New Video Card

[nathan_m_2005]

Right now I have the XFX Geforce 4 420 MX card. I'm looking into getting an FX card right now, particularly this one: http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProdu...g=48&depa=0

Am I going to notice a very big difference in performance speed? I need this for using photoshop and some mpeg2 creation. I also game a little bit.

[_Mystical_Night]

the link is broken :p , but no matter what card it is im 100% sure u would get a performance increase over a Geforce MX card :p those cards are only for basic use not for gaming or grathics intense applications

[dajogejr]

A better question would be what kind of budget do you have to work with...what kind of card your motherboard will accept...

AGP, PCI??

2X, 4X, 8X...

Send us a hook, and we'll bite

[nathan_m_2005]

I have a pretty new MSI board with a 2100 overclocked to a 2700. I have 512mb of memory. So I need a 4x AGP card. I'm looking for under $200.

Thanks

[dajogejr]

If your board will accept a 4X, it should except an 8X as well...

So...for that kind of money, I think a Radeon 9600XT is your best bet right now...

Any other takers??

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Yup, Radeon 9600XT is the best card currently availiable in terms of price to performance ration and weighs in at a fairly resonable price too

--Jakk:t

[nathan_m_2005]

I have the MSI KT3 Ultra2 board. It says it only supports 4x AGP. What kind of Radeon 9600XT card is good? I want one I can overclock, and for $170ish or less.

[chaser_22]

Radeon 9600 pro all the way!!

Well don't know about the price difference between the pro and the xt, but either of them will do nicely and you can get them pretty cheap too.

I got my 9600 pro for 180 euro (probably lower now). It's a club3d, but doesn't matter, it's still Ati under the hood and the performance is really good.

[dajogejr]

Not much difference in real performance between 4 and 8X, IMO.

You can OC the 9600 Pro well.

The XT comes with software, overdrive, which will safely overclock the card based on applications and performance automaticaly...

I don't know how great this works...but, an OC utility from the manufacturer isn't a bad start!!

[iceblue]

128MB DDR GeForce™ FX 5900 (http://www.pcavailable.com/web/index.aspx?pid=1135&cid=3). This one has higher performance than any card mentioned so far (bar the broken link) and is the current "best-bang-for-the-buck".

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Originally posted by iceblue
) and is the current "best-bang-for-the-buck".

...just not in DX9 apps...

--Jakk:t

[Plaster]

Originally posted by Bigjakkstaffa
...just not in DX9 apps...

--Jakk:t

He conveniently leaves that part out every time he pimps it. :D

[mobiker]

New Egg has the Saphire 9600xt for $158 and free shipping. I just got one for my son and it works great.

[Tweb]

I have a 128MB DDR GeForce FX 5900 an it rocks in everything, Photo Editing, Video Editing, Gaming an 3D OPENGL "MAYA" Programs. One thing people DON'T mention is you shouldn't go any higher in refresh rate then ur monitor can handle or you risk destroying ur monitor !!!!!!! So, getting an ATI or GeForce is up to you, 'cause 250 FPS doesn't mean dittily sqwat if ur monitor can only goto 1280x1024 @ 60 hz!
My 128MB DDR GeForce™ FX 5900 max out my games @ 1024x768 @ 75 Hz all the time an video editing is clear but the Vid card has little to do with the speed of the work being done, but I have no problem or gliches I should say, when editing!!!!

[nathan_m_2005]

So what would be the better buy here?
This one:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-102-326&catalog=48&depa=1

This one:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-102-335&catalog=48&depa=1

This one:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-127-113&catalog=48&manufactory=BROWSE&depa=1

This one:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-127-118&catalog=48&manufactory=BROWSE&depa=1

Or this one:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-127-077&catalog=48&manufactory=BROWSE&depa=1

And is the a big difference between the 256mb card and the 128?

[dajogejr]

Save your money, get the first.
In tests ran on the 128 and 256 MB 9800 Pro cards, the 256 only beat the 128 with AA turned all the way up to 6XX...and even then, it was just barely.

Doom 3 and Half life 2 may take a little advantage of the extra memory. Again, that's MAY...but, save the money.

128 version is just fine....

The 9600 XT is a better offereing than the Nvidia cards you listed here, as well.

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Originally posted by nathan_m_2005


And is the a big difference between the 256mb card and the 128?

In a word no, 2-3FPS at best ATM, as for the card:

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-102-326&catalog=48&depa=1


--Jakk:t

[iceblue]

There's no need to mention dx9 cause it already performs at a smooth frame rate, one that is twice as good as the 9600XT, without being twice the price.

