vidcard advice plz

[Doglike]

Hey all

Im gonna buy a new graphics-card for this system: p4, 3.0ghz, 1.5 gb ram, 7200rpm 200gb hd. It will replace my old radeon 9800pro. I need an AGP-card, so no pci-e.

I have around 200euro's and I'm pretty overwhelmed with all the choices out there. I've seen an gf 6600gt 256mb, an gf 6800 128mb, for 80 euro's more i could get an ati x850 pro, i could get an x800xl 256 mb for 260euro......

1. whats best bang for buck now?
2. will i miss shader model 3.0 in new games like oblivion? hdr and sm3.0 look nice. I would be willing to sacrifice some fps for better image quality.
3. can i play bf2 on high with my new system?
4. which one would you get? Do you have experience with one of these cards?

Thanks in advance!

[Hawkeye127]

Re: vidcard advice plz

I have a similar setup to you, 3.2ghz P4-1gig ram, and I have an X800pro. If you want SM 3.0 and hdr ATI will not be your best bet as they don't support it right now. The Nvidia 6800 does support these features, but please, if you get a 6800, make sure it is either a 6800gt or 6800ultra as the vanilla 6800 is not as good. I wouldn't go any higher than 6800ultra or X850 or else you'll be bottlenecked by the cpu more than likely. It all comes down to whether you want to go down the Nvidia road, or the ATI road. And right now, the Nvidia road is a little brighter IMHO.

[Doglike]

Re: vidcard advice plz

thanks.
How well does bf2 play on your rig? the 6800gt maybe is a bit too expensive. How much difference does 256 mb over 128 mb make in terms of loading and fps?

[Hawkeye127]

Re: vidcard advice plz

Video memory can make a difference, especially in a game like BF2. I honestly cannot make a comparison between 128mb and 256mb because I haven't experienced a 128mb card. My game runs pretty good. I would say I average around 60-70 fps in-game. My settings are.....

Terrain- Medium
Effects- Medium
Geometry- High
Textures- Medium(would be high if I had 2gb of ram)
Lighting- High
Dynamic Shadows- Off (because of the giant performance boost, and they look ugly as hell)
Dynamic Light- Low (for performance boost as well)
Anti-Aliasing- 4x
Texture Filtering- High
Resolution- 1024x768

I'll also add that I could probably turn some of those mediums to high and still get plenty of frame rates, but I'm one of those ppl who will sacrifice minor degradation of graphics in turn for better performance. And better performance equals better gameplay.

[Kazzul]

Re: vidcard advice plz

It will replace my old radeon 9800pro.

Not really a suggestion, just a comment. Im still using my radeon 9800 pro (256mb) with 1600x1200 res with all settings on high (apart from dynamic shad) and it looks perfect. Personally id keep that card for another 6 months to a year.

AMD 64 3000+
1024mb
Radeon 9800 pro 256mb

[Hawkeye127]

Re: vidcard advice plz

It all depends on what kind of framerate you are happy with. Some ppl could care less if it was 30fps or 70fps. While others simply couldn't play at 30fps.

[Kazzul]

Re: vidcard advice plz

yeah, i agree with Hawkeye, some people would refuse to play a game with less that 30fps, its just your own personal taste. A good way to find out how low your willing to go (fps rate) is to get hold of a tech demo, have a mess around with the settings and see what ya feel happy with

[sackynut]

Re: vidcard advice plz

9800pro rocks!, but umm, i would go with a 6800gt AGP if they have em, or if there is an AGP x800 series then that also compares. then, if you cant get those theres always the 6600gt and the x700.

[Doglike]

Re: vidcard advice plz

HIS Radeon X800 XL 256MB DDR3 (AGP, DVI, ViVo) for 260 euro's, good deal?

I would keep my 9800pro 128 mb, but i got all kinds of problems with it, they seem to be graphics-card related, not driver-related. all kinds of corruption and artifacts and flickering colorfull textures. The weird thing is, it only happens on high settings, in 800x600 medium/low I don't experience them most of the time. I'm afraid it will break down any minute.

[DarkHorizon472]

Re: vidcard advice plz

Hi,

I upgraded to an X800XL from a 9800pro and found it to be almost twice as fast. You do have to be carefull as BF2 is very CPU dependent as well. I did the below and got my FPS up alot higher , this may help you out :-

My setup is none to special but below are some usefull pointers to help improve peoples FPS. Like many people after the last patch my FPS dropped off a fair bit so try out the following (AT YOUR OWN RISK) and see how it helps. I used to get around 25 - 40 FPS on average on 64 player servers with it peaking at about 60fps. I now get around 55 - 60fps on average with it peaking in the 90's. This may not be true for everyone though.
My specs :-
2.66 (533fsb) P4
1.5 GB (2700) RAM
x800xl AGP
Audigy 7.1 se PCI

To see your FPS in game press ` (top left on keyboard below esc)
and then type
renderer. drawfps 1
press ` again to get back to normal screen.
The top left number is your FPS (frames per second , the number of times your screen updates a second)
Ideally you want to average 60FPS or more but an average above 40ish is fine. If it drops into the 20's or less then you will be at a disadvantage compared to other players. Please note it is not the same as watching a film which does not require such high FPS due to it being non interactive!!!!!!

(1) Make sure you have all the lastest drivers for motherboard and other components. Some older drivers contain errors or have not been optimized which will impact on performance. For Graphics cards try out a few drivers and see how you get on some people claim they get better performance with older drivers.
(2) Take the load of your CPU. Anything running in the background or drawing CPU cycles away from BF2 will drop your frame rate. Common examples are Software Firewalls, antivirus, utilities and On board sound.
In my PC I used to use the AC97 onboard sound. Buying a cheap Audigy 7.1 se OEM PCI sound card (£15) and then setting the ingame sound to low quality and software made a big difference to FPS. The same may be true if you swap to a hardware firewall etc
(3) More RAM is better. The game is RAM hungry and having 512MB or less will drop your FPS alot due to swap file activity. 1GB seems to be a starting point for alot of people but more is better.
(4) http://bf2lag.b0x. com/top5tips. html
This website has alot of usefull things to try I have tried most of them and found this helped alot.
(5) Drop your details level to low or off on all settings except the last one in the BF2 graphics settings. I play on 1024*768 with all options low and 90% visibility. If your FPS is OK you can raise the settings and resolution to suit. Remember the lower your FPS after a point the more it hampers your game play.
(6) On my x800xl I set the advanced graphics settings to performance and unticked any options that I did not need or use. Also disabled 2nd display in computer manager.
(7) Buying a faster GFX card may not be the best solution if you CPU is struggling to keep up with game. I found this may self. Upgrading from a 9800pro to an x800xl made little difference until I did all the above tweaks.
(8) Clear down the cache files : -
Delete the folders in the My Documents\Battlefield 2\mods\bf2\cache folder
This forces the BF2 to recreate them with your current settings from scratch.

(9) Be honest about what your average FPS is. Too many people exagerate their average FPS coming out with unrealistic figures. You cannot improve the performance of your BF2 setup unless you are very honest and accept low and high figures.
Hope people find this helpfull and any other usefull tips please add them on.

[Doglike]

Re: vidcard advice plz

thanks for all the advice, will try the things I haven't done yet.

I think I'm going for an geforce 6800gt 128mb agp, if I can find one and scrap the money together