Graphic card advice.

[Karl41]

I am going to order a new graphics card this week. I am not very technically minded, does any one have any advice on a good one for me
to get.
It will need to be AGP and my budget is £160 and no more. Any advice is most welcome.

Thanks

[Full_Throttle0]

i recommend an ATI for its ability in both directX and opengl but i could be talking through my hat.




by the way this should be in "fs general" i think

[slashed2]

I purchased the 6600GT to help improve frames after getting fsgenesis 38m mesh and ultimate terrain. Frame rates went up
considerably and the sim was flyable again. With an AMD3000 from wal-mart, upgraded to 768mb ram and the 6600 gt, asv6 or WMP,
and radar contact my frames of course vary depending on location. City flying brings me from a locked 20 to about 14 depending on the
airplane I'm flying, due to ultimate terrain and AI traffic. This is mosty cpu dependent, so the card suffers. If I unlock the frames I can see
between 30 and 70 in suburban and urban flying and 1 or 2 cloud layers.

As far as the look of the graphics, I can't really tell the difference in FS, maybe more rich and deeper color? But in my sons games which
he now can run full tilt such as Battlefield 2 and Earned in blood, well, they look absoulutely awesome.

Overall, a great buy and good bang for the buck but all systems vary greatly and I've found that a new card doesn't solve the CPU issue,
my AMD is running at about 2.2ghz and this is where my bottleneck now lies, but compared to the the 5200 ultra I had in previously which
was brought to a crawl with FSgenesis and ultimate terrain, I'm pretty happy with this card as it saved me from talking my wife into a new
pc, which of course may change with FSX.

Ian.

[WBHoenig]

I recommend Nvidia in the 6xxx series or above. I have a little laptop Nvidia card and still get very managable framerates. However, you may or may
not be able to get that for £160.

[samiranks]

I use ati xseries I think either the x700 pro x800 or if you have a high end computer the x1800 or x1900

[aristoteles]

Best money value Nvidia 6600 GT, best card Nvidia 7800GTX, IMHO.

[FsP Dennis]

i know this is not AGP but this one is great!

BFG
GeForce 7900GTX
OverClocked
512MB!

This one cost : 690.87euro

OR

GeForce 7800GS AGP
256MB 256bit DDR3
16 Rendering Pipeline
NVIDIA® CineFX™ 4.0 engine
NVIDIA® UltraShadow™ II technology
NVIDIA® Intellisample™ 4.0 technology

This one cost : 316.72euro

[Sovek]

no more than 150 pounds he said.

NVIDIA 6600GT, best card for your money.

[samiranks]

i tried the nvidia 7800 gtx, i think thats the new one, but I didnt see much difference between that and my x700 pro pci express card. no
kidding. i dont have the 450 watts in my computer but my card works great. also i had to by the power unit to match the nvidia card and
still was not much better. Maybe it was the card, however i took the card back and purchased another one and still no difference

[highlander]

There's no point in a 512 MB graphics card at present, and by the time that amount of VRAM is necessary, the actual GPU on the card will be seriously
obsolete.

Best bang-for-buck at present is either the GeForce 6600GT or 6800GT. Don't go for the regular 6600.

I have no experience with ATi cards, and have no idea what the equivelant card is in that range.

Also try downloading the latest graphics card driver from nVidia.com - uninstall your existing driver before you run it. It can make a hell of a
difference.

[Enzo]

I had the regular 6600 and upgraded to the 7800 GT with 256 MB RAM. Huge difference! But yes you should upgrade your power suply. It
requries at least 400 Watt. I have 500 Watt in mine now... should be fine to add even some more HD's