i need an agp card that will play ut2k7 and crysis

i need an agp card that will play ut2k7 and crysis on medium to high settings. by this i mean 4xaa and 1024x768.

the cards i'm considering at the moment are:
a. 6800xt
the card is cheap, has 256 bit, ddr3 ram, sm3.0, hdr, but only 8 pipes

b. 7600gs
one step below the 7800gs (fastest agp card), but only 128-bit. not sure if it can fully take advantage of hdr and sm3.0

c. 7800gs
powerful but too expensive. i don't want to waste money on a dying agp system that will create a block in my upgrade path.

d. x800gto
cheap price, 16 pipes, 256bit, ddr3 ram, but no hdr or sm3.0. it's also known to get very hot, meaning i will have to spend $20 extra for an aftermarket cooler.

e. x850pro.
same price as 7600gs and it has more juice. but it doesn't have sm3.0 or hdr. ati cards are also known to have numerous driver problems and compatability issues with certain games.

f. wait until the games come out, at which point the 7600gt will be available and that will give me the best price to performance ratio.
the only problem i have with this option is my current graphics card is a 4yr old radeon 9000 and i can't play my favorite games like cs:s, fear, and quake 4. if i wait until the 7600gt, summer will be over and i won't be able to play during the school year. 7600gt will also cost a lot and that doesn't make sense because i am planning on getting a pci-e system in a year or so once dx10 and vista are out and stable.

which of these cards give me the best value and at the same time can be able to play ut2k7 and crysis with medium to high settings?

HDR and SM3.0 are nice but gravely OVERRATED. They are nice to have if you can afford to blow some really serious cash on a top of the line machine.

Other than that you have it all figured out. Decide what's more important to you in an AGP card and go for it.

However, NONE of the cards currently on the market (AGP or PCIe) will be able to run Crysis or UT2007 at high resolutions with all eye candy enabled. I can pretty much guarantee you that SM3.0 and HDR on any nV AGP card available now or later will be USELESS in these games since they will cause the game to run at 15 FPS or lower (unless you are cool with playing at 640x480).

I take my info about potential sysem reqs for Crysis from CGW. I've subscribed to this magazine for some 10 years and I've been PC gaming hard for 16+years. In my experience CGW guys are almost never wrong. August issue of CGW has an article on Crysis. Dude, you have no idea what that graphics engine is designed to do. The game is two GPU generations ahead of its time. Seriously.

It is my educated guess that a top of the line machine with Core 2 Duo, 4Gb of RAM + the hottest next generation GPU with DX10 support will struggle in Crysis at any resolution higher than 1152x864 with all eye candy up, low AA, Medium AF and HDR on. I'd think that such a machine will still have its minimum frame rates drop as low as 20 FPS in some areas.

To give you an example, when Far Cry came out I had the hottest PC money could buy with a 6800 Ultra, 1 gig of RAM etc. Could never enable all the highest detail settings, AA greater than 2X, AF greater than 8X and run it 100% smoothly at any resolution higher than 1280x1024. Even at this relatively low resolution I saw FPS drops in certain areas. I like high resolutions because to my eye they do more for perceived image quality than AA, for example. I played the game at 1600x1200 but I had to turn down some detail settings. So there.

What do you mean "redundant"? That word makes no sense in the context....

As for Oblivion being an indicator of future requirements, it kind of is but it really is not. Crysis will be videorealistic (as opposed to photorealistic). In Oblivion, for example, animations SUCK. Most of the animations look simply unnatural. Heck, even World of Warcraft has better movement and combat animations than Oblivion. Crysis will require a hell of a lot more rendering power than Oblivion.

If you get a motherboard with pci-express, you can save money on the graphics card and you can move your card to your new computer once you upgrade.

Look dude, u want a card that can run CRYSIS, but u dont want it to be expensive, theres ur mistake! The only way ur going to be able to run Crysis on medium-high is with a powerfull 400-600$ PCI-E card. The 7800GS is overpriced, so ur only bet is to get a new Motherboard. I got mine for 70$ and now i can get a PCI-E card. Dude, ur talking CRYSIS, this isnt going to be cheap.

I don't see any of these cards being that effective in either of those games. The 7800GS might be able to run it at medium settings with probably most of the eye candy turned off. Maybe if you flashed the X850Pro to an X850XT PE it might be able to run it on medium settings. These cards have a tought time in Oblivion running at medium to high settings, I doubt they'll be able to survive in Crysis.

I do not know what these people are talking about. I have an x850xt and it runs Oblivion fine. I get 30-35+fps in almost every situation. Indoors that number goes way up. My machine is a 2 year old P4 550 3.4 with Hyper Threading and 2 gigs of Ram. I even can run Farcry at high settings with no issues at all. Alot of the people hear just cannot cope with not having top of the line stuff. A game company is not going to put out a game that only 3% of the population can play, its that simple. If the game requires a 400+ dollar card it will not sell well.

how does 1.5GB RAM prevent dual channel? is there any way for me to fix this problem?

so to prevent bottlenecking i will have to remove the 512? i will only be left with 1GB, but that's fine because i know my brother needs an extra 512mb anyways. its better than letting the 512MB go to waste.