[Bigjakkstaffa]

...actually, youve got a point there, afterall if coders follow the pattern of what Valve are doing for Hl2 by making Direct X8 the default settings for the FX cards due to their lack of DX9 grunt, direct x 9 power (or rather lack of it)may not be an issue at all for the FX series

--Jakk:t

[iceblue]

Originally posted by Bigjakkstaffa
...actually, youve got a point there, afterall if coders follow the pattern of what Valve are doing for Hl2 by making Direct X8 the default settings for the FX cards due to their lack of DX9 grunt, direct x 9 power (or rather lack of it)may not be an issue at all for the FX series

--Jakk:t
If they follow this pattern, then HL2 will become the biggest failure of (insert year of whenever they plan to release) since Nvidia owns more than half of the dx9 market (recent statistics show). :t

[bob05]

I'm more and more beginning to think that the DX 9 problem is just with HL2. Tomb Raider AOD, Aquamark3, Homeworld 2, X2 and other RELEASED DX 9 games perform just fine with FX cards.

[Plaster]

Originally posted by iceblue
If they follow this pattern, then HL2 will become the biggest failure of (insert year of whenever they plan to release) since Nvidia owns more than half of the dx9 market (recent statistics show). :t

Reading comprehension: jakk was saying you may have a solid point because Valve is tuning the engine so FX cards get good performance by tweaking the DX8 codepath's visuals. If you think they're dumb for doing this you're nuts. The FX chokes on true DX9 coding. The FX needs the DX8 codepath just to be playable. More companies should offer DX8 paths so the FX isn't a complete bust.

Btw, please show us this DX9 market you speak of. Maybe there are a large amount of cheapos buying FX5200's but calling that a DX9 card is pushing it.

[MadPistol]

You guys really need to think about where the market is right now. If you must know, now really isn't the time to be buying a new high performance video card. The truth of the matter is that ALL DX9 video cards choke on TRUE DX9 games.

Definition of true DX.

DX8.1 Unreal Tournament 2003 is a true DX 8.1 game, and it took nearly 2 years after the initial release of DX 8.1 for game designers to get there because before that, the technology wasn't good enough to take full advantage of it's capabilities. The true power of DX 8.1 is seen in the second generation of DX 8.1 cards, which is the Geforce 4 Ti series. They ARE the top performance cards in DX 8.1. The Radeon 9700 is not included in this because it was the first fully integrated DX9 card to hit the market (at least of what I'm aware of.) However, before the Geforce 4 Ti series was the Geforce 3 Ti series, which was Groundbreaking technology because it used DX8. However, the Geforce 3 was designed to be optimized for games that were NOT DX8.

This brings me to the main idea of this discussion, which is WHY THE HECK ARE YOU BASHING THE GEFORCE FX 5900? In a sense, it is like all other high performance cards, including the 9700Pro and the 9800 series. They are all brand new technology that is made to utilize the features of DX9. However, these features will not be tapped into fully until later. The games on the market today are just now starting to integrate DX9 into their structure and graphics engine. Therefore it is unfair to call any card bad performance in DX9 applications, because they all have bad performance in DX9 applications. DX8.1 has been mastered in the high ended DX9 cards, I can't dispute that. However, the high ended cards we have right now (I have an FX 5900) are simply the Geforce 3's of DX9. But until we come out with second generation cards, these cards are king.

Don't dispute this garbage with us. Saying a Geforce FX 5900 sucks at DX9 is like saying that a Pentium 2 sucks at 3d applications: WE FREAKIN KNOW THAT!!!! Now that we have that out of the way, If you're going to dispute that the Geforce FX 5900 sucks at DX9, wait until some games that use full DX9 come out. Right now, I have yet to see one, and the closest I think I've seen so far is Tomb Raider: AoD. They did quite a good job on that game, and it runs really well with everything up. However, this still isn't an accurate measure. Once we get an accurate measure of DX9 out on the market, then you can dispute it all you want.

[Plaster]

Originally posted by MadPistol
(I have an FX 5900)

lol, I never would have guessed.

Nobody was bashing the 5900. I was simply saying it chokes on DX9 pixel shaders and that's a fact. It's a well documented fact at that.

Here's some HL2 benches using DX9 shader paths. (http://www.beyond3d.com/misc/hl2/index.php?p=3) And yes, HL2 is fully DX9 compliant.

Now look at the results when using mixed mode (http://www.beyond3d.com/misc/hl2/index.php?p=4) (DX9 paths but DX8 shader paths)

Clearly this improved the performance for the FX series; however, Gabe states that they have spent up to five times as much time optimising specifically for NVIDIA’s FX series as they have the generic DX9 path, under which ATI’s hardware required no optimisation at all. The other issue is that these performance improvements will be removed as newer DX9 functionality will require the full DX9 precision, thus decreasing the use of partial precision shaders – Higher Dynamic Range is one such feature that calls for this.

Gabe went on to suggest that the best optimisation may have been to treat the FX series as DX8 boards, for this would have saved Valve lots of time and users could have been given the option of utilising the full precision DX9 mode if they wished. In fact, the default path for the 5200 and 5600 will be DX8. While development houses such as Valve may have the resources to expand lots of time and effort into creating special paths for NVIDIA's boards, smaller houses might not.

