Special GeForce FX notes: All GeForce FX cards are temporarily removed from this buyers' guide due to their serious performance problems in Half Life 2 and unimpressive performance with other DX9 games. If Detonator 50 driver solves the problems without cheating, we will again add GeForce FX series cards in this buyers' guide.
Till then, avioid all GeForce FX cards by all means.
<font color=red>Removing the FX cards form the buyers guide is a joke, of the 200+ popular games on the shelves being bought, the FX cards have trouble with only a few. I wouldnt even call it having trouble, I would merely say that they dont perform as well as the competitions.
FX5900's are uder $250.00dollars in stores now, and I personally think thats a good deal </font color=red>
FAQ
~~~
#1) What does "FAQ" means?
Ans: Frequently Asked Questions
#2) Should I read this guide before I'm going to ask a question about buying graphics card?
Ans: YES!
#3) I don't understand the techincal things of this guide
Ans: A technical FAQ is coming, it should make everthing clear.
#4) There's no list of recommended card manufacturers.
Ans: See at the bottom of the guide.
#5) Where can I search for prices?
Ans: See at the bottom of the guide.
#6) I think this guide is "x" brand biased!
Ans: Of course not!
#7) I have comments/suggestions/flames about this guide.
Ans: See at the bottom of the guide.
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Start of the FAQ
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Value Cards (upto $150)
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Recommended Cards
Best buy: GeForce4 Ti4200 (64 MB version)
<font color=red>The Radeon 9600Pro is as low as $139.00 in stores, this should be at the top of the list.</font color=red>
Other good cards in this price category: Radeon 8500LE/Radeon 9100, Radeon 9200 Pro/non-Pro,
GeForce4 Ti4200
Pros- Fastest out of all those cards, cheap
Cons- No DX9 support, AA/AF can hurt performance
Sidenote: There are three types of Ti4200
Ti4200 64mb 4x/8x- cheapest, second fastest(clocked higher), better quality ram
Ti4200 128mb- slowest out of the three, said to have cheap ram to reduce cost(clocked lower)
Ti4200-8x 128mb- 8X AGP, slightly faster than Ti4200 64 MB, uses good ram
Radeon 8500/8500LE/9100
Pros- Cheap, full DX8<font color=red>should read full DX8.1 support</font color=red> support, good image quality
Cons- No DX9 support, not so fast, 8500/8500LE are discontinued product
Radeon 9000 Pro/9200 Pro
Pros- Cheap, full DX8 <font color=red>DX8.1</font color=red> support, good image quality
Cons- No DX9 support, not so fast
Cards to Avoid
SiS Xabre 600/400
Pros- Cheap
Cons- Speed comes at the cost of heavy quality loss, very slow when quality on par with ATI/nVidia cards, poor driver support
GeForce4 MX440
<font color=red>The MX440 shouldnt be in this catagory, it's a $50.00 dollar card, and performs good for that price. Not everyone reading this is a hardcore gamer.</font color=red>
Pros- Cheap
Cons- No DX8 support, basically turbo charged GeForce2 MX with Video processing engine. Slow in DX8 games
Radeon 9500 (non-Pro)/Radeon 9600 (non-Pro)
Pros- DX9 support, Best AA and AF performance among value cards
Cons- Radeon 9500 (non-Pro) sometimes can be very slow due to it's 4 pixel pipeline design. Radeon 9600 (non-Pro) is bandwidth limited and unlike the pro version, not good overclocker.<font color=red>It does too overclock good</font color=red>
Special notes for budget graphics card buyers:
Avoid 128 MB versions and save money. All of these budget cards aren't powerful enough to make use of 128 MB memory. Moreover, many 128 Radeon 8500LE/9100 cards are slower than the 64 MB version, because they come with slower memory.
