Best Graphics Card On the Market.....

For people in Europe ( like me ), we really haven't got much choice. Creative is the only nVIDIA board maker left since Hercules shifted completely to ATI ( I'm not sure about upcoming Kyro products ).

Apparently certain american manufacturors are trying to penetrate the European market ( mainly Leadtek ) which should bring more competition.:grinthumb

Creative isn't very expensive ( I'm talking about Graphic cards here ) but they don't really put much in their cooling systems.

I managed to snatch one of the last nVIDIA Hercules card ( the 3D Prophet 3 TI200 ). It's a very good card, pretty cheap & works at Vanilla GF3 speeds without a single propblem but I don't think you can find it anymore.

Another nice bargain is Elsa GF3 selling for almost a GF2TI price :eek

Problem is, Elsa is going bankrupt so technical support will be a no-no

whoa.. seems like i'm the only one to support voodoo... believe me, a voodoo outperforms a g2 gts on a athlon 2100+
and the fsaa is the best ever

Nope, you're not the only one supporting voodoo here.. Take Unc or me.. We're both very satisfied with our V5's...
I won't change it until either ATI get's it act together and produces good drivers, or Matrox finally produces the G850 (or whatever it's called now...)

And no, I'm not an nvidia fan (but I won't discuss that here... Visit the IRC channel if you have to....)

THERE!

I am in the third category, I don't have any cash to buy a new 3D accelerator card, which is why I am STILL sticking to my old and creaky 3D card :dead:

Re: GEFORCE 3 Ti 200

Since you can now get the Asus v8200 Geforce3 (original) for about the same price I would go for that as it give better performance than the ti200...

Surely the problem is finding one now? Most places seem to have sold all of their stock of them.

Also, since the Ti chips are a redesigned (more cost effective) core, they are newer and probably run cooler - hence they will overclock to full GF3 standards anyway.

I must agree with Th3M1ghtyD8 on the fact that it is hard to find GeForce 3's or G4's anywhere nowadays. In my case, as a poor college student, I believe I'm simply going to wait for the prices to come down some before I invest in upgrading from my G2 Pro. I don't believe I will see enough of a substantial difference to make the G4's worth buying right now since I try not to play too many games.

I believe it there is no such thing as the best video card. Motherboard and other computer peripheral can limit performance of every video card.

"Best" is established by best possible performance with a modern system. Many review/tech sites state that you should pair up a decent processor with a powerful video card. A P3 500 with a GF4 4600Ti is a bit pointless as the GF4 will be starved and not run to its optimum ability. The same can be said if you pair a 2.2Ghz P4 with a TNT2 M64. The TNT2 won't be able to keep up...
Still if you go with the modern system test situation you can establish what the best performance card is

Arris is right. You can't have bottlenecks slowing your system down or not allowing it to perform at its potential. Personally I have a Athlon 1.4 gig processor so I believe I should be ok for a while anyway.

So does my GeForce 2 MX 200 and Pentium 4 1.8ghz results in a bottleneck?

Probably a little, but not an incredibly noticeable one. It really depends on whether you play lots of games. This is where you'll see the real difference. If I were you and had a little extra money I would opt for either a GeForce 3, GeForce Ti200, or maybe an ATI 8500 (although I don't really know too much about ATI, but I've heard good things). This would more than likely improve your gaming experience tremedously.

I have a GeForce 2 Pro, and sometimes I feel that it is not enough, but then again I try not to play too many games!

When I played my common played games like counter-strike and RA2, I don't feel that it's not enough. However, when I see my graphic card's performance on 3Dmark2001 SE my heart suddenly sank...

Yeah well, my scores weren't that impressive either. The newer games will start to take advantage of features that my card nor my card have like Antialiasing, etc. and then the differences will begin to show up. The human eye can only see so many frames per second and after that it is just for bragging rights really.

But if you feel comfortable with your card then I would say to stick with it.

Oops, I meant my card nor your card. Sorry about that!

You do know that there is an edit button don't you? :haha:

I am currently running an Athlon 1.4@1.5 (143fsb) with a Geforce3. If I look at the 3dmark scores of users with Athlon XPs and P4 > 2Ghz but still using an original Geforce3 they get higher 3dmarks. So the Geforce3 hasn't topped out yet!
Features like antialiasing, as far as I am aware are dealt with more or less by just the GPU as its transforming data that it has already received from the system. Whereas the general 3d rendering and recalculation of positions of 3d objects etc is done as a partnership betwen CPU and GPU. The faster that the CPU can provide the data the faster the GPU can process it.. up until the limitation of the AGP bus speed and the processing capability of the GPU.

I believe that even if you used a card like TNT2 M64, you'll still get an increasing performance with an faster computer, though not by much, but the CPU tries to squeeze everything out of that poor card.

My GeForce 2 MX 200 only got 1500 3dmarks using the default settings. "Impressive."

Yes but the threshold that a faster CPU stops improving performance is lower for the older and lower spec video cards...

Check out the Quake III Arena: 1024x768 graph in this Tomshardware Geforce2 scaling analysis article

The article is a little out of date but you get the idea???

i remembered back in the old forums, someone posted a link to a very nice article about bandwith, by the bitmap brothers (or sth) i think...
hmm... where's Arris's post... gotta use the link in his sig
...
oh no... can't find it...
anyone bookmarked it?