<font color=skyblue>From what I am to understand from Tom's Hardware Guide, it sounds like NVidia failed with major embarrassment when they released the FX, because although the design looked good on paper, they messed up when they built it with the same errors that older cards carried, and the FX never performed the way they expected. Within only a few months, the 6800 Ultra was mentioned, swearing that it would perform better than they had originally expected the FX to.

Look at how big this thing is. I mean, the fan takes up such space, you need two slots open in order to plug it in! It also begs for at least 480Watt Power Supply. The BFG GeForce actually sales a card and 530Watt Power Supply together in one of their packages, and even a water-block or something.

However, as delicious as this card sounds, I think that I would wait a couple months to let others try this card out and see if there are any problems with it before purchasing one myself, which is due any time now if it is not out already. Maybe by then, the price will drop at least $100.

</font>

Agree. That is one scary bloated card. If I have the budget, I would rather go for a RADEON X800 XT.

i heard in a couple of months there will be a new kind of video card that will use a dual processor or something.. i cant remember much since i just read it in a magazine once. ill try and look for that article again.

At the moment Nvdia is slightly ahead, but so is there price too. If you don't need top of the range, your better buying a 9800pro for about £130 (about $230, although its probably cheaper over there) since the budget 6800 and x800x's are a lot more expensive!

<font color=skyblue>I am currently using the GeForce 3, ti 200. How much am I missing out on? NWN plays fine, but am I missing out? </font>

Not with NWN. The GF3 is a Direct X 8 card, and supports all features of Direct X 8.0, which is all NWN is.

If you were playing a DX9 game, then you'd want a DX9 card. Of course having said that, you'll find that with a newer card you can run NWN at high resolutions.

One word of caution for NWN players from experience. NWN doesn't like ATI cards very much. That's not to say that everyone will experience problems, but my 9800XT should be a heckuva lot faster in NWN than what it is. Seems to be a wide spread problem with the Open GL drivers for ATI.

Larry, I'd hold off on the new card for a bit. Your GF3 is still a very good card, and rumour has it that DirectX 10 may be making an appearance soon which will of course bring on yet another swarm of new cards, driving the price of existing ones down.

Like I said in the Intel Thread, wait until there's software to take advantage of the hardware.

<font color=skyblue>Thanks for the advice!!</font>

As Animal said, with some games (NWN for example) you are not missing out on much. For others, which use DX9 you are missing out on a lot of extra effects. And you are also missing out on AA and AF (Anti Aliasing and anisotropic filtering) which add to the games looks. The other big difference is Frame Rate, however anything with a Frame Rate above 30 is "playable"

With some of the new cards you can get massive framerates (200+) on some games, but after you get to a certain point, they dont really matter since the eye cant tell the difference.

If you want to play ANY of the newer games, eg Far Cry, then you NEED a newer card.

Incidentally, don't knock the FX series cards too much, the 5200 (a low-end card if ever there was one) is fully capable of running Far Cry with most detail levels at medium (and water effects at full) and still get good framerates (40fps+) on a low-end machine.

If you want all the eyecandy, you'll need an X800 or a GF6800 but even on medium, the look of this game is spectacular.

Hmm...what about my NVIDIA GeForce MX/MX 400 32MB? Is it hopelessly outdated? It's only 2 years old or so - it came with my Dell 8100 1.4Ghz that was state of the art 2 years ago. :eek:

If it is past it's UBD, can someone recommend a decent card that won't break the budget? I don't play that many FPS games, it's more RPGs, RTS and strategy games with some sport sims thrown in - I am planning to watch DVDs though once I get a DVD drive. There's such a proliferation of cards now that I can't work out what's what - Radeon, GeForce, NVIDIA...what's the difference with them all? :confused: A number of people on another forum seem to recommend the Radeon 9600pro as a good upgrade option, it's about $190 here which is around about what I'd be looking to spend (unless someone can convince me to do otherwise).

[ 07-05-2004, 01:47 PM: Message edited by: Memnoch ]

Yes, the Radeon 9600pro or 9600XT are good cards, but they don't handle Open GL as well as nVidia cards do. Rumour has it, that a future driver release for ATI will fix the Open GL problem.

Having said that, I use a 9800XT and am quite impressed with it. Quite frankly, picture quality is a lot better than my old Geforce card, and I have yet to find any games that I can't play with all details maxed out, including 8X AA, and 16X AF.

I don't do much with the FPS myself, but do enjoy NWN, KOTOR, Flight Sim 2004, etc...

