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budget card woes!

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polycounter lvl 18
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CheapAlert polycounter lvl 18
Since the R9800 and R9500 falis in my machine (Athlon 950), I'll get a "budget" card in the $40 range, because I know those'll work in this crap machine I have. Unfortunately there's only two, and they both suck:

Powercolor ATI Radeon 9250 128mb $38

The 9250 only has DX8 support, and everyone talks about radeons having graphics glitches and bad driver stories, also Blender i've heard doesn't work well on Radeons (unless they fixed that, but I lost track) plus you don't get pixel shader 2.0

eVGA GeforceFX 5200 128mb $39

The GFFX has dx9 support, but supposedly has bad performance overall, even many customers saying "DON'T ATTEMPT DOOM3 ON THIS CARD OMG"

Both cards are AGP 4x/8x of course.

I CANT DECIDE

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  • Slayerjerman
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    Slayerjerman polycounter lvl 18
    eVGA is an awesome brand. I own the 5200 FX and its fine. Of course why in gods good name would you want to even attempt doom3 on a 950 athlon anyway.

    Get the 5200.
  • JKMakowka
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    JKMakowka polycounter lvl 18
    Are you sure it is not a power and/or old AGP port problem?

    Otherwise, get the Nvidia... the 5200 pretty much sucks, but anything from Nvidia is better than that Ati crap tongue.gif
  • ElysiumGX
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    ElysiumGX polycounter lvl 18
    [ QUOTE ]
    anything from Nvidia is better than that Ati crap tongue.gif

    [/ QUOTE ]

    *insert cruel and degrading remarks about JK's mother here* angel.gif
  • oXYnary
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    oXYnary polycounter lvl 18
    What about a 6200? THose shouldnt be much more.
  • CheapAlert
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    CheapAlert polycounter lvl 18
    [ QUOTE ]
    Of course why in gods good name would you want to even attempt doom3 on a 950 athlon anyway.


    [/ QUOTE ]
    It's already playable with the Geforce2 I have, perhaps the gffx makes d3 performance worse? I've also heard horror stories of low framerates in Farcry with the card as well, making it seem like the GF2 beats the GFFX in performance.
  • Slayerjerman
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    Slayerjerman polycounter lvl 18
    The only BAD things about the 5200 are shaders and shadows.

    The FX 5200 supports DX9 shaders 2.0 and it is really shitty at handling them.

    So if you turn off shaders and shadows the card runs great.

    I ran StarWars galaxies at max detail fine as long as i had shaders turned off (didnt make the game look any different anyway) and increased the framerate considerably!
  • notman
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    notman polycounter lvl 18
    I'll give you $40 for the R9800 so you can buy the lower models wink.gif Hell, I'll even throw in shipping
  • Toomas
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    Toomas polycounter lvl 18
    [ QUOTE ]
    It's already playable with the Geforce2 I have, perhaps the gffx makes d3 performance worse? I've also heard horror stories of low framerates in Farcry with the card as well, making it seem like the GF2 beats the GFFX in performance.

    [/ QUOTE ]

    HELLO wake up, GF2 has no shader support so it doesnt do normal maps etc. so you might aswell play Q3 and it looks the same as D3 with GF2...
    Oh wait maybe we could run D3 on 486 in text mode, WEEEE so playable.


    Anyways i have Radeon 9600 and it runs D3 fine (high detail at 800x600) and i havnt had any of this "omg ati drivers suck so bad you cant use it atall" crap, actually i think i had more problems with my GF3ti200.
  • KDR_11k
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    KDR_11k polycounter lvl 18
    Normalmaps are just dot3 bumpmapping, you don't need shaders for that, the GF2 can do that in the same way it can do environment mapping or alpha blending.
  • ElysiumGX
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    ElysiumGX polycounter lvl 18
    in fact, Q3 supports normal maps. it takes a little effort, and isn't as impressive due to lighting, but it's there.
  • CheapAlert
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    CheapAlert polycounter lvl 18
    [ QUOTE ]
    HELLO wake up, GF2 has no shader support so it doesnt do normal maps etc. so you might aswell play Q3 and it looks the same as D3 with GF2...

    [/ QUOTE ]

    hrm
  • thnom
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    thnom polycounter lvl 18
    [ QUOTE ]
    [ QUOTE ]
    HELLO wake up, GF2 has no shader support so it doesnt do normal maps etc. so you might aswell play Q3 and it looks the same as D3 with GF2...