I guess they should just take out mixed mode altogether and let FX owners suffer with sub 30 framerates. The simple fact remains that Radeon 9x00 (9600 pro and up) will be able to use all graphics functions available in HL2 and still maintain playable framerates. The only FX cards that can come close to this claim (just barely) are the 5900 Ultra and the 5950. And They can't really claim that, because the absolute highest features won't work on those higher end FX cards either.

Some people may look to OpenGL and Doom3 and say that this displays no such issues, yet the fact is that John Carmack has already stated a similar situation with his software engine. With Doom3’s “ARB2” path that utilises the OpenGL ARB approved fragment (pixel) shader extensions, the NV3x series is at about half the performance of the Radeon series; however, it is widely known that Doom3 will have an NV30 path that makes use of NVIDIA’s own extensions, which can make more effective use of the mixed precisions than the standard ARB extensions can.

Note: It’s an interesting fact that of the two most eagerly anticipated games over the next year the developers have had to expand time and effort in creating special, optimised paths for GeForce FX hardware whereas ATI has more than acceptable performance (and with higher IQ) in both of these titles utilising the default path. The release dates for both of these titles have been a constant source of interest - has creating more special rendering paths actually hindered the release of these titles?

And nvidia loyalists are saying it's a bad thing that software companies are spending ample time trying to get the FX up to par with the Radeon.

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Originally posted by bob05
I'm more and more beginning to think that the DX 9 problem is just with HL2. Tomb Raider AOD, Aquamark3, Homeworld 2, X2 and other RELEASED DX 9 games perform just fine with FX cards.

In all Direct X 9 benchmarks, including the above games, the FX cards come off worse than the Ati equivalent, admittedly nto always as badly off as in the Hl2 benchmarks, while still suffering from poorer image quality as a tradeoff

--Jakk:t

[Someone Stupid]

If you have even a moderately tall nb heatsink you may have problems with the saphire with the heatpipe cooler on it. The others will fit 100%. Saphire still makes some using the heatsink I'd imagine. Either Saphire or BBA would be my choice for a 9600 XT. Go with the ATI. Don't gamble with nvidia being able to run true heavy shader D9 games until some are out that aren't falling back on D8 codepaths.

Why does every thread a certain couple memebers post in that involves video cards has to turn into a complete rendition of the thread before it with a couple members ignoring any real logic or rational reasoning? The ignore list appears to be useless as I'd have to then ignore everyone's responses as well to try time and again to talk to a set of brick walls.

As for the hl2 being a failure if they use D8.1 codepaths for the FX series, it won't be. It would if they left it as D9 codepaths and you can change the coding to D9 for your nvidia card if you want from my understanding just the DEFAULT is 8.1 for most operations. Would you rather 10 FPS in D9 or a respectale FPS in D8.1 as the game stood when benched last?

[scottluebke2003]

i find it amazing that someone would pay $300 just to play a game that cost $45......HL2.....D3.

[bob05]

Originally posted by scottluebke2003
i find it amazing that someone would pay $300 just to play a game that cost $45......HL2.....D3.

This is the smartest post I've heard in this thread. :D

[Plaster]

Originally posted by scottluebke2003
i find it amazing that someone would pay $300 just to play a game that cost $45......HL2.....D3.

cough XBox...cough PS2....

Big difference though. People don't buy these cards just for 2 games. The cards are backward compatible and offer massive speed improvements on existing games.

I've never paid that much for a video card or a game console. Probably never will. I'll also never knock anyone for doing so, it's thier money.

edit: Before anyone comes in harping about the PS2 or XBox only costing $180, don't bother. You've still got to factor in the cost of extra controllers ($30 each) and the Television required to play. ;)

[Cyan]

Originally posted by scottluebke2003
i find it amazing that someone would pay $300 just to play a game that cost $45......HL2.....D3.

We don't buy the card just to play the game... we buy it just to play the game BETTER...

:t

[Rugor]

Originally posted by bob05
I'm more and more beginning to think that the DX 9 problem is just with HL2. Tomb Raider AOD, Aquamark3, Homeworld 2, X2 and other RELEASED DX 9 games perform just fine with FX cards.

It's not an HL2 only factor, it also came into effect with the original releases of a number of the games you mentioned. It happens any time a game relies on PS2.0 shaders. They are probably the biggest deal of DX9 and whenever a GfFX runs into them it chokes on the register usage.

Just because a game is released with, or requiring DX9 does not mean it uses DX9 graphics features. It may be a simple checkbox feature, or use some of the DX9 features in DirectSound or DirectPlay. There's more to the API than just Direct3D. Neverwinter Nights needs DX8.1, but it uses OpenGL for graphics. The DX requirement is for sound features.

Why not hype on the things the FX series does do well, rather than claiming it's great for things it's not good at?