What about qualitative analysis of the finer points of the video card? 2d image quality is something that's generally mentioned but not expanded upon. The majority of video cards produced these days are geared to allow for dual displays out of the box; do we see indepth coverage of said dual-head implementations? Do we see the performance impacts of powering a second display in various situations? S-video output is another feature that's beginning to become more commonly desired and used, yet rarely tested and compared.

There are power users out there that simply don't require m4d l33t g4m1ng performance. I would imagine a sizeable portion of the readership of 2CPU.com simply don't have the time or the desire to constantly engross themselves in games. These people demand other things from their video hardware, like impeccable 2d quality, acceptable performance in certain CAD applications or even some punch when it comes to 3d rendering.

All these factors combined to motivate us to write the sort of article I'd like to read if I was in the market for a new video card (which I'm not, G550 for life yo!). We tried to round up as many video cards as possible. Not all of them are the newest and swankiest on the block (some are actually quite dated), but we wanted to at least include analysis of cards from all the major players in this industry. Furthermore, we will hit you with a smorgasbord of benchmarks on both a dual Athlon MP system and a dual Xeon workstation.

Cory and I also took the time to test the s-video implementations of all the cards in our round-up. We dug out a favorite anime series of ours on DVD and proceeded to make our own comparisons. We also used the 2CPU.com front page as a basis for examining the ability of each video card to display text legibly on a TV screen via the s-video output.

The cards to be tested?