Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: KTM520guy on December 31, 2005, 02:29:22 PM
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I'm looking for suggestions for a new video card. I'm on a bit of a budget here so I'm not looking for uber performance. I would like, however, to get something better than the FX5200 I have right now.
Throw out you ideas here and thanks in advance.
:)
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Your budget and what type of slot you have available determines what you can get. Is it a PCI or AGP slot?
If it's AGP, look at the nvidia 6800 GT. If that's too much, try the 6800GS. If that's too much, try the 6800. If that's too much, try the 6600GT. If that's too much, try the 6600. If that's too much, you might as well wait until you can afford something better.
If it has to fit into a PCI slot because your computer doesn't have an AGP slot, then I'd say wait until you can buy a computer with a pci-e expansion slot for a better video card because nobody makes fast PCI video cards.
IMHO.
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legacy PCI slots have a fraction of the bandwidth that AGP has.
As for PCIe vs AGP, just buy what you're comfortable with. Despite the sudden trend to rush and buy PCIe mobos and 3d cards, AGP will be around for a long time, by my guess. The cpu and mobo are the bottlenecks, for the most part, and AGP8x isn't even close to being a traffic jam yet, so if you have a AGP mobo I'd say stick with it until it burns out or cannot be upgraded.
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Got the 6800gt and love it .
Does all i ask of it.
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which is better....
nvidia 6800 GT
or ati x800xl 256mb for AH?
for desktop?
running amd64 3400 w/ 1 gig ram
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It's probably a toss-up. Right now I happen to like nvidia and although my first 6800GT died, I've been happy with it's replacement. The drivers are pretty stable and if I recall correctly, AH runs just a bit faster on nvidia hardware than on ATI. But that's a recollection from over a year ago, after HT had made some major changes. I don't know if HTC has been able to get any speedups on the ATI cards lately.
There used to be framerate test threads in one of the forums while HTC was beta testing some graphics optimizations, and that may give you some clues as to relative performance, however the framerate tests can't be directly compared computer to computer because the test didn't lock down the graphics settings or screen resolution.
If you play quake or doom, then nvidia may be a better bet. For the desktop, I think they're about the same. Some cards have VIVO features, and some are capable of HD output via s-video or AVI. You'll have to check the individual card specs to see what features they've included.
The feature I really want is only available in the brand new ATI 1800 series cards though, so I'm going to keep my 6800GT and sit tight for another generation or two. Ever notice that with most cards today, a boulder will have one or two "sharp" looking facets and the rest of the boulder will be totally blurry? Or at certain angles, even up close textures will blur out? Well, ATI has a mode that pretty much eliminates ALL texture bluriness at all angles, out to the max visibility range. Yea it has a framerate hit, but at least it's a driver option NOW. Nvidia doesn't even try, and that means that my pet peeve of visible texture filtering thresholds (seen as horizontal lines where it's blurry on the far side of the line) isn't even on the drawing board for Nvidia while ATI has given a pretty good hack at it.
The Nvidia 7800 has better antialiasing I think.
But you were talking about the 6800GT vs. x800XL, and I'm not really sure. 3Dmark2001SE relative benchmark performance USED to match up pretty well with expected AH performance, but I haven't done any checking after HT's latest round of optimizations so I don't think that holds true anymore.
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yea..my ati radeon 9800 pro artifacts pretty bad on doom3. I had to underclock it about 5%.:cry
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Thanks for your input guys. I bought a Nvidia 6800 AGP. Anything has to be better than the FX5200 I have now. Heck, it's worse than the Ti4200 I used to have.
:)
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the 6800 and x8 series are the last high end agp cards you will be able to get , the new generation high ends are pci-e only , so that kills agp in my book. 38