Video Card? GeForceFX

i recently realized that the GeForcefx5200 card in one of my machines is the 128mb version, as opposed to the 256mb one...

does anyone know what the differences would be as far as performance and functionality... especially with shader 2 stuff...

and i already know that i should dump the card :)

thx

--Mike

Get an x1900xt or something.

You would see little to no increase in performance.

Yeah. If you PAID for a 256MB version and only got s 128MB version, go nuts. But if you're thinking of upgrading, go for more power, rather than more RAM.

Can you get a decent card for under £100 pounds these days? I have a Geforce4TI 4600 and am wondering whether it`s worth upgrading or not. I don`t play many PC games and the ones I do are mainly Blitz made ones. I also have a 1.5ghz processor thats getting a little old now but would it really make much of a difference if I upgraded it as much as a new graphics card would?

Jason.

thx guys...

i bought it cheap... it's beena while, but i think i remember it being a 128 mb jobbie...

yeah... gonna update one of the machines and relegate this bad boy down to the server...

thx again for the input...

--Mike

Relegate to the server!? I'm still using a 32MB GeForce2 GTS, here. :/

hey... on a similar subject... how many 1024x1024 sized textures do you guys stuff into your games... or do you go for smaller textures?

--Mike

Voodoo3 All the way baby!

My 5900XT got relegated to.. .errr... somewhere.

D'oh, I donated it to a Blitz user. I forget who now!

Anyhoo. You can get a 128MB GeForce 6600 for just under £100 or the 256MB version for under £120 (both AGP versions, obviously).

I would go with the 256MB one, if only because the kind of games you'll want to run on a 6-series card will probably make use of the extra RAM. If you go with the 128MB one, you're going to have to set texture quality to 'low' in many games.

vinylpusher, would the following card,

Club 3D Geforce 6600 256Mb at around £80

be a good card to get over my current Geforce4Ti4600?

Sorry but I have no idea about these things and would appreciate your help. Would it make a marked improvement?

Jason.

Don't get any 6600 but the 6600GT. It's only slightly more expensive and it's a much better card. My 6600GT is giving me 60+FPS with the most demanding games I can find ( Oblivion, Tomb Raider Legend, etc )

OK I`ll go for one of those, any suggestions on a good priced one before I go looking on Froogle?

Jason.

when I bought my video card some time ago, I opted to go with the ATI 9600Pro 128MB instead of the 9600 regular with 256MB -- the kind of game that required more than 128MB likely would need more juice than the 9600 could provide anyway, so it made more sense to get the faster GPU instead of the additional memory...

Well I'm guessing you don't have a PCI-E slot, and the AGP versions are now slightly more expensive, but here's a 256 meg 6600GT.

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?NOV-6625GT

You can knock a bit off if you only want the 128 meg version but in this case, I think the 256 is probably worth it.

I'm guessing you're not using Tomb Raider's 'next gen content' option there then ;)

My 7800 balks at the graphical niceties of Legend. It's playable, but you know it's working damn hard. Either it needs 512MB, or the shaders slow it down. I'm guessing it's the former. I would consider an upgrade myself, but I don't spend that much time playing games on the PC.

Dunno. I thought I had everything on Maximum. I know I turned AA onto full. But if your 7800 has problems with the next gen content option then - unless there's some kinda bug or driver problem that a patch will resolve - I must have been mistaken.

Finished it now though, so I'm not going back to see how different it looks just yet.

I was just going to start a thread asking about something like this... So I might as well ask here! :)

I have an AthlonXP 2400+, with 256mb of PC2700 RAM, inside is a AGP (x8) Geforce FX 5600 128mb GFX card ... Anyway, it plays most games fine (Even King Kong), but, I was browsing through Gamestation and I came across Farcry, I've always wanted to play the game, and for £7.99, I thought I'd give it a go!

Anyway, The game runs like pap on my spec above, it's sorta playable with the lowest settings applied, but it still does have trouble when there's a few things happening on the screen, which spoils it!

Anyway, barring more memory (Which I know it needs), what other (non-mortgage busting) hardware can I invest in to bring the game up to speed without a complete upgrade?

Any advice will be greatly appreciated!

Dabz

EDIT: Forgot to mention that it's built on an ASUS A7V8X-X Motherboard! :)

It's hard to guess what the biggest bottleneck might be, Dabz. Is it thrashing the hard drive much during gameplay? The CPU and the videocard are not awe-inspiring, but I played Far Cry very nicely on a similar setup when it first came out. The main noticeable difference is that I had a gig of ram. I also had a Radeon 9700 too, but I don't think that's *much* better than a FX5600.

I'd just be concerned about recommending you get a new videocard in case the bottleneck is the ram, or something else.

Then do that first. FarCry should run just fine on that setup, but you'll want at least a full gig of memory. Preferably two.

Hmm, installing nVidia beta driver 84.43 to see if there's any improvement for Tomb Raider...

**EDIT** Nope, still chugs a bit in some areas. Quite a lot on the level I'm on (big waterfall outdoors), somewhere around 5fps. Ah well, shoots back up to 85 when I turn off the extra content.

x800XT is a good buy if you can get it cheap.

Thanks very much for the advice Gabriel and Flameduck, a gig (or two) of RAM it is :)

Dabz

FX5200 can be consider a mid-range card, however it can't run many new games, so it's being phased out.... but still very sufficient for Blitz3D, DarkBASICPro, or Torque..etc.

128MB of video memory isn't very powerful, however enough for testing many things, I think you can use it as a test platfrom...

Sorted my little Farcry problems out... more RAM (1280MB of the stuff now... wahey) , and I updated everything! Runs like a dream now! :D

Great game by the way, though, I'm a little fruity driving that buggy on the first level! LOL

Dabz

It's amzing the difference something cheap like RAM can give you. Btw, i'm playing Tomb Raider Legend on my rig just now fine. 1024x768, everything on, plays not too badly :o)

That card looks good Gab, i might grab that one.