Graphic Card for DX9 Games @ 30fps

[astroruben]

Hello,

Which ATi and Nvidia graphic cards are fast enough to run latest DX8.1 and DX9 games at:
- Maximum quality (anti-aliasing, etc) settings
- 1024x768 32bit 85Hz Resolution
- 30fps

Do I really need latest card from ATi/Nvidia? How long will those cards last, I mean will they be able to run DoomIII at those specs/settings? My system are P42.26Ghz/512MBPC3000/WDJB800.

Thanks for any suggestions!

P.S. I assume that human eye cannot detect difference in smoothness of frame rates beyond 30fps, right?

 

[Nights_L]

ATI Radeon9500/9700/9800 DX8/9
nVidia GeforceFX 5800 Ultra DX8/9, or GeForce4 Ti Series for DX8

 

[elzt]

If you want to run DoomIII and have a card that last long, then you should consider the above cards with at least 128MB of memory.

 

[phial]

ok.. well how much do you wanna spend?

on the cheapest end of teh DX9 line is the Radeon9500.. or for slightly more the 9500pro

*im not sudgesting the GFFX5200 because i doubt if that would play Doom3 fast enuff.. heck i think i TI4200 would play it faster*

the reason i sudgest the Radeon9500pro is because it has an incredibly fast pixel shader engine. and is very fast at AA. these are same engines that are in the top of the line models.. liek the 9700pro.

the 9800pro has some slight revisions, but not alot in terms of rendering performance. the revisions are mostly for memory bandwidth/clockspeed/AA speed..
teh 9800pro is very expensive tho

you might also want to note that the 9600pro is comeing out very soon. i dont wanna get into mentioning the changes between that and the 9500pro because its been posted quite a bit here recently. just click search on the left of the screen for "9600pro" and youll find the info..

if you have money, then id get the 9700 or 9700pro. they are quite amazing cards, ESPECIALLY with AA, which you specifically mentioned at the top.

the reason i dont recommend a TI4600 or gffx5800.. well, honesly the TI4600 doesnt even compare to the 9700.
compared to a 9500pro- without AA its about equal..(remember no DX9 so no special Doom3 effects like the uber smooth models ) .. with AA the 9500pro smokes the TI4600.

teh 5800? well, it is fast.. very comparable to the 9700pro, but the price is higher. so , not that im trying to promote one company over another *laff* but why would you pay more for teh same or less.

the info above may not be perfect, so dont attack my post plz, and feel free to correct it

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"You change the channel, and you change our minds..." - System of a Down<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by phial on 04/27/03 00:31 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[astroruben]

Thank you for all the replies! I thought that since I don't run games at higher than 1280x1024 res. and fine with 30fps, I dont need a high-end graphic card, but I guess I do. Does it worth to put 9700pro on my system, I mean it is fast enough? (P4 2.26GHz/512MB PC2700/WD800JB)

 

[Ghostdog]

The human eye can detect a difference in smoothness over 30 frames per second.

Current top-of-the-line cards are fast, but Doom3 will be a taxing game. I doubt full-quality settings and full AA+AF will result in completely smooth gameplay.

<font color=red>I´m starting to feel like a real computer consultant.</font color=red>

 

[shadus]

> P.S. I assume that human eye cannot detect
> difference in smoothness of frame rates
> beyond 30fps, right?

The human eye can detect differences in frame rates well beyond 30fps (40 fps is generally considered the lowest playable framerate.) The other thing to consider is this-- FPS as shown in most games is AVERAGE. Average is shitty, minimum is the important number. Generally I consider double the number of FPS that I want to see a good starting point... aka for 40fps min -> 80fps avg but that's not exact and at points even something running at 3x the rate will drag down to a sickeningly low fps number.

Shadus

 

[cleeve]

Realistically, the slowest card you'd want for Doom3 is a Radeon 9700 non-pro.

You might be able to get aweay with a Radeon 9500 PRO/9600 PRO or Geforce FX 5600 ULTRA, but 9700 non-pros can be found for $200 US now, which is a very good deal...

 

[vacs]

remember no DX9 so no special Doom3 effects like the uber smooth models

ok, let's try it again... Doom3 is OpenGL, so you don't need a 100% compatible DX9 graphiccard to get all the effects possible with the doom3 engine. In fact a GF3 is enough to render all the effects handled by the D3 engine. For those interested, even a GF1 can render all the shadowing and lighting effects in Doom3 but without bump-mapping and of course only at an unacceptable framerate... but nevertheless the GF1 can do it and so can a Radeon 8500 and above.

 

[GeneticWeapon]

No Vacs, the OpenGL compliancy has changed...just as Direct X always does. A Geforce 3 will not enable all of Doom3's features. GeForce 3's and Radeon 8500's etc. are only OpenGL 1.3 compliant. Doom3 is being written on the OpenGL 2.0 compliancy standard. Thats a common misconception of why people say you need a DX9 card to play Doom3, DX9 cards are also OpenGL 2.0 compliant. Hence, the confusion to some people.

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[GeneticWeapon]

So do YOU want to try again?