    [/ QUOTE ]

    hrm

    [/ QUOTE ]

    8fps. It may handle them, but not well
  • KDR_11k
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    KDR_11k polycounter lvl 18
    That's Doom 3 we're talking about, that remains playable at 5 FPS.
  • CheapAlert
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    CheapAlert polycounter lvl 18
    [ QUOTE ]
    [ QUOTE ]
    hrm

    [/ QUOTE ]

    8fps. It may handle them, but not well

    [/ QUOTE ]

    The framerate doesn't get faster if you disable bumpmaps or specular, so they're not the problem, just the stupid stencil shadows (stencil shadows eat fill-rate no doubt), note i'm playing in a hi-res too

    Delta Force XTREEMEMEME!!! (Barf, at least it's the demo) runs well online on a 32 player server and just about everyone is bumpmapped.
  • Toomas
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    Toomas polycounter lvl 18
    [ QUOTE ]
    [ QUOTE ]
    HELLO wake up, GF2 has no shader support so it doesnt do normal maps etc. so you might aswell play Q3 and it looks the same as D3 with GF2...

    [/ QUOTE ]

    hrm

    [/ QUOTE ]

    The D3 i played looked about 100x better laugh.gif
  • Rwolf
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    Rwolf polycounter lvl 18
    cheap, you need to stop living 2 hardware generations behind all together. Scrounge up some money and buy a ultimate gaming PC!

    meh anyway I bough a Power Color 9250 256mb PCI a while back for my digital 2d art PC. It's ok, but it's still slow running and of todays flash programs and high poly 3Dsmax. It's decient enough to run Painter and Photoshop. I only mainly bought it so I can run multiple monitors. (I probably blame the outdated PCI slot limiting performance, don't know why I didn't go with AGP instead...)
  • KDR_11k
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    KDR_11k polycounter lvl 18
    Scrounge up some money and buy a ultimate gaming PC!

    I did that for roughly 600 Euros, you can probably get away with less by not buying that expensive a graphics cards (I got a GF6800 when they were new, I just like how much mileage you can get out of an expensive card, no need to adjust to new cards for a few years). After all, there's no need to replace the drives, case, peripherials or monitor. I think in some custom vs. Dell thread here we managed to build a very good gaming machine for 400-500$.
  • CheapAlert
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    CheapAlert polycounter lvl 18
    i wish people could re-read the top of the thread to show why i'm getting a budget card again. I've the dough to get a great one (heh I got the Plextor PX-716A Dual Layer DVD-RW recently and works snazztastical) but i'm not going to.

    Is it the shader support that sucks, forcing you have to turn it off and take huge step backwards to the Geforce2-level GFX? What about the Radeon 9250, how is it's shader performance, even though it only supports pixel shader 1.1?

    And no, i'm not getting a new PSU and CPU. My Athlon works great and i'm not getting a new CPU/mobo/case till that breaks. Besides, wouldn't all these newer cards be bottlenecked by the 950?

    I've only made up this thread to hear opinions on which card is obviously better for a polycounter, and most point to the GFFX5200, so i'll just get that then.

    Oh and finally, I don't plan to run many "next-generation" games - so yeah, not really looking forward to playing Fear anytime soon.

    TOO LATE I ORDERED HAHAHAHA
  • CheapAlert
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    CheapAlert polycounter lvl 18
    k guys, I got the gffx5200, I like it, i'm surprised it's not slower than my gf2 as the horror stories tell me so (yey) and now I can RUN bf2 without a glaring problem. Thanks gusy!
  • Raven
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    Raven polycounter lvl 18
    I play Doom3 on an Athlon 2600+ 512MB GeForce 5200 (Standard) 64MB AGP8x. Plods along nicely at 30fps on High Settings, you get like 10fps extra on Low so not even worth the graphics crap-out.

    The problem with the low-end GeForce and Doom 3 is actually the Fillrate. Budget GeForce FX/6 have horrible small fillrates, so they can't run shaders very well.

    That's where the majority of Doom 3's speed goes. It's also quite a damn sight faster than the budget Radeon. So again I wouldn't worry about the whole 'speed difference'

    Personally I would've gone for the 6200 AGP8x or 9600XT as they both run one hell of a lot quicker at only a slightly higher cost, like 2-3x the speed.

    smile.gif I'm currently waiting for the 7200 before I update my budget-end system.

    Something I don't like about the 5200 is it's vertex throughput.

    5200 - ~63 Million / Second
    9200 - ~80 Million / Second
    6200 - ~260 Million / Second

    You won't notice much of a difference in Doom 3, but in Half-Life 2 the speed will seriously improve.
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