I am going to need to upgrade my machine sometime soon, before Alan Wake, Kane and Lynch, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and the other upcoming PC action games come out. For the longest time I have been using an ATI Radeon 9700 card, and it is now quite obsolete. It’s time to move up. I want some recommendations as to a good card.
I’ve been using this Radeon so long that I’m out of the loop when it comes to the more current cards. Are there any good ones right now at a decent price (under 400 dollars?) Should I stick with ATI or nVidia or are there some lesser known companies that are better? All advice and suggestions will be appreciated greatly.
Now is a really bad time to buy video cards. DirectX 10 is going to be launched in a few months, along with a new, and somewhat revolutionary generation of cards. Anything you buy today will have a short life of being able to play the latest and greatest.
The latest Nvidia card the 8800 supports DX10, its pricey but will likely see you good for quite a while. I brought a Nvidia 6800 (the first shader-model 3.0 card) soon after it came out and it can still hold its own. I agree with SenorBeef that buying anything else would be a mistake.
Given that DirectX10 is going to be only distributed with Vista and not available as an upgrade for XP, I seriously doubt that many game developers are going to require it for at least two or three years. Having a video card that supports DX10 will do very little for DX9 but even though the hardware is getting very powerful don’t get to wrapped up in DX10 unless you don’t see upgrading in the next two or three years. The eVGA GeForce 7600GT is a good choice @ $160 or if you want to spend a little more go for the GeForce 7950GT. By the time games are going to actually be able to exploit DX10 advances it would be time to upgrade anyway.
I say upgrade now to play the games you to play, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and such are not built with DX10 in mind.
Yup, as already said with DX10 coming out… you’re better off waiting if you can.
I was in a similar position recently: I just built a new system, and needed a PCI-e card as I only had AGP ones lying about. So I picked up one for about $100. It isn’t the latest or the greatest, but it works and it should keep me going until the price on DX10 cards comes down to something I can afford.
If you absolutely have to get a card now (games that you just gotta play that you can’t on your current card), then I’d suggest you do what I did. If you watch, you can get a decent card for about $100 that will keep you going until prices drop.
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If you’re using a 9700 you have an AGP motherboard. None of the middle to high end video cards are produced as AGP any more, they are all PCI Express. In order to upgrade you’ll need a new motherboard, and probably a new processor and memory. And possibly a new power supply.
Forgot to add, it’s pretty good for the price, and eVGA makes good cards. If you only have AGP, then, the 7600GS is one of the best for that architecture.
I just bought that eVGA 7600 GT card, actually, and so far it seems to be doing well. I agree that this isn’t the best time to buy a new card, but I personally didn’t have much choice; my relatively brand new 6600 GT kicked the bucket pretty quickly. So far it seems to be a pretty solid card (Quake 4 at highest resolution and detail barely gave a whimper), but I’ve only had it since Saturday, so I can’t speak for longevity. I just hope it lasts longer than the Leadtek that died.
Require it, no. You can still play half life with a directx 7 (geforce 2 generation, I believe) card if you wanted to. But you won’t get the full experience, nor at fast speeds.
The next generation of hardware will be, of course, more efficient and beefier in general. I think it’s a really bad time to buy something other than a temporary card as a holdover.
I’m still running a 6800 GT, which is still pretty adequate and good. I bet you could find used AGP ones on ebay for cheap to tide you over.
As mentioned above, the first of the new, revolutionary cards has been out for about a month. It’s the NVidia 8800 series. It won’t have nearly the short life as the “tide you over” cards mentioned. On the downside, it comes at a premium price right now (and doesn’t come in an AGP version).
I’m curious where all of the “bad time to buy a card” talk is coming from. I guess you could argue that it’s a bad time to buy a high end card like the 8800, since ATI doesn’t have an answer to it on the market. ATI’s newest entry, the R600 has been delayed and is expected next quarter. That should help take the edge off the price of the high end cards (if the R600 is good). Still, if you’re looking for anything other than a cutting edge DX 10 card, this seems like a great time to buy. The 8800’s are so ridiculously fast that prices on the other cards are going to have to drop.