To be honest, if your card is working great for the games you play today, hold off until it can't. Any card you buy today, will be outdated tommorrow. :D

I'll echo the statement about NWN being finicky with ATI cards. I let a friend borrow my copy of NWN and it wouldn't run. I tinkered around a bit in the BIOS and got it running. Worked ok for about a month then it just quit working again.

I will say though I am impressed by the ATI 9800Pro. It's older, but pretty sweet nevertheless. I just put on in my parents computer and ran Morrowind with full settings (16x+ani+trueform) and it was smoking along nicely. Makes me jealous. [img]smile.gif[/img] Luckily I got my old GF4 T4200 working nicely now though. I just don't understand laying down $500 for a gfx board.

thats right! im on student budget so i got the fx5200. thank goodness it can run the newer games at a decent fashion. :D

So what's the difference between ATI and Nvidia?

I would recommend the Radeon 9800Pro, its about £130, which (if I converted properly on XE.com) is around $330 (your in AUD right?). Although you could get it cheaper on ebay.

I've been very happy with my FX 5700 Ultra, although I would avoid any FX other than the 5700 or 5950... they had "issues" that were mostly overcome in these two newer cards. My card is a single slot unit that had a decent sized fan/heat sink but it still took only one slot (I've got it liquid cooled now so there's no fan at all).

Performance has been good, overclockability ok. I can run Far Cry at 1280x1024 with everything at maximum except shadows (which I think they've got an engine problem with, good performance outdoors, but go in a cave and the frame rates drop to unplayable levels).

I have my FX 5600. And I am happy with it. Now am looking for speakers...

Mem, the diff? Competition. Both has its ups and downs. ATI being the fastest yet (with the same level of cards) somehow not as compatible in other progs as nVidia... I think

ge force is shit !


get ati radeon cards !

<font color=skyblue>Thank you for your highly intellegent opinion.
I am sure alot of people will be converted by your testimonial. </font>

Well that was intelligent. He's probably just jealous for being stuck with a Diamon Stealth 3D 2MB board from about 1996.

Same same Memnoch :D

I have the exact same card and the same wish to upgrade. My motherboard is a Aopen AK77pro with 4xAGP does this limit the video card replacements to something with only 4xAGP ? or can a 8x AGP card be used? (what does it mean anyway :D )

So far I have seen a nVIDIA GeForce4 MX440SE 64MB DDR RAM in a local shop for $70. Will there be a reasonable jump in performance with this change?

[ 07-08-2004, 12:33 AM: Message edited by: wellard ]

You know what, Wellard? Go and download a diagnostic tool called SANDRA (from www.sisoftware.com) and it will tell you how "expandable" your motherboard is. I did it a few days ago and it's given me some very useful info - my m/board supports up to a 2GB P4 chip and 2GB of RDRAM - unfortunately the voltage is only rated at 1.75v and a lot of these cards are rated at 3v these days...

Personally after seeing the future prices here I bought myself a GF 5900 XT, 128 MB RAM.

The card it big, good meemory and has alot of the goody goody stuff for playing games, and a fair price at that.

I personally preferred my GF TI4200 rather then the sluggish 5200 MX card I had as well.

MOst important in a game for me is not ALL the eyecandy, it is that the graphics runs as fluid as possible with a minimum of glitches and troubles.

All I hope for now is that the new Bards Tale game will be as cool to play as it looks by the screenshots ;) I wonder.... have they met Yorrick perhaps?? ;)

Any hardware becomes outdated the moment you touch the receipt. [img]tongue.gif[/img]

I have a Radeon 9600LE with 256 DDR,
is a Radeon 9800 or 9800XT with 128 DDR really that much faster?
I mean, is it worth upgrading, and is there a noticible peformance difference between a 9600 and 9800

Anyway the Radeon 9600 is a major improvement over my Geforce 4 MX440 with 64 DDR, and it was reasonably cheap, so i am happy with it as a temporary upgrade, but the important question...

do you think it will run half life 2?

Any hardware becomes outdated the moment you touch the receipt. [img]tongue.gif[/img] </font>[/QUOTE]Actually, from the moment you start to think about it it's already outdated. [img]tongue.gif[/img]

Does anyone have any answers to the questions posted here? :confused:

Come on experts, where are you all. :D

Actually, I've been doing a bit of research and I haven't found anything lame about the FX...possibly it didn't meet NVIDIA's expectations, but given the price they're at now, particularly the FX5700 and 5900, they seem to be quite good cards for the money. And even the cheaper cards FX5500, FX5200 seem to be more than adequate for things like NWN gaming, RTS, TBS and watching DVDs etc.

