-contiguous memory slowing it down) and Windows overhead. I believe XP, for example, requires a seperate call into the driver for every line you draw, whereas Win9x let you specify a list of lines that could be thousands of entries long and render it in one call.

 

[hcforde]

Are you saying that it is better to run on a Win9X system rather than W2K or XP?

I am currently lookig for motherboards that have more than 2 PCI-Express slots.

Bandwidth seems to be my problem

 

[MarkG]

Are you saying that it is better to run on a Win9X system rather than W2K or XP?

Only if you want to draw lots of 2D lines very quickly .

 

[PheloniusRM]

I still play alot of old 2d games, like diablo2, baldurs gate, emulators. I now have a 7800gtx and it seems that these games run slower now then they did when I had a TI500 and a voodoo5500. It bothers me that card makers are completely neglecting 2d performance because of the assumption that the only 2d a card will see is the desktop and ms office.

 

[sylvez]

I still play alot of old 2d games, like diablo2, baldurs gate, emulators. I now have a 7800gtx and it seems that these games run slower now then they did when I had a TI500 and a voodoo5500. It bothers me that card makers are completely neglecting 2d performance because of the assumption that the only 2d a card will see is the desktop and ms office.

iirc winxp/2k uses some kind of 'emulator' for the dos environment
i suppose the slow down is due to that?

 

[4745454b]

Can we clarify something? What do you use to view this info? Is it IE, or is it something else? If it is IE, is there some sort of flash/animation/etc that is on the screen? If your changing 6 views at once, I'm thinking a dual core CPU and a faster internet connection is in order. (it could also be something on the remote site.)
I'm also slightly bothered by the idea of running 4 monitors off of a single 64mb card. Can a smarter nerd then I run the numbers of how much memory is needed to draw four screens at 1024x768?

 

[hcforde]

I am a currency trader so this is a dedicated program for financial charts. I look at each currency in time frames of 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, and a combination of trading systems for a total of 6 screens. When I switch from one currency to another all 6 of these screens must change.

A number of people have said that it doesn't matter what card you get because 2D will run the same speed on modern cards because since ther is no (3D) computation that the bus is bandwidth saturated anyway. Well I found some 2D benchmarks and there is definately a difference. Also it must be kept in mind the number of screens I have running simultaneously and how much data needs to be changed when I change from 1 bank to another(that is where the bottleneck becomes apparent). I ran the bench on PCI, AGP, and PCI-Express in PCI-Express cards it seems that core clock & memory speed come into play for throughput. So now there is a price performance issue.

I have been told everything from
1)Just use PCI-Express cards and DON'T use any PCI because it slows down the whole process,
2)Buy a very fast CPU, and in that arena buy a dual core or buy a 64bit CPU.
3)Use windows 98 because it is faster in 2D,
4)Buy a fast HDD or RAID.

I will probably end up doing almost everything. Currently I am looking at the following.

1)A faster CPU, I am currently using a P4 2.8Ghz chip, the Conroe's are coming later this month. It seems that the only solution for 3 or more PCI-Express slots are Intel

2)3-7600GT or 7800GT video cards or equal ATI cards - these have 2 video ports each

3)A 74 Gigabyte Raptor HDD or maybe even a SCSI drive (I have a spare 29160 controller) 2 drives one for OS one for the programs and data

I am even toying with the idea of getting one of those new ram drives

www.cyberwizardpit.net/reviewscrda.htm

Gigabyte also has a Hardware ram drive called i-RAM another hardware ram drive that works off the sata bus. Here are some scores

HDD 57699
Application loading 100.5 MB/s
File copying 118.9 MB/s
General usage 90.6 MB/s
Random access 0.1 ms
Burst 137 MB/s
read 132 MB/s

Anand had this to say
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480&p=1

4)Gigabyte Quad Royal motherboard - This motherboard has 4 PCI-Express slots

Since this is a 3D world no one seems to know exactly what the problem/bottleneck is, but 45 seconds changing from one bank to another is about 40 seconds to long in the trading world.

I am going to wait untill the dust settles a bit before buying the motherboard/CPU combo. To much is happening in that arena right now. BUT the Video cards and HDD I can tackle right now because 2 monitors on a PCI bus with 64MB per video stream vs 16MB per stream will show some temporary improvement.


Ideally I want to keep things on seperate busses
Only video on PCI-Express
Only HDD on SATA or PCI

 

[mitch074]

If you can move your mouse from one screen to the other without sluggishness during a refresh, I'd say you have enough 2D power; it woyuld then be the app that doesn't take well to the refresh - in which case a faster CPU and more RAM would just kick ass.
PCI-Express VS. PCI 2: if you only have a single PCI card and the others are plugged as PCI-Express (or AGP), then there is little problem with bus bottlenecking: the worst you'd get would be much slower display on the PCI card, but it seems refresh is long on every screen: so your graphics subsystem is good enough.

