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Quadriflax - Mar 11, 2002

		Quadriflax		Mar 11, 2002
			I've been thinking of getting a new video card to try and improve my overall PC gaming performance and want all the advice I can get. Currently I have a 3Dfx Voodoo 3 3000 AGP with 16 MB RAM. I've been pleased with its performance so far but a looking for something that will allow me to get better frame rates for games like Medal of Honor. Unfortunately my budget is rather small, if I do decide to buy one. I'm looking to spend around $100-$120US. There's quite a bit of cards to choose from and I've no real experience with any of them. Mostly I'm looking at Hercules and PNY cards, but I don't know anyone who's ever owned either. When I bought my Voodoo3 card I pretty much settled on something that looked decent and was cheap rather then spending large amounts of time looking at numbers and things I don't really understand. I'm not a hardware guy. If anyone has any suggestions I would appreciate it. Keep in mind I'm using it mostly for gaming and I'd like it to be AGP. Thanks!

		IceDigger		Mar 11, 2002
			For about $100 you can get a Radeon 7500 which is fast and has excellent image quality or you can save up and for about $150 you can get a Radeon 8500 which is #### fast and has excellent image quality. I would stay away from the geforce line of cards for now untill they get the whole image quality thing down. That is my advice from a person who has owned just about every video card from 3 years back (seriously).

		archiver		Mar 11, 2002
			It all depends on what you wanna do with it, really. I own a GeForce 2 MX, and for some emulators that use full screen "stretch", the bilinear filtering leaves something to be desired (imo). It looks blurry, and the colors are washed out. Not so with the Radeons. NVidia's driver revisions are spotty. When I first got the card I could run UT in Direct3D great. Several drivers later I've found DirectX slows to a crawl, where OpenGL seems to be better render of choice. Only with recent drivers I've noticed the vsync seeming to work correctly. I hear the NVidia cards with TV-out can cause problems with certain resolutions (people c/o it not being able to fill the TV screen), where the ATI users with TV-out seem pretty happy. Next card I get will be a Radeon, I think.

		Quadriflax		Mar 11, 2002
			Thanks for the info. Everything I've read so far is quite promising. So I have another question. How much better a performance do you think I'd get if I upgraded? I don't know the relationships between processors, RAM and video card performance. Given that I have the V3 3000 and a PIII 700 MHz with 448 MB RAM, would I see a significant improvement, or only a slight one? If any more information is needed just ask. I hate to be a bother, but when I go to these review sites they have all these side by side comparisons of cards and so many different numbers it makes me dizzy. For someone who just wants to play games it can be a bit too much information Thanks again.

		IceDigger		Mar 11, 2002
			The difference between your voodoo and a radeon would be like the difference between night and day. Yea its that much faster! The voodoo cards always had great image quality to begin with so you wont notice too much of a difference in quality 2d wise but 3d wise the Radeon will be much better. My personal video card I have right now is a Radeon 8500 and 2 voodoo 2's in sli coupled with an athlon 2000xp and 256mb ram. It's the perfect combination for both older and newer games. Plays everything I throw at it.

		eatpenguin		Mar 11, 2002
			yay another voodoo3 user! voodoo3 for me always seemed little...lacking. getting it to work with the right ogl drivers on win2k was pain, the glide driver for win2k really sux, and anything beyond q3a is x_x.

		Raijin Z		Mar 11, 2002
			I put my Voodoo 3 into a Pentium 200 I bought for $50. It works like a charm there, but it's forever banned from my P3 1000. Now if only I could get something better than the GF2 MX200 I'm using now...