I went to www.whirlpool.net.au (an OZ broadband site) to inquire about video cards and got told to buy nothing less than a Radeon 9800 or an FX5900, both going for at least $500 OZ. Considering that my CPU is "only" a P4 1.4Ghz it's probably going to be a waste of money for me to get a high-end card - besides, some of the blokes there sounded like the types that would spent $500 on a power cable. :D

In any case, I'm starting to narrow it down to a Radeon 9200 or 9600 or an FX5500 to 5700. Any comments/feedback?

Larry, I'm a bit concerned about your "lame" comment. Do you know something about these FX cards that I might need to know if I was planning to get one? :confused:

Okay, here goes...

The FX series of cards were bloated and under engineered. There is a lot of belief that nVidia rushed them to market because ATI was kicking their buts with the 9700 and 9500 series.

What you want to look for is memory bandwith, 256bits being better than 128. This is not to be confused with RAM. For example the 9600XT 256MB card uses 256MB of 128bit DDR. The 9800XT 256MB uses 256MB of 256bit DDR. So you may have one card with 128bit memory running at 500MHZ and another card with 256bit memory running at 400MHZ, but the 256bit will be a faster card because of the memory bandwith.

Next thing you'll need to look at is the number of rendering pipelines, again the more the better. The ATI 9600 uses 4 pipelines, where as the 9800 uses 8. The 9800 is a much faster card in games that uses programmable shaders or DX9 games because of the 4 extra pipelines.

The same principles work for nVidia, I just used ATI because I own an ATI 9800XT.

When nVidia first launched their FX series of cards they were terrible underperformers. They sounded like F-16's, took up 2 slots in your case because of the huge cooling fans needed. I'm sure things have changed by now, however, I still feel that the ATI is a better engineered card, has better picture quality and offers the best overall real world performance.

Having said that, nVidia drivers are much, much better than ATI, although ATI is picking up their socks in that department. Open GL support in ATI drivers, in my opinion, is subpar. NWN for example will perform much better on nVidia hardware then it will on ATI's, but that is the only issue I've personally encountered with ATI. It took my 2 months of tweaking to get NWN to run at a decent frame rate.

One last piece of advise. Most newer cards support the AGP 3.0 spec, or 8X AGP. Some AGP 3.0 cards will not perform well unless your motherboard specifically supports AGP 3.0. The voltage requirements for AGP3.0 and AGP2.0 are different, so make sure your motherboard will support the new card that you want.

I'd suggest that you narrow your decisions down to the 9600 or the 5700. Stay away from any SE variants of the cards and concentrate on the top end models for that line, ie the XT or Ultra.

Thanks for that, Animal...what's the difference with the SE and XT variants anyway? I noticed there's an LE variant for both the 9600 and the 5700 as well, as well as ones with NO suffix - is the difference with these incremental or are they significant?

Another thing...I noticed this message on a 9800SE on sale at eBay:

ATI R9800 SE GPU
"L"-shaped RAM layout - silver-coloured fan as standard
128mb of DDR RAM onboard, capable of AGP 8x
TV output - S/VHS and Composite cables included
DVI Output
SMOOTHVISION™ 2.1 & SMARTSHADER™ 2.1
* Fan & heatsink held on by pins, Zalman HP80a passive cooler will fit
* Requires power via HDD power connector (HDD power splitter included)
* Needs a decent PSU - 300w minimum, more is better



What does PSU mean and how do I find out what mine is?

[ 07-10-2004, 02:45 PM: Message edited by: Memnoch ]

The SE or LE versions are usually stripped down variants of the original version. The original version doesn't have a suffix, where as the better ones usually carry a Pro, XT, or Ultra tag on the end. The difference is usually in core and memory speeds. I think both nVidia and ATI have comparison charts on their sites to help you out.

PSU is your Power Supply Unit. It's usually marked on the outside of the unit somewhere, although 350W is somewhat conservative for a 9800. I'd suggest a quality 400W minimum. An underpowered card will cause all kinds of crashes and glitches that will drive you absolutely insane.

Check this out for a comparo of the 9800 cards. http://www.atitech.ca/products/radeo...o/compare.html

The 9800SE isn't listed on that chart, because it's not made by ATI, it's made by a third party company that ATI has licsensed their technology to. It only has 4 pipelines as opposed to the standard 8 that the 9800 has.

