Advice please

[falo]

I'm planning on upgrading my ickle video card to something more chunky (mainly in anticipation of B&W, hence posting here). Someone either on this forum or the LH one suggested a 64Mb Radeon. As this is within my price range (£150 ish including VIVO and good DVD decoding) I'm thinking of getting it this week. I'd just be interested to hear if anyone disagrees with this choice / has any experiance with this particular card.

Thanks in advance for any advice and my apologies if this has wandered too far off topic.

[Sar]

Seems sound advice to me.

You may be able to scrounge a 32Mb Geforce2 GTS for £150 of you shop around, but I'd go for the Radeon at that price, as I've heard lots of good things about them.

:)

[lennon]

Ive heard that B&W makes extensive use of T&L which is only on NVIDIA cards but I might be wrong as I am no expert.

I have just bought a Geforce2 MX for £100 and it is awesome. I can run all the latest games (Hitman,Giants) with all the video options turned up and I only have a p2 266.

It is definately the best pc purchase I have ever made and it was a bargain price as well.

My advice buy whatever from somewhere like EB or Game as you have 10 days to take it back if it isnt as good as you thought it would be.

[falo]

Thanks guys, I'll bear that in mind.

[Sar]

The Radeon can handle T&L afaik as well...

[lennon]

Fair enough I didnt know that.

[falo]

Nice! It should be arriving at my door tomorrow with a DVD ROM drive. Now my PC is my complete entertainment system. Pure contentment (yes, I know. I'm very sad). The only thing it needs now is a coffee percolator and a beer pump.

[MUNKYFUNK]

and a woman:wink: :)

[Behemoth-100]

Nah just get down to a computer fair - youll get a geforce2 for £50-£70......

[falo]

Originally posted by MUNKYFUNK
and a woman:wink: :)

I knew I'd forgotten something.

[cleoteo]

/me slaps Munks :tongue:

[cleoteo]

Aww soz pumpkin,read it wrong and thought u said WOMEN
/me slaps myself :(

[The Larch]

I read soemthing a long time ago, think it was on 3dfxgamers (may it rest in peace), about the geforces having problems with certain texturing features - they compared several screenshots of giants on the geforce mx (I have the prophet II) and the Radeon which demonstrated that the image produced by the Radeon was simply in a different league from the Geforce in certain scenes - I have giants and the screenshot on the webbie of the geforce mx image was perfectly accurate..the sky being a vague reddish haze. I would never have realised that on the Radeon the the same scene is a stunning collection of vivid blues and purples. While I'm perfectly happy with my Prophet II its an interesting thing to bear in mind.

[lennon]

I have the Geforce MX and Giants looks pretty damn cool to me. I dont have the same problems you mention at all. Have you got the detonator drivers from NVidia?

[bilston]

I'm just worried if my Voodoo5 will hold out for all the max setting's in the game :/

[The Larch]

Lennon m8, it doesnt show up as a problem - u wouldnt realise that the card wasn't displaying the textures correctly unless you saw it displayed on a different card. It looks absolutely fine, it just looks much much better on the Radeon but you wouldnt realise it unless you played through the game on the two different cards and compared them directly.

[falo]

I have my Radeon at last but ... with a VIA chipset it's about as stable as the average guest on Jerry Springer. Looks like it's going to be a hard days tweaking ...

[lennon]

true larch but you said the screen looked a reddish haze. on my system I dont have that.

[The Larch]

Not the screen, the sky in certain places where it is supposed to be different. Same thing with water effects and some other stuff....was just one example. Take the mech mission where you have to open the big bridge thing into the island fortress - the sky on that is overwhelmingly red wheras on the radeon its vivid blue.

[Mr Carrot]

its meant to be red its dusk look at the position of the sun......

[The Larch]

*sigh*
If only 3dfxgamers ahdnt died you'd see what I'd mean from the screanies.....
Wish I'd never mentioned it now.

[MUNKYFUNK]

Nothing to do with the radeon but:-
I used to have a V3 3000 and the picture quality on that was sharper and more defined than my new(ish) GF2 GTS.The gforce is a lot faster though:)

[The Larch]

yeah munky, when i first got my prohpet 2 i was pissed as i couldnt believe how much worse the image was compared with my old voodoo3 - ive gotton used to it though and the latest dets help a bit. 32bit is nice too :)

[gandalf1]

I'm gonna have a bit of rant by here...but someone point
out to me the differences of 16-bit and 32-bit colour. I've
had the 'pleasure' of 32-bit in Quake3 since I got my GF2 MX
but tbh I can't notice any difference in visual quality
what-so-ever. It's like saying that 200fps is much better
and looks much smoother than 120 fps (even though the eye
really can't tell). Please, someone show me the way to
enlightment :)

[The Larch]

Yeah it can be difficult to notice the difference - I ain't got q3 so I don't know what difference it would make. However on Homeworld and earth2150 you definately can see a difference - the colours just seem brighter and more vivid, and basically look better. The space background on homeworld also has a smooth colour gradient as the colours change in 32bit, wheras in 16bit you can see where one colour ends and another begins as the palette simply isn't large enough. Hope that helps :)

[falo]

Try UT. I've played that in both 16 and 32 bit and there's really no comparison. It just makes the range of colours better. If Q3 is anything like the other two (dark and dingy) then I doubt you'd notice a few extra shades of brown. But then I've never played Q3.

[Sar]

Well Q3 maps fall into 3 categories:

Gothic (Think Quake 1)
Future (Think Quake 2)
Space Maps (Think grey hunks of concrete floating in space).

:)