Looking around for a new video card...

[Jaguar]

Well I'm gonna time getting the new card and HALO with thanksgiving break, and I still do have time on the weekends when I don't have cross country meets.

[Atahualpa]

I'd say G4Ti4200 or Radeon 9600 (Pro)

The 9600 is DX9, the GF4 DX8.

[Az]

wait a sec, you wanna tell me, that if I get the ATI Radeon 9700 and put it on my P3 500 Mhz system, it will give me ~50 frames per second?

wow.

[Combat Ingrid]

You mean the UT2003 numbers? I think this test was just "flyby" through the levels (and at a low resolution, too). With lots of action, the framerate is probably lower

[Az]

Does the human eye care after 24 fps?

[Combat Ingrid]

Depends on the game.
Being a Quake3 addict, I can tell you that it's actually a big difference between 40fps and 80 fps. When you do a quick 180 degree turn, you will get a much more accurate shot at a high framerate. For that reason, I'm very happy about my Radeon 9700 Pro

For other kinds of games, you will notice that the game feels much "smoother" if you increase your framerate from lets say 25 to 60fps.

[Az]

Oh, Quake 3 runs smooth as silk on my P3, RIVA TNT 2, as well.

[Rogan Josh]

I have a Dell Dimension (insert numerb here) 1.5GHz with a measly 256Mb ram and a GeForce 2. I don't really play graphics intensive games much, so it is fine for me, but lately I have been playing Morrowind and it is s little 'sticky'.

I had assumed this was the memory and have planned on putting more memory in (maybe upgrading to 1025Mb). Do you think this will help, or will I also have to upgrade the video card?

[Asher]

Originally posted by Azazel
Does the human eye care after 24 fps?

Remember that those are average framerates, half of them are below that number, some of them drastically so.

And 30fps is what the eye can see, motion-wise. Movies get away with 24.95 because the lens actually somewhat blurs the picture, rather than games where the image isn't blurred at all.

[Asher]

Rogan: Try adding another 512MB (or at least another 256MB). If that doesn't work well, upgrade the video card.

Morrowind is spectacularly poorly coded though, very inefficient graphically and also a RAM hog.

[Rogan Josh]

Originally posted by Asher
Morrowind is spectacularly poorly coded though, very inefficient graphically and also a RAM hog.

A hell of a game though

Thanks - I'll try that (that was what I had planned, but all the talk of video cards made me wonder if that might be my bottleneck).

[Adagio]

I have been looking around for a while, and have found these:

HighTech Excalibur ATI Radeon 9600 Pro
(or this ) and Point of View GeForce4 Ti4680

The first one is a little more expensive, but has DX9 support...

Which of them should I buy? Does anyone have any of these?

[Asher]

The 9600 Pro, definitely.

DX9 support is a HUGE plus.

[chequita guevara]

So, what's the differeence between the 9600 Pro Ultra and 9600 Pro Ultimate?

[Asher]

The Pro Ultra and Pro Ultimate stuff is specific to some board vendor...who knows. Ultimate is Sapphire's and it differs from the Ultra in that it has the Zalman noiseless heatsink on it instead of standard cooling (I just installed it myself).

The actual chips are (ignoring the worthless 9200 chips):
9600: 4 pipelines, 325 MHz core, 400MHz memory
9600 Pro: 4 pipelines, 400MHz core, 600MHz memory
9600 XT: 4 pipelines, 500MHz core, 600MHz memory

9800: 8 pipelines, 325MHz core, 620MHz memory
9800 Pro: 8 pipelines, 380MHz core, 700MHz memory
9800 XT: 8 pipelines, 412MHz core, 730MHz memory