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[reever2]

For Dx 9 games i would get anything above a 9500 on the ati side and nothing less than a 5800 ultra on the Nvidia side, nvidia cards suck at dx9 shaders

 

[astroruben]

Radeon 9700 non-pro for $200, you mean made by PowerColor? ATi made 9700 non-pro starts at $280 (pricegrabber.com). Does PowerColor Radeons perform the same as ATi and have good drivers support and why there $80 difference?

If human eye can detect difference between fps above 30, then why TVs are at 25 for PAL and ~30 for NTSC? I guess my card is so old that I never got to experience above 30fps to know better (Radeon 7200).

 

[endyen]

So what I'm hearing is ,for game enjoyment the minimun is a Radeon 9500 pro or 9600 pro , and that until the lying cheating bastards at novideo come out with an honest driver, no-one can guarantee their cards can play solitaire the way Raymond does.

 

[Twitch]

Technically, the human eye cannot detect anything faster than 28 FPS in film playback.. The difference is that a computer's graphics card is not just playing back a movie--the player is moving the mouse and the computer is reacting to constant input which requires the graphics cards to make on-the-fly calculations very, very fast. It is not playback...it is actually rendering, and the framerates are changing dynamically from second to second. If a computer game is playing smoothly at a constant 30 FPS, you wouldn't notice any lag and playability would be fine. The problems start when the FPS is rising and falling as the game thrusts more or fewer 3D objects into the scene with complicated lighting and effects. This is one reason I would like to see more benchmarks rate minimum FPS as well as average FPS. Anyway, the short of it is that the more FPS a card can produce, the more complicated the scenes it can render, and the less likelihood you will ever notice any lag or stutter.

<font color=green>The Netherlands is where you go when you're too good for heaven.</font color=green> :tongue:


<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Twitch on 05/28/03 02:20 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[phial]

actually, i can notice up to 80 fps about. its easy to see the difference once you get used to it. kinda like those magic-eye tricks.. my friend coudlnt until i showed him.

most people can . set your monitor refresh rate to 60hz and then to 85hz and youll see the difference. try looking off to the side a little bit and youll see the flickeryness in the corner of yor eyes, its easier that way


in movies.. if you unfocus your eyes and watch the background, youll see HORRIBLE blurring and studdering. i hate watching movies in the theatre because of teh horrendous picture quality

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[vacs]

GWeapon, my comment was based on plan update by JC who said that Doom3 is going to be the first game fully using all the features of a GF1 card. In the same post he stated that a GF3 could do everything he needed in Doom3. Well, this post is somewhat older, so maybe in them meantime the requirements for D3 changed...

anyway, the doom3 e3 alpha version does run flawlessly on a GF1, I tried it myself on a GF256 SDR

 

[phial]

and you can run UT2003 on a TNT2


but you wont be able to see any pixel shaders or bump mapping

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[shadus]

Yup, it's fairly easy to note on a computer the issues related to frame rate. I don't think I can note as high as 80 but definetly up to 60 and anything less than 40 makes me ill. I think lotr was the first movie I watched that I really didn't note it being 'off'... but I may have just been too engrossed with what was going on... have to see it at again at the cheapie theatre here and see if I can note anything...

Shadus

 

[cleeve]

Powercolor, Sapphire, whatever... Ati makes all of the radeon 9700 GPUs.
If you buy any Radeon 9700 non-pro, it's the exact same speed as a retail Ati version.

And as far as Doom3 goes, regardless of the OpenGL or DirectX spec that is current when the game releases, the engine's feature requirements were programmed for DirectX 8 class hardware, weren't they?

Carmack even commented that one of the code paths the Radeon 9700 can run doom3 on is thre R200 path, which is based on the Radeon 8500.
Any DirectX 8-class hardware with Pixel and Vertex shaders will able to display Doom3 with realtime shadows and bumpmapping.

 

[DjKlown]

i remember reading somewhere that doomIII miniumum requirements would be equivalent to a Xbox(a 733 P3, 256 MB?,and a GeForce3).I believe i read it somewhere on this site or forums

 

[phial]

i read that also .. somwhere

that the req would be like a 1ghz P3 or Athlon, 512m/ram and a 64m dx8.1 video card



but it probably went up sinse then. i mean look at the scores on the THG article haha... its sick

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[astroruben]

Wow.
Once again, thanks for all of your support. I thought I can get away with something like Radeon 9500 to play games at high quality/medium resolution till winter 2004. I guess not. Since I will need to spend ~$300 for the video card, I decided to get AIW Radeon 9700 Pro to cover up another of my needs in computers, which is TV capture. Right now I use passthrough with my digital camcoder to do that job. Where can I find out more or does anybody know if AIW Radeon 9700 Pro caputure TV content AT LEAST at the quality of TV=>camcoder=>Firewire setup? Thats the only function of AIW I will use, I don't need automatic recording, rewind TV shows, etc; just recording programs off TV and then burning to DVD. Thank you very much.

P.S. Can AIW 9700 take advantage of HDTV and increase the capture quality?

 

[CasualCat2001]

Listen to GW he always knows his stuff...

 

[GeneticWeapon]

You are my friend Casual....

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