What Video Card Do You Recommend?

I’m thinking about upgrading my video card from a GeForce4 Ti 64MB to one with more power.

My main interest is in simultaneously hosting and playing multiplayer Neverwinter Nights on the same PC, so I’m looking for a card to take as much graphics load as I can afford off my CPU.

Since Neverwinter Nights is my main interest, I’d prefer an Nvidia card because its drivers run more smoothly than ATI ones with this game. My husband however does play other games, so we’d like to get a card that will last us a while.

Which video card would you recommend as the next logical step?

Thank you!

Arawen

Depending on your price range, I’d recommend either the Radeon 9200 or 9600. The 9200 really is a pretty sharp performer for people who don’t want to spend a fortune, and it can be had for under $50.

Do the latest Radeon drivers work ok with Neverwinter Nights ?

Do the latest Radeon drivers work ok with Neverwinter Nights ?[/quote]

A close friend of mine has a 9600 and is playing through NWN for the first time. He hasn’t had any problems.

There are a couple of really good deals on Nvidia cards right now. Newegg has the EVGA 5900SE for around $180. Buyxtremegear.com has a true 5900 for $162 last I checked although the site seems to be down right this moment. Both would be great choices for NWN.

Edit, site is back up:

http://store.yahoo.com/buyxg/bfg5900128.html

– Xaroc

Are you sure about the 9200? As far as I understand it the 9200 is slower than the fx5200U, and the fx is slower than a gf3ti200! I used to know pretty well which card was worth the price, but everything has gotten complicated lately. The gf3ti200 has 400Mhz memory at 128bit which is the same as the plain 9600, but the 9600 gpu is clocked higher. Your geforce4ti might actually be faster than both the ati cards in some games, because the bandwidth will be greater (ti4200 = 500Mhz, 4400=550). The 5900 should be faster though, and the 9800 should be faster than the 5900, especially if you want to use fsaa/af.

If NWN is your main concern but you still want a card that can do other games for your husband, I would absolutely go with an NVIDIA card. I went with a true 5900 non-ultra from newegg for 200$ (Gainward) but it may have come down in price over the last few months. The Geforce 5700 Ultras are pretty good, although I’ve heard that they cost about the same as a non-ultra 5900 but are slower, so I went with the 5900.

It really all depends on what your budget is, but ATI and NWN have been known to get along very poorly. Both of my geforces have outperfomed my Radeon in that game and the geforce should handle the games that your husband wants to play.

I agree with Xaroc.
The best bang for the buck right now is probably the geforce fx 5900 non-ultra’s.

Here’s a HUGE list of video cards if you want to compare performance:

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/over2003/index.html

The FX 5900 still have the double-width form factor, though, even when they’re non-ultra and cheap. The new 5900 XT (also sold as SE or LX) offers nearly the same performance on a standard-sized board, at around $200.

I just got my AOpen Aeolus FX 5900 XT for €194 plus shipping. Surprisingly quiet fan which means I may be able to keep the card in the PC even when I’m not gaming – a huge plus in my book.

Two months ago I had bought an FX 5600 (non-ultra) because my youthful ignorance had led me to believe that it was a decent card. Replacing the 5600 with the 5900 XT improved benchmark results dramatically:

3DMark 2001 SE build 330: from 6,823 to 16,169 (+137%)
3DMark 03 version 3.4.0: from 1,469 to 5,594 (+281%)

No wonder DX:IW ran like crap on the 5600… :roll:

My true 5900 non-ultra is a single slot card. It just depends on the manufacturer.

Follow up. I had ordered two of those BFG 5900s above but one turned out to be a clunker and I had to RMA it. Since it was my son’s birthday I let him have the one that worked but not before running it through a series of benchmarks vs. my 9700 pro.

The simple version is when the 5900 lost to the 9700 pro it was by a frame or two except when I looked at Mafia where the fps went from 30-42 as opposed to 36-42 for the 9700 pro. However, when the 5900 won, it won really big. In KOTOR and NWN I saw at least a 3rd increase in performance and this is significant because I was starting at around 20 fps in these games maybe even teens with everything turned on. In NWN 1280x960 with 4xAA was significantly faster than the ATI at 1280x960 with no AA. KOTOR went from around 20 fps to around 30. Jedi Academy performance increased about 25%. Most other games I tried (Far Cry Demo, Madden, etc.) were even.

So basically it is as fast as a 9700 pro and should give a lot less headaches with driver issues. Oh and that card comes with a full version of Call of Duty which normally runs at least $40. So in reality you are paying about $120 plus shipping for maybe the 3rd fastest video card you can buy right now.

Oh the one drawback I can see about this card is it is long. I will have to rearrange my hard drives to fit it in my tower case. It is also two slots wide (really about 1.5 but it has two side by side back plates). That isn’t as big an issue since everyone knows you never want to put anything into the PCI slot right next to your AGP.

– Xaroc

That’s not always true. On my last VIA based machine I could only use PCI slot 1 for my soundcard. Any other slot caused headaches.

That’s not always true. On my last VIA based machine I could only use PCI slot 1 for my soundcard. Any other slot caused headaches.[/quote]

Ok maybe never is strong language but I have seen it echoed in numerous places.

– Xaroc

PCI-1 shares IRQ with the AGP slot, so it’s surprising that the soundcard only worked there. It might of course require some black magic to get IRQ-assignment to work well in some cases, but PCI-1 would be the last place I’d expect a soundcard to work.

So basically it is as fast as a 9700 pro and should give a lot less headaches with driver issues.

I thought this was supposed to be a thing of the past? I thought with the Cat and Omega drivers ATI had supposedly gotten their shit together?

I ask this a as proud new owner of my first ever ATI card. I jumped on the Newegg deal for a Sapphire 9800 Pro for $229. It should be a nice upgrade from my TI 4200, but I don’t want to have to start dealing with driver headaches. :(

I have a 9500 pro, and while i only played NWN for about 10 hours before giving up, I never had any issues. I guess some people have problems but it isn’t universal.

The performance if you turn on full shadows and AA is abysmal. It has gotten somewhat better in newer cat releases but is still not playable. So you have to turn down shadows or turn off AA to get it to run smoothly. This is for a game that was put out what 2 years ago? Most of the issues I run across in games are small things but they are irritating to me. I want my kick ass video card to be able to run things completely properly not 90% properly.

– Xaroc

I have had my Radeon 9800XT for about a week now and am becoming increasingly disappointed with the amount of graphics bugs and glitches in both my older games and my newer games when running on the Radeon.

I am starting to think the extra speed isn’t worth the effort. Even with the latest Catalyst 4.1 drivers I am having graphics problems in many of my games.

It only reinforces my opinion that ATI couldn’t write decent drivers even if their life depended on it.

This round - nVidia 1 / ATI 0 - now let’s see what the next Catalyst driver gives us. :roll:

On an unrelated point, I would like to announce that my GeForce FX 9500 XT has a really fabulous fan control!

When Windows boots up, the fan actually slows down compared ot its speed when I started the computer. Apparently some kind of fan control is built into the current NVidia drivers. At least I’m not aware of installing any other software that would have this effect.

The net result is a video card that’s nearly as quiet as a passively cooled one, but nearly as powerful as the fastest cards on the market!

I’d sure like hardware sites to pick up such criteria and report on how noisy a card is in desktop use…

I had a 9500Pro and while the drivers were never terrible, the performance was always crap compared to the Geforce 4200 I replaced. There were some odd glitches here and there, but I never had lock ups like others sometimes had.