My advice: Take a pass on the 9800SE

EDIT: Here's a link for the 9600 comparison from ATI. It will give you a good idea about what all the different variants are. http://www.atitech.ca/products/radeo...o/compare.html

[ 07-10-2004, 02:57 PM: Message edited by: Animal ]

Ok, I think I'll restrict myself to either the 9600 (original and XT) or the FX5700 (original). Surely either of them has to be better than my GeForce MX400, right?

That goes without saying. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Check this out for a comparison to help you make your decision:

http://www.amdmb.com/article-display...D=274&PageID=1

Cheers mate. :D I'll have a bit of a think about it all and come back to this thread when I've decided - hopefully tomorrow. Thanks for the help. [img]graemlins/thumbsup.gif[/img]

Hey Animal I have heard that the SE series (I think) are have 8 pipelines in the hardware itself, but they are only using four. My friend unlocked the four other pipelines and there. [img]smile.gif[/img]

True, you can attempt to softmod the 9800SE and open the 4 locked pipelines, but it's a 50/50 crapshoot as to whether or not it will be succesful.

That's why they're SE's, because they failed quality control as a regular 9800.

Okay, what do you guys think of this one:

http://i24.ebayimg.com/02/i/02/1c/0d/9f_1.JPG

It's currently going for $112 OZ on eBay Australia (that's about US$80). Description is below:

*****************
The 9600XT graphics core (as known as RV360) from ATI is considered a medium to high end solution, with 128 bit bus bandwidth, 4x1 pipelines and complete support for DX9 features. It will satisfy most of your productivity and gaming needs.

The Gigabyte Radeon 9600XT can only be used on AGP 4x and 8x motherboards, it is NOT compatible with AGP 1x and 2x motherboards, please see picture! Sorry for this mix up and any inconveniences caused.
*****************

Any comments about this one? It seems like a good price. Will I be able to run NWN, Civ3, Warcraft 3 on it?

[ 07-11-2004, 02:01 AM: Message edited by: Memnoch ]

Good choice [img]graemlins/thumbsup.gif[/img]

Make sure your motherboard is AGP2.0 or AGP3.0 compatible, at least AGP 4X or 8X.

EDIT: NWN might be a bit finicky with this one, although using the latest Cat4.7 should do the trick.

[ 07-11-2004, 03:27 AM: Message edited by: Animal ]

Finicky? [img]graemlins/wow.gif[/img] What do you mean finicky? :eek:

On another note, what about this one?

http://www.cheapcomputer.com.au/imag...-E-box-500.jpg

<font size="1">
Features
nVidia GeforceFX5700 GPU
CLK : 425MHz
.13u process technology
AGP 8X including Fast Writes and sideband addressing
CineFX shading architecture Support for DX 9 pixel shader 2.0+ and DX 9 vertex shader 2.0+
Intellisample™ Technology
High-Precision Graphics
nView Multi-display Technology
NVIDIA Digital Vibrance Control™ 3.0
Industry-renowned NVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
Daul, 400MHz RAMDACs
16 texels per pixel with 8 textures applied per clock
4 Pixels per Clock Rendering Pipeline
Architected for Cg
New 64-phase Video Scaler for scaling DVD and other video to full-screen HDTV resolutions.
Video Mixing Renderer (VMR)
128-bit, studio-precision color
Integrated Full Hardware MPEG-2 Decoder
Bright NTSC/PAL TV-out support with flicker filter
On-board DVI support up to 1600x1200X32bpp at 60Hz
Provides best-of-class TV-out functionality up to 1024x768 resolutions.
I/O Interface
DVI-I
D-Sub 15 Pin VGA Out
4 Pin TV-Out Connector

Bundled Software
SiluroDVD 5
Siluro Software Album CD
Package Contents

Siluro FX5700 Card
CD Driver & SiluroDVD 5 Software
S-Video to RCA Adapter cable
S-Video Extended Cable
Composite (RCA) Extended cable
DVI-I to VGA Adapter
System Requirements

Intel/AMD/Other Compatible CPUs
One available AGP Slot and one vacant PCI Slot adjacent to the AGP Slot
64MB System Memory
CD-ROM Drive
Operating Systems
Windows® XP/2000/NT/ME/98

Brand: ABIT

Warranty: 1 Year Manufacturer's return to base
</font>

Is it better or worse than the 9600XT? It's $205 OZ ($US150 or so).