Are the cards worth the money???

Ok, I have to ask this question. I have a GeForce 2 Pro from Gainward and my graphics card does anything I want it to from playing divx rips to Citizen Kaboto. Anyways, I got my card over 5 months ago for 135 dollars, and I was just wondering if it is worth it for some of you guys to spend 400 dollars on the newest GeForce 4's or ATI 8500 series cards? I just can't seem to see the big performance difference between the two, besides the newer cards being a few frames per second faster. Any thoughts on this you guys with the fastest or newest cards???

I think that if you can stumble across a Geforce 3 for a good deal you should probably go that way. The Geforce 4 is overpriced so dont even think about that option right now unless you got money to burn. A Geforce 3 will be a great boost in speed and you will get some new options like Anti-Aliasing and the ability to play DX8 games.

Im not a big fan of ATi because of their lackluster driver support but it looks like that is starting to turn around with the 8500. I just think that the Geforce 3 will give you a great increase over your current card and wont kill your wallet.

I can't tell u to buy a geforce4 ti 4600 when i know it's actually junk, though, u can buy a geforce3 cuz that is a real investment in price and quality product, though image quality is not so close to a v5's fsaa

(* edited by mod)

I recently upgraded my monitor and have been running Project Eden at 2046 resolution with my Geforce3. I would be interested to see a Geforce2 Pro run it as well as my GF3 does. Saying that its not such a big leap as I made when I upgraded since I went from Voodoo3 and TNT2 to GF3. The major ability of the newer cards is to run at higher resolutions without gigantic performance hits. Also antialiasing can be enabled and you can force antistropic filtering instead of bilinear or trilinear which gives you clearer textures in games. I am currently playing Counterstrike with 4x antistropic 4x and AA 4x at 1024 resolution (99fps) and the difference between that and PCs at my work place running the same game with Geforce2MXs is phenomenal!!!

whoaaa going from a tnt2 to ag3 is a uhge improvement!! i bet u couldn't believe it... just like me... i went from banshee to v5

hehe, i went from a tnt (ya, not a tnt2) to a gf3 and, well, i was quite impressed really!!! unless you're a performance freak and have money to burn then don't bother with the highest spec/priced card. if i was buying right now i would buy a gf2 ti for a lower spec machine and either a gf3 standard (which can be got for the same price as ti200s at some places!) or a radeon 8500 for a higher spec machine. In the UK i would refuse to buy a video card for more than £200 at the moment.

SamJ

Darn, u must've died when u first run quake3 huh?(* edited by mod)

I splashed out £299 for my original GF3 and I reckon that I have had my moneys worth from all the gaming I have enjoyed with it.
Its really made playing games much more immersive due to the realism that can be achieved with the newer generations of cards.
As John Carmack's .plan says :
Don't buy a GF4MX for DoomIII

Its a boosted GF2MX.... Lacking as many pipelines as gf3 or the proper gf4 and DirectX 8 support (only has directx7 support). I really don't know what nvidia were thinking with the release of this waste of money...

u've said it, a waste of money, that's what they were thinking

I think I'll probably wait to upgrade when the new GeForce 5's come out sometime soon. Then I might get a G3 or G4 depending on price difference and then we'll see what the differences are!!!

yeah maybe the nvxx (+25) chip is better and maybe they decide to use 3dfx antialiasing method and get the best fsaa quialilty and maybe it'll be clocked at 1gh/1ghz

for now you're fine because a gforce 2 can run just about every game that a geforce 3 or 4 can run. Unless you have a really big monitor or want a high resolution like that one guy, stick with the 2. My roomate has a gforce 3 and I can run every game that he has with my gforce 2 at the same resolution just a little slower.

Wait for the Geforce 4 Ti 4200s they should perform better then the Geforce 3 Ti 500 and be great value for money

Thats very true. At the moment Geforce3 mainly allows you to turn on lots of nice eye candy (shadows, AA, Antistropic filtering, bump mapping (hardly used)). Not many games (Aside from Comanche4 and a few others) are utilising DirectX 8 features or making much use of the advanced hardware features of the Geforce3 series of cards.

Also there isn't much advantage between being able to run Quake3 at 120 fps or 180 fps since the v-sync to your monitor will likely limit it to about 60-70 fps and it generally only takes +25 fps to fool the human eye/visual perception into believing that the series of frames is motion.

Some times I would like to have AA, because I have a 19" monitor and sometimes edges are a little to jagged for me, but if you don't look to close and aren't too picky then the GF2 is fine. Wait untill some more games come out that actually use the GF4 to it's full capabilities.