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Midrange Cards ($150 to $300)
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Recommended Cards
Best buy: Radeon 9700 (non-Pro)/9800 (non-Pro)
Other good cards in this price category: Radeon 9500 Pro, Radeon 9600 Pro, GeForce FX5600 Ultra rev2.0
Radeon 9700 (non-Pro)/9800 (non-Pro)
Pros- DX9 support, Fastest out of all those cards, good price/performance ratio, very good AA/AF peformance
Cons- Most expensive among listed cards, 9700 (non-Pro) is quite hard to find <font color=red>www.pricewatch.com</font color=red>
Radeon 9500 Pro
Pros- DX9 support, Inexpensive, Speedy, good price/performance ratio, very good AA/AF peformance
Cons- Discontinued product, Hard to find<font color=red>not where I live</font color=red>
Radeon 9600 Pro
Pros- DX9 support, Inexpensive, Speedy, very good overclocker,<font color=red>some are</font color=red> good price/performance ratio, very good AA/AF peformance
Cons- slower than Radeon 9500 Pro
Cards to Avoid
GeForce4 Ti4800/4600/4800SE/4400
<font color=red>These cards can be had for cheap. I disagree that they arent worthy of consideration</font color=red>
Pros- Inexpensive, Runs most games smoothly without AA and AF
Cons- No DX9 support, Get wasted by Radeons, not really worth the price anymore
Special notes for midrange graphics card buyers:
Don't think about buying 256 MB version GeForceFX 5600 cards. They aren't fast enough to utilize 256 MB VRAM.
GeForce4 Ti4800 = GeForce4 Ti4600 + AGP 8X; GeForce4 Ti4800SE = GeForce4 Ti4400 + AGP 8X
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High-End Cards ($300 and up)
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Recommended Cards
Radeon 9800XT
Pros- DX9 support, fastest card, very good AA/AF performance
Cons- very expensive, only little faster than Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB, no new features compared to Radeon 9800 PRO
<font color=red>I guess dynamic overclocking and temperature monitoring arent new features?....c'mon dude</font color=red>
Radeon 9800 Pro (128 MB version)
Pros- DX9 support, very fast, very good AA/AF performance
Cons- Expensive
Radeon 9700 Pro
Pros- DX9 support, not much slower than Radeon 9800 Pro, best price/performance ratio in this category, very good AA/AF peformance
Cons- none
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
Recommended Brands: (sorted alphabetically)
For ATI based cards:
Best: Built by ATI, Hercules
Good: Gigabyte, Sapphire
<font color=red>I would take Sapphire over Hercules any day.....better ram</font color=red>
For nVidia based cards:
Best: ASUS, MSI, Leadtek, PNY
Good: ABIT, Gainward
Brands to avoid: (sorted alphabetically)
For ATI based cards: Gigacube, PowerColor<font color=red>(huh?)</font color=red>
For nVidia based cards: Daytona Palit<font color=red>(huh?)</font color=red>, and any unknown/less known brand
<font color=red>While telling people which card is better is good, it still doesnt tell them why one is better then another. When you tell an average person that one card has DX8 support, and one has DX7 support, you arent telling that person a whole lot. Somewhere in this guide, there needs to be a brief description of pixel/vertex shaders, memory bus width, what DX spec calls for(not just DX9, but DX8.1, DX8, DX7) I wouldnt go as far as trying to describe the fundamentals of floating point precisions in modern architectures, but there's alot that needs to be covered if you guy's want to make this guide really great. I think that a full description of what each generation of graphics card is capable of(fillrate/shader performance/poly count/which shaders the card uses/memory bandwidth etc.)would be of more use to the new people then just telling them which card is better. I would want to know 'why' that card you recomended is better. Unless a person can get that answer in the buyers guide, their only going to start a thread about it asking the question anyways....and stopping the same redundant questions from being asked is the reason why we wanted the buyers guide in place to begin with.</font color=red>
<b>I help because you suck</b>
. If this were to go through, we would perhaps be one of the most dedicated Grahics Communities on the Net ot helping others out. I'm all for this, what about you guys?
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