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Which Graphics Card?

Whats the right choice for me?
Posted by George		2004-01-04
Index » Whats the right cho... What graphics card should I get so I can play Doom 3 with medium/high graphics settings? I get asked this question alot and Its something that many people are unsure on. So in this short and brief article Im going to discuss the Pros and Cons of getting a new card. If your going to spend Ã‚Â£300+ on a graphics card just so you can play Doom 3 in the future, don't! Why spend that much money now when your not making the maximum Power:Price Ratio. If you can play the current games with medium-high graphics setting I feel that if you've just got that Ã‚Â£300 to spend and you wont be getting and more money like that for a while to come then the best option would be to save it and wait until the release of Doom 3. The benefit of this is that you can get the latest super dooper graphics card when Doom 3 comes out and it will be twice as powerful as the current high end ones out now. Also you wont have been using the full potential power in that card as nothing yet takes full advantage of all of this yet. Another reason why I feel that its not the best idea to buy the latest top of the range card is because PCI Express is coming in soon and will be replacing the current AGP Port. PCI Express is soon to be the new graphics card standard. Its alot faster than the current AGP so its going to replace it in the not to distant future. The Half-Life 2 bundle with the Radeon 9600xt and the 9800xt comes only with the Single Player Version which is a pretty raw deal as I suspect that Half-life 2 will be very popular for online play and mods. Think carefully about that. Don't go for the card just because of the Half-Life 2 coupon. You will almost certainly want to play the online and take advantage of all the great mods around And then there is the wars between radeon and nivida. So far it seems as if the radeon is always one step ahead of nvidia in terms of performance and price. According to half-Life 2 benchmarks the radeon performes twice as well as the nvidia. Im not too sure on what to think about this as i don't belive they have even made Half-life 2. But it does seem that radeon is out peforming nvidia at the moment. This could change though. The radeon seems to be focusing more on DirectX 9 whilst Nvidia cards are pretty much shit with DirectX 9. So if your after an OpenGL The best option I can see is to get a Radeon 9600XT or a Nvidia G-ForceFX5700. These are the very latest Mid range card out at the moment. They will play all of todays games at pretty much full settings. Well thats the short and brief article. Wait for some articles on the PCI Express, DDR2 Memory and of course 64bit Proccessors coming soon.
	1

Comments

2006-07-27 01:51 - eldorado

I'm looking for a new computer. I'm using Lightwave 3D as a moding system my mac was doing fine with version 8.5 but when nine came out it fell out of the loop. Also whats the best computer for gaming thats well... say? &2,500. Thanks.

2005-12-19 06:00 - Matt

I've a Gainward 6600GT 128mb AGP card & it plays both doom3 & Resurrection of evil VERY smoothly, I clock around 67 FPS on high resolution at 1024/768. Not bad for a 2 year old computer!!!.

2005-11-11 02:46 - Atomic77

Um I like ATI. Im currently using a raedon 9550GE 128mb to play games like doom 3 and its working very well. Nvidia maybe better but Raedon is more pratical.

2004-10-19 20:50 - Skullbasher_LaRrY

always nvidia coz ati are crap!
and the reason ati cards are faster in directx 9 is coz they are built for directx9...
so I choose nvidia purely because they are trying to bring innovations and fresh ideas into the graphics market(always a good thing if you ask me!)
Ati however only seem to include what microsoft includes in directx9 wheres the innovation and effort from them?
oh and my geforce 6800 gt kicks much ass

2004-07-25 00:42 - Calamormine

I'm going with the Nvidia, and I agree that you don't need to spend the bank on the latest and greatest. I spent 250 bucks, and got myself a AGP8x 256mb GEForce FX5900XT (for the record, I've also had my share of problems with ATI cards in the past...so much smoke...)

2004-07-24 16:00 - zoggo

I am very suspicious about VNA9216's technical details there. Carmack has confirmed that the D3 engine draws everything to the depth buffer first in one quick pass and after than you will have zero overdraw.

I could get very neardy about this, but I think any performance difference between the FX and 9x00 series will be largely drivers.

As to future proofing, the GeForce 6 series will be worth a look, but the FX series have some big holes which are going to show up in the coming years.

I have an FX and a Radeon 9600 and I would recommend the Radeon any day. The ATI shipping drivers aren't very good but the latest updates are very solid.

2004-06-29 23:04 - George

This is a bit out of date now. Was written on 4/Jan/2004

There are a couple of new mid range cards being released by ATI and Nvidia soon so I will write an update to this article for you guys

2004-01-14 22:51 - VNA9216

and I forgot the most important thing.. doom 3 is optimized for Nvidia their cards.. because of the shadow system the Nvidia FX series will probably outperform the radeons on doom 3
the ati cards calculate shadows that cant be seen by the player (for example) a shadow is cast behind a model.. ati cards still calculate the shadow behind the model.. that cuts into performance with much light sources and advanced lighting like doom 3 uses.. the FX cards do not calculate these shadows that arent seen.. and since doom 3 is optimized for that it will definetly give a huge boost to the performance

why bother working with stuff you cant even see

2004-01-14 19:18 - VNA9216

I am gonna prefer an Nvidia one
I got a horrible experience with the ATI cards... well ok not the cards.. but the drivers :S

2004-01-06 00:08 - George

What do you think?

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