No, I think your CPU and RAM are at fault there: the P4 would perform horribly in this situation, and you may want to get a cheapo AMD cpu (say, Sempron64 2800+) + mobo (like Asus K8n-e): if you notice a great change with this experiment, then Conroe would give you quite a boost. If no change, then the problem is elsewhere.

 

[ctrob]

I'm not familiar with anyone using more than 2 screens, but if it's taking 45s to switch then I'm 99.999% sure it has nothing to do with the graphics card(s). I would expect them to be able to refresh text 100s of times a second.

As others have suggested, there could be any number of reasons for the delay but we'd need to know a lot more about the whole (trading) system (not just the pc), which really takes it ouside of the scope of these forums.

Assuming you're getting your data in real time from server on the network then the 3 most likely issues I can think of are:

• 
  [*:a4841174ba]Your network connection to the server is slow.
  [*:a4841174ba]The server app is slow at delivery the data you need.
  [*:a4841174ba]Your client application is slow at retrieving and organising the data.
  
  If the client app is java and there is a lot of data involved then 3. is quite likely, although it could also be combination of the 3.
  
  If it's 1 or 2 then there's probably not much you can do, but if it's 3 then adding memory and processing power would probably help the most.

 

[hcforde]

I just talked to another tech person about the charting platform. This one seemed more knowledgable about the system than those I talked to in the past.

Thanks CTROB and MITCH074

The charting platform happens to be written in Java and C++ I just found out. The variables on my end that affect performance are;

1)the number of screens open
2)the number of bars or candles on each screen(500 to 5000)
2)the number of trading systems on each screen


If there are 5,000 bars available on each screen(seen or unseen) the request for a different currency will dictate that 30,000 bars must be drawn. If there are 1,000 bars on each screen then 6,000 bars total must be drawn. The data comes from the server . I am on a cable modem service which is pretty fast. I also have 2 GIG so at least a dual proc would probably be the most helpful

This does appear to be more processing power related than video cards.

Thanks again

 

[garyhope]

I do stocks and currency trading at home also. I'm in the process of building a new system fro trading. It will be multi monitor and 2D.

Have you looked at these cards:?

http://www.pny.com/products/quadro/nvs/285x16NvsPciEx.asp

and the various other Quadro NVS cards for multi monitor apps? They make some for dual monitors and quad monitors. Mostly for "workstation" and financial systems.

Then there is also the ATI "workstation" cards for multimonitor financial trading also:

http://www.ati.com/products/firemvseries/index.html

Then there's Matrox.

http://www.matrox.com/mga/corp/home.cfm

But you probably know all this.

 

[hcforde]

Yeah, my current setup is with Quadro cards but they are too slow for the amount of data I want to push. (See my first post) I am benching some cards and finding that muscle does make a difference in the PCI-Express realm in 2D. Right now I am leaning toward Nvidia 7600GT, 7600GS and will be benching the x1600pro soon. I may even go down to a 7300GS just to see how much difference it makes. They are dirt cheap. $80.00 after $20 rebate at compusa until the end of the month.

A fellow currency trader - lets chat sometime

 

[Cody_7]

Well, a 64MB card doesn't exactly sound like a good idea with as many monitors as you are using at once. I highly doubt the network connectection is what's slowing you down though -- all those bars and data are just numbers, and it's the program that actaully organizes it into a visual representation.

I'm betting that the two major factors in this problem are 1)The program and 2) Windows itself.

Every Windows OS (escept for the soon to be released Vista) render most of the desktop / 2D applications using the CPU of your PC. That means that no matter what kind of graphics card you have, you will only get so much performance in 2D mode, no matter what. I'm guessing that the 6 screens are hitting this performance "plateu".

Getting new hardware is always a good idea, and it will probably improve perfomance in this app alot. Getting a faster CPU (event though yours is still fast) might also be a good idea, and those 7600's are an excellent choice. It will most likley eliminate some drawing time, but only to a point.

 

[Fursecul]

Almoast all the new video card's are the same when it comes to 2d performance

 

[MrCommunistGen]

Although from the look of what's been said the graphics card probably isnt your problem, you might look into workstation class cards. I just ran the BitBlit program on my workstation here (at work) which has a low end ATI FireGL V3100 (X300 I think) and it got an avg framerate of 1164.5 which blows all of the other cards listed out of the water. Maybe the PCIe 16x bus is helping because I'd imagine that an X300 is slower than a Mobility 9700. I've gotta try this on my gaming rig when I get home.

Edit: I don't know how much this matters, but I was running @ 1600x1200 and the CPU is a 3.0GHz P4 w/1.0 GB Ram.
-mcg

 

[Cody_7]

Almoast all the new video card's are the same when it comes to 2d performance

Yeah, and I personally think that's sad. Like I said above, windows barley takes advantage of your video card at all and renders most of 2D modes with the CPU (Obviously the CPU is so much slower at rendering it's not even funny; hence why we use seperate 3D cards). Vista is supposed to be directly hardware supported so i'm REALLY hoping this will change.

Just a side note: That program should probably run in Direct3D mode (the name kind of explains itself) so the video card can actually accellerate the drawing of the bars & graphs. How old is that app, anyway?