graphics cards?

What kind of graphics card do you guys recommend?

I'm trying to play crysis, but the lag keeps getting me killed, so, what kind of graphics card should i use? I'm looking at a price range of under 150$ if possible, would this work?? (i don't know all the techy terms, but you guys oughta, i just know it's got 512mb dd2 memory, and it's 80 bucks lol)

any help is appreciated. (if you find me a really good one for cheap, I'll email you a virtual cookiee :D )

I would be surprised if a graphics card would give you enough lag to do that, surely it's more likely the network?

to die??

it's possible, it's happened. To play multiplayer i have to put most settings to low, but i wanna get a better card so i can do all settings very high (looks beautiful, i used a very high settings hack to avoid using dx10 lol)

A low enough rendering framerate would certainly get you killed fairly quickly in a first person shooter.

I'm also in the market for a new graphics card (or more likely an entirely new computer), so I'd also be interested in hearing peoples recommendations.

If you are using DX10 / Vista, then no, that card would be worthless.

But no mather what, I would suggest getting a 9600GT or Radeon 3850 if you intend to play Crysis with medium to high settings
both are affordable and very powerfull

No, it wouldn't. It would do exactly the same things it would do if you had XP or any other version of Windows. It just won't do anything for games which have a DX10 version, of which there are very few, and those few that do almost all have a DX9 version anyway.

If you can afford an 8800GT then I'd push the boat out for it, no point upgrading from a mediocre card to a slightly less mediocre card

"trying to play crysis" and "looking at a price range of under 150$" don't go together ;)
Fork out the 250-300$ for a 8800GT, it's definately worth it.

8800gt

:(

being broke sucks

Do not buy a 9600. It is a low-end budget card for the 9 series. You should get an 8800 GTX.

Memory bandwidth is probably the most important thing to look for.

I'd go for a 8800gt over a 8800gtx, its a lot cheaper and has onboard HD support.

9600GT is the mid end card of the GeForce 9 Series and it kicks the Radeon 3850 as well as the 8600GT / GTS in any regular benchmark ... while still beeing cheaper than all of them.

Don't understand why all rant against it.
Sure the 9800GT / GTX will be better but will cost 400-600 USD again.

if you are looking for a medium ranged affordable card, go with the 9600GT from NVIDIA if you are pro NVIDIA or the Radeon 3850 if you are pro ATI / AMD

they both share the best performance / USD ratio at the moment and are higher on that than the previous generations have been

And yes it would do something massively different with DX10: DX9 games are, due to the ways dx9 works, a little bit less relying on the pure amount of shader units. But DX10 is enforced pure shader. So the 16 stream units of the 8400GT make it a bad joke for 3D ... even higher featured terrain system already needs more than 16 stream units
they are nice for h.264 decoding and CUDA ... but thats it.

Hello.

I would play Larn.

Goodbye.

Can anyone recommend a decent video card that's compatible with PCIe 1.0? Everything I've seen posted here requires 2.0.

Been window shopping around, and the best I could find was an eVGA 8600GT 512mb (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130290).

I actually didn't know there was a 2.0 specification on PCIe, so that kind of ruined my day after looking at the 9xxx series.

That's because the 8600 is an 8 series budget card. If you look at the specs on NVidia's site, the 9600 is worse than the 8800s. Their numbering system is very misleading.

Not all fork out a lot of trash erm cash for a card that will be outdated in at last 18 months.

If you check out the benchmarks here


As well, I don't know what you compare with what, but an 8600GT has 32 stream processors and 128Bit bus bandwidth. A 9600GT has 64 stream processors and 256bit bus bandwidth. Even a newbie in computer technology would understand that the 9600gt is better so you should definitely be able to figure that out, right? Or are you just making sure to always read the wrong stuff to make your things better?

And on your beloved 8800GTX: 9600GT SLI beats the 8800 Ultra to crap, so I would reconsider "what you know" about NV8x and NV9x / NV1xx: review

Look at texture fillrate and memory bandwidth between the 9600 and the 8800 cards:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce9.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce8.html

You don't get it, do you?
Compare 8600GT to the 9600GT, not the 8800! He is asking for a mid range card and the 8800 clearly is a high end card and costs about twice as much as he is willing to pay.

Who are you? Sony?? Those are the only ones that compare eggs to chicken to show their "superiority".

9600GT is meant to compare with 8600GT and Radeon 3850
ie the other mid range cards.

when do you start to understand that not all waste 400 USD on a card that will be ass kicked by the mid range cards in at last 18 months?? By the current speedups of the cards you can be happy if the 9800GS won't let a 8800 GTX look like a mid range card!

but thanks for the links. if you check them you will see that the 9600GT has double memory bandwidth in GB/s and double texture fillrate compared to the 8600GT and even the 8600GTS and that although it costs less.

Here¨is a DX10 comparision by the way of Joshis beloved 8800GT vs 9600GT and as you will see: 10-25% more performance don't justify 2.X x the price! In some cases its 3 FPS on 50 FPS ... for 400 USD instead of 150 ...
Anyone who wasted money on an 8800GT definitely will be pissed as I was when I heard that a second generation of 8800GTS is going to come at 300 USD after I bought mine for about 500 USD and that it is going to be faster.
Definitely the last time I wasted money on a high end card.
By buying the mid range one I could now buy the 9600GT and would still have money left and a better performance!

This 8800 GS has a higher texture fillrate (but lower memory bandwidth) than the 9600:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150275

The GE Froce 9600 starts out at $164.99:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010380048+106792522&name=GeForce+9+series

Hmmm, I thought the GTX was supposed to be about $300, but it is a lot more expensive than that. But you can get a GT for $189.99, so that is probably your best price/performance ratio:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010380048+106791921+1067932704&name=GeForce+8800GT

Main problem is that the memory bandwidth / bus width is elemental to DX10 stuff, which heavily depends on the usage of textures to store data for shaders.

But yes if they are that near to each other, it surely makes sense to buy an 8800GT instead of the 9600GT / 8600GT as the 30 USD nearly get you 100% more stream processors.

Here (Switzerland and most likely mots of the european area) they aren't that near to each other, they are about 100 USD apart with the 8800GT at 250-300 USD. Only the 3850 / 8600GT are in the < 200 USD range here.

I'm playing Crysis at medium settings on my Radeon X1950 Pro with no problems, I'm not sure how much it costs nowadays, but I think it's pretty cheap now?

Well its yesterday technology. anyone investing in Shader Model 3 stuff today wastes money.
Especially as the 3850 is most likely same price if not cheaper and quite a large bit faster on current generation games.

The 8800gt is about £20 more than the 9600gt and faster in most benchmarks, especially when you increase resolution.
I don't know of any card that is pcie 2.0 only yet, all should be backwards compatible to 1.x

I'm running an NVIDIA 8600 GT. It runs all the games just fine.
I would've gotten the 8800 but I would've had to update my power supply also and the money just wouldn't stretch that far.