I need to buy a new video card for my gaming rig soon.

Can anyone reccomend either card over the other? Or would it be a better idea to wait for possible new card releases?

I don't give a rats ass about game bundles, over clocking, FSAA or anything like that.

Just balls to the wall, stable, performance for games like Lock On: Modern Air Combat and the upcoming releases of Half Life 2 and Doom 3.

The rig is a Shuttle XPC (SFF) P4 3.2/800 with 2gb Kingston CAS2 ram. Current card is a Geforce FX 5900. It runs Lock on modern air combat really jittery and crappy FPS even at medium resolution settings.

you're not going to be upgrading a whole lot, if you can afford to hang on for a few months, supposedly both companies are coming about with their next-gen cards fairly soon but both keep away from dates

if now, i'd recommend the ati, very stable, great card, had one problem with it and that was CoD (didn't like the game anyway)

Raedon all the way.

Altough, you might get more out of upgrading that processor, than anything.

Lol upgrade the processor to what? The lowest P4 3.2 extreme is like $800+, the only other one is the 3.4/800 and i don't think 200mhz is that big of a difference.

Do you mean one of the 64bit CPUs? Because i'd pretty much have to build a new system for that...

As for ATI, I've been a die hard Nvidia guy for a long time, but recently the Radeons are looking pretty damn good.

i used to be a die hard Nvidia fan as well, until their PR people started to talk about the issues they were having with early performance

Radon 9800 pro 128 meg here.

All I can say is that i have had nothing but problems with this card.

ATI has already come out with a novel full of fuckin drivers trying to fix all the problems their cards have,
it's a fuckin joke.


www.hardwareanalysis.com/...5152/?o=20 (http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/15152/?o=20)


www.xpmce.com/PNphpBB2-vi...15-f-.html (http://www.xpmce.com/PNphpBB2-viewtopic-t1315-f-.html)


forum.pcvsconsole.com/vie...p?tid=4701 (http://forum.pcvsconsole.com/viewthread.php?tid=4701)



There's just a few of threads about the topic.


If you're a gamer,I would steer WAY clear of anything ATI until they get their shit straight.

BTW,the first link is all about call of duty problems,the second link gives a much clearer picture of what you'd be buying into.

Whoops. I was in a hurry and just saw the 800.

I used to be die hard Nvidia too, until I swaped out my ti4600 for a 9700 Pro. Wow. It was like night and day. Personally, I like the drivers better too.

ATI
Just look at benchmarks.

My first experience with an ATI card was horrible. EQ ran terrible as well as my other games. I took the card back and got a GeForce3 (best card at the time) and i swore never to buy an ATI again. My GeForce4 crapped out on me recently and my buddy gave me an ATI 9700 256 and i have to say, it is a pretty damn nice card. It seems to me that people tend to have more problems with ATI compared to Nvidia, but when you talk to the people who have no problems at all with thier ATI, it seems to be uncomparable to Nvidias.

If you want to be really cool, though, you could go out and buy 2 monster 3d's and put them in sli mode! VOODOO LIVES!

Heard you can actully flash the 5900 to the 5950

Ya not really advised tho... My 5900 ultra overheated without overclocking 2 weeks ago. it still run games fine but some effects don't work anymore and the fps is lower than a normal 5900.


I d suggest the same thing than gokuu I.E wait until the next set of card by end of march/early april. Overheating problems on the geforce 5900 is bad tho.

If you do decide,for some reason,to buy this ATI crud,here's a link to the Omega web-site.His drivers usually work.

Also gives a bit more customization options.





www.omegacorner.com/ati.htm (http://www.omegacorner.com/ati.htm)

Former Nvidia junkie here, until I got a new pc that had the ATI 9800 in it.

I haven't had any issues with this card at all and it runs my games just fine. EQ, SWG (when I played heh), UT2K3 and a couple others.

Another thing to consider is that there's no way to easily install a GF FX 5950 Ultra in a Shuttle XPC. The 5950 Ultras take up two expansion slots, and all of the Shuttle XPCs have their AGP slots on the outside edge of the motherboard. Unless you want to cut into your case and wind up having the heatsink/fan sticking out the side, the 5950 Ultra is a no-go.

(Unless there's a single-slot 5950 U that I'm not aware of...)

The Radeon 9800 XT, however, only takes up one slot, so it would fit quite nicely in a XPC.

(As an aside, if you haven't looked into the 250 watt SilenX power supply, you should. I bought one for my SB75G2, and it's noticeably quieter than the stock 220 watt PS. Most reviews of the SilenX PS are favorable, too, and new SB75G2s will have it installed)

Anandtech has an article called "Soon to be obsolete AGP video cards" that has a nice roundup of all NVIDIA and ATI chipset cards.

url is: anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.html?i=1962&p=2 (http://anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.html?i=1962&p=2)

Pay special attention to the last paragraph of page three.

heh, mother boards will not just stop using agp, thats like when pci was created, they were not just going to stop making mobo's with isa slots

as long as cards still have the agp feature, and are still a popular buy, the agp slot will be a feature for time to come till its too outdated to care about

another thing is PCIe probably won't have a huge future either, not with all the experimentation everyone is doing with the new 64 bit architectures, agp might get an upgrade, it might stay with the pci bus, its too early to say that "if you buy a card now, it will be totally outdated in 2months time with PCIe"

I think he's saying soon to be obsolete models of AGP cards, since the new GPU cores are coming out soon. Not so much that AGP is going to be obsolete soon.

My take on the process is this:

There is the possiblity that in a few months, the current economic model re: Video card pricing as well as "what is best" might change so much that those that upgrade now will kick themselves.

i don't know, if its anything like what amd/intel did with their products, its gonna be in quazy mode where their product will cost an extreme amount (making older cards cheaper still but more wanted) and in less production

hopefully its something like what they did with voodoo/monster cards and just create a trillion of them and put them out for not-so-insane price

/nod

Most likely the #1 driving force will be price.

Yea I forgot about SFF and how the AGP slot is right up against the side of the case. Guess the 5950 is out of the question.

The only reason I made an SFF gaming PC is because I bring it to work and toss all the games and bad ass graphics in my Mac Zealot co-workers faces.

Mac Freak: "Hey check out this rad game on my G5! Civilization!"
Marz: "Bitch please, check out Half Life 2 beta"
Mac Freak: "It will probably run faster on my G5"
Marz: "Yea, have fun playing it when your 110 years old"
Marz: "I'm Rick James bitch!"

Seriously I'm probably just going to wait it out. If worst comes to worse and graphics architechure changes, I'll just buy a new case and mobo and migrate everything into a tower case.

just buy the ati since it comes with a free half-life 2 copy. sucks though it probably will held back and back and back and back... reminds me of TFC 2. I remeber seeing vids of that game like 5 years ago and it never came out heh. Why the hell would you want to upgrade for like 3 percent more performance anyways? But seriously performance wise they are like neck and neck. If one beats the other in a pefromace its like only by .0005 percent. or the other will make up in diff category. Personnaly I would just get the nvidia since its cheaper but I like the idea of half-life 2 being bundled with ati, makes you think it will run better on it. And thats the game i've been waiting for.

and pci-x has been aroud for a while and still has not been introduced workstation mobos yet. They always say its coming but it hasnt come yet.

edit:

BETA HALF-LIFE 2?
SHARE BITCH!