<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.

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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 ]