Speaking of AGP, ATI did just release a X1950 Pro with an AGP interface. They’re still scarce and somewhat expensive (at around $250), but it’s as fast as you will get with AGP.
Ah, I was under the impression that the first DX10 card to market wasn’t due for another month or two.
Still, the market is pretty limited right now. Do they have the 8600, or whatever mid-low end model out yet? I don’t know if he wants to spend $500-$800 for a video card, because it’s mid to high end, and the first of its generation. Wait 2 months, and the price of the 8800 will drop, and the various midrange models of the geforce 8 architecture will start to become available.
It’s worth investing in DX10 technology for the future - now is just not a good time for it because the market hasn’t had time to mature and start to come down in price.
I just wouldn’t, myself, even consider buying a high end dx9 card like the 7900GTX right now. The window in which it’ll run everything with all features is small. I’d buy a decent, still relevant card like a 6800 GS/GT for cheap, waiting a few months for DX10 to mature, or just wait.
There are two more 8800 based cards coming down the line. The last I read, most were thinking that these will be the mid-range or value-gamer cards, but a few were thinking that they were going to be even more on the high end. I haven’t read any news on it for the last few weeks, so maybe they’ve been announced now. Right now the high end 8800 (the GTX) is selling for $600-650. The slightly stripped model (8800 GTS) is in the $450-500 range. They’re not cheap, but they are very fast. A single 8800 card will beat a 7900GTX SLI (dual cards) setup in most benchmarks. The image quality is also improved.
I understand where you’re coming from here. I look at it another way though. The first of the DX10 games may be out in 2007Q1, but if you have a AGP based motherboard, chances are good that your system is going to have a rough time with them anyway. I actually think it’s a pretty good time to get a bargain price on a DX9 card that will last you another year or so.
Take the case of the OP who’s got a AGP based system. If he (or she, sorry) wants to milk some more time out of the system, get one of the better AGP cards now and plan on a new system down the road that has Vista and a DX10 card. That ATI X1950 Pro is fast card, even if it can’t compare to the 8800 based cards.
Just don’t do like a friend of mine just did. He bought a new boxed system from a department store. If I remember right, it has a NVideo 6150 chipset in it, but they expect to play new games. Sorry, that’s just not happening at any decent frame rate. To me gaming systems do not come from department stores.
Sorry to resurrect this thread, but I just picked up Doom 3 this Christmas and it turns out my geforce fx5200 simply isn’t cutting it. Even playing with all the cool stuff turned off and the effects set to “low,” gameplay is still really jerky.
I’ve been looking into the eVGA GeForce 7600GT but still have a questions or two. My current card is in a AGP slot, but I have 2 PCI slots, Will PCIe fit into PCI? Do I need an adapter or should I stick with an AGP?
I have a dell dimension 4600 with a Pentium 4 at 2.66 ghz and 512mb of ram, will a new video card even help?
Sadly, PCIe won’t fit into a PCI slot. Unless you want to upgrade your motherboard as well (naturally, I’d advise against), you’ll want the AGP version.
(Tangential: PCIe is an awesome new interface and I’m really glad it’s taking root so well, but this transitional phase is a pain in the tuchis.)
It couldn’t hoit.
Seriously though, yes, it should help quite a bit. CPU and RAM can only take you so far; games like Doom 3 that focus heavily on graphics will be bottlenecked by a slow video card, while it won’t feel a slow CPU nearly as much. There are some games that require a lot of CPU processing power for non-graphical things (like Planetside and other MMOs, which require hefty calculations to keep track of a large number of individually moving players), but yours should currently be okay for most stuff.
I couldn’t imagine anything like that being practical. The stuff made to be PCI-E, pretty much exclusively video cards right now as far as I’m aware, require far more bandwidth than a PCI slot could provide. Just adapting it to the right physical interface with an electronic bridge wouldn’t do any good if your card required 4x the horsepower that the pci slot could provide.
