New Vid Card

[jussi]

I'm looking to get a new vid card. The integrated one I have is pretty crappy and lags when I does vpu intensive programs. Specifically games. Although I'm not a huge gamer I'd still like a pretty good card. I also do some video editing.

Any suggestions on a brand and model? What should I look for in the specs? Is memory the most important?

[Warren]

Don't know what your outputting to but I run a digital and an analog screen off of a Geforce 8500GT by NVIDIA. Not top of the line, but sufficient for a game on one and a movie on the other.

[pbui3057]

I'm looking to get a new vid card. The integrated one I have is pretty crappy and lags when I does vpu intensive programs. Specifically games. Although I'm not a huge gamer I'd still like a pretty good card. I also do some video editing.

Any suggestions on a brand and model? What should I look for in the specs? Is memory the most important?

Really depends on what resolution you are playing on, what other hardware you have, what games you play. You could get a top of the line video card but if your cpu is a bottleneck, then there really is no point to it. Tell me what other parts are in your system, what games you play, what resolution and what price range. That could narrow it down considerably. Also are you running pci-e or agp.

USUALLY, ati cards have better image quality but that is really subjective. There are a ton of video cards out now and pretty much any of them will be better than onboard video.

[drumpriest]

Hey Jussi, I play a few games, but I am a video game graphics programmer for a living. The new ATi cards are pretty promising, I typically don't use them much because of driver issues. nVidia has been in the lead for a while performance wise, but the 4800 ATi with tesselation looks pretty good.

I'm currently running an 8800 GTS 1024 from Palit tech. It's pretty good. I would not consider an 8500 a gamers card, more budget graphics. It's capable but not really that fast.

A lot of newer screen space algorithms are sampler heavy, which gives nVidia an edge, as they have a better balance of samplers to shader processors, on the lower end of high end, if you get my meaning. The 9800 GT looks pretty good for the $, the 280 is of course nice and fast, but probably more money than it should be at the moment.

btw, both nVidia and ATi are conformant, which means that they have comprable image quality, if you are seeing lower image quality from a nVidia board, that's probably because the game supports the half format which is nVidia specific, and results in faster frame rate sofr floating point rendering (think crysis, unreal 3, and my current project ;-)

Be careful, as nVidia's naming convention is pretty bad at the moment, the 320mb and 640mb 8800GTS cards are older G80 cards, and the 8800 GTS 512 is a G92, which is faster and newer.

Feel free to hit me up with any questions, and check out Tom's hardware guide about the best bang for your buck. Other than their recent blatent lie about OpenGL lacking DX10 features, they are pretty good. BTW, on that point, the DX10 features were actually available in OpenGL BEFORE DX10 SHIPPED! The api war is just stupid, they both do the job, and after that it should be developer preference.

[jussi]

Cpu is fine for me. It's a Quad-core Dell Dimesion 9200. I usually like rpg games. Playing warcraft 3 right now (yes I know it's old). I don't need anything too high end. I won't be playing anything needing a super high frame rate. It actually plays fine on lower resolution but I want to be able to play at max res without lagging. I have to look at what slots are in it. Not sure it has pci-e.

[jussi]

Be careful, as nVidia's naming convention is pretty bad at the moment, the 320mb and 640mb 8800GTS cards are older G80 cards, and the 8800 GTS 512 is a G92, which is faster and newer.

Yah the naming convention these companies use has me dizzy. Hard to keep straight. I'm in no hurry so I'll probably do a little research first. Glad to know we have a pro on board.

[sparkeyjames]

I have an older 32 bit system with an apg video slot and recently had my PNY Verto Nvidea 6600GT do a catastrophic fail on me. The first Nvidia based card I have had out of 5 that has ever failed on me. I replaced it with a EVGA 7600GT superclocked 512MB and could not be happier. I got it off of buy.com for $113 that included a $20 mail in rebate. So final cost was $93. I also got a $10 discount for signing up for google checkout but I blew that on quicker shipping. I spend most of my time in Linux but when the gaming bug hits me I switch to WinXp and play a lot of games that require a somewhat powerful graphics card. This card gets decent frame rates in half life 2 episodes 1 and 2, battlefield 2 plus other various online games. I'm a dyed in the wool Nvidia fan the drivers have always been stable and fast. Plus their Linux drivers are top notch. It has been only recently that AMD/ATI drivers have caught up to the speed and stability of the Nvidia driver set. Check out buy.com they are always running sales on various graphics cards.

Jim


ps. I have not been a fan of ATI graphics cards since I had an all-in-wonder graphics/TV card that I used under win98 that had horrendous lock up problems because of the drivers. The drivers were horrible to say the least.

[pelligrini]

Cpu is fine for me. It's a Quad-core Dell Dimesion 9200. I usually like rpg games. Playing warcraft 3 right now (yes I know it's old). I don't need anything too high end. I won't be playing anything needing a super high frame rate. It actually plays fine on lower resolution but I want to be able to play at max res without lagging. I have to look at what slots are in it. Not sure it has pci-e.

With a quad core on the mobo I would bet it's a pci-e, maybe not the latest version though. When I'm looking for a video card I usually browse newegg and get one to fit the budget, comparing memory, clock speed, etc. I like their search a lot better than most online computer stores. The customer reviews are nice too.