Like i said, my game performance is great, everyone here would laugh my system into the ground. I have never had any problem getting at least 30+fps in anything. I get over 100fps in HL2 with it maxed out. So far the most challanging game has been Ovlivion, but as i stated i have it at 1280x1024 on my 17 in ultra sharp Dell LCD and it gets 30+fps. I do not have aa and af maxed out in it, but it is still totally playable. People do not need maxed out systems to run anything. Example when ut2004 came out people were crying that thier systems sucked. That game made most people get new systems vs thier 3 to 4 year old system. They will not make a game that will force you to have a 3000+ system.

He wants medium to high settings with 4xaa and 1027x768. I had a nvidia fx5200 with 128 mb of ram and a AMD xp 2500 and i could run Doom 3 at that setting when it first came out and got 30+fps. He is not asking for MAX settings. Most games have options to disable stuff that is not visually worth it to the game. You do not have to play games that support SM 3.0 with the 3.0. You can sure but you do not HAVE to. I think what he is wanting to do is possible. I know on the ATI site they have refurb x850xt for about 150 bucks or he could go with a x850pro and make it a PE. Everyone here is stuck in well if i cant run the game maxed out the hell with it. You must remember that the game programers themselves must try games out on systems before they put it for sale. I do not think that each and every game stuidio has the maxed out super uber PC to test games on. I did beta testing for blizzard in California when i was there. The pcs we tested on were not super uber. They were typical systems to simulate regular PCs people would actually have.

Driver problems and compatability issues? Known by who? Maybe Nvidia fanboys, but not the rest of the unbiased community. Both Nvidia and ATI have their pluses and mius', but in the end their all good cards.

Go with the clearance ATI cards. Their both leaps and bound ahead of what you have now, and won't break the bank. They'll hold you off until you can upgrade to DX10 and Vista, and really be able to play Crysis at med-high settings.

I'm not sure when Unreal Tournament 2007 will be released; they were shooting for this year, given that "model years" are one year ahead, as it was with UT2k3. Of course, it appears that the split happens at mid-year, so that could mean anywhere from this year, to all the way through spring of next year.Similarly, Crysis is slated not to be released this year.

And as a correction, "HDR" isn't a feature for a card, it's a type of shader, that can be written in either SM 2.0 or SM 3.0; about half of major HDR-using games have a SM 2.0 option, be it in-game or a user-mod, for games like Half-Life 2/Counter-Strike: Source and Oblivion, and, if I understand right, Splinter Cell 3.

However, let's take a look at the candidates:[list=a73c685544][*73c685544]6800XT - I simply don't recommend this card; it performs like a 6600GT most of the time, and costs significantly more. A scam, in my opinion.
[*73c685544]7600GS - Nowhere near as powerful as the 7600GT (about a 30-40% reduction) but still perhaps respectable. Very little memory bandwidth, though.
[*73c685544]7800GS - Technically the most powerful AGP card, (Gainward's been selling 7800GTs and even 7900GTs re-branded as "7800GS" cards for AGP) but it is only marginally more powerful than the vastly cheaper competition.
[*73c685544]X800GTO - Arguably nice from a price-performance standpoint, but definitely too weak. It's not actually as hot-running as they say; it runs at 400MHz with a cool-running R430 core.
[*73c685544]X850pro -In many cases with newer games, the X850pro may actually out-perform the 7800GS; Oblivion is such an example. However, prices are often not good; you might pick one up from ATi's store, but who knows when you'll actually get it.
[*73c685544]Wait - In my opinion, the only really good choice you presented. The 7600GT may or may not be the best choice, as the vendors may decide to jack the price to obscene levels. Similar tales may go for the X1650/X1700, (whatever it's called) which would be even more powerful than the 7600GT; expect to probably shell out $300US+ for either card in AGP form.
[*73c685544]Don't buy your card for Crysis or UT2K7 - Had to add this; this is really my suggestion to you. You might want to pick up a cheap SM 2.0 or 3.0 card for the meantime, such as an X800XL for $119US off of ATi's site; use it until next year, when you can move up to a full PCI-e system. Thsoe games you're waiting for are pretty far away, and you could probably re-sell a decent AGP card for close to what you bought it for.

You got your X850pro finally? Happy gaming.

"Since DirectX 10 cards didn't exist in May, the Crysis demo at the Electronic Entertainment Expo was actually running on DirectX 9 video cards, which is a good indication of what sorts of visuals you'll get with current hardware. "The E3 demo was all about DX 9 shader model 2.0--there was no more technology than this," Yerli said. He also addressed some of the controversy around the E3 demo. While visually amazing, the frame rate struggled quite a bit throughout the demo. However, he noted that Crysis was running on dual graphics-processor-unit systems, while most other PC games at the show were running on quad GPU systems. Still, we can expect performance on DirectX 9 cards to be smoother once the game is finished and optimized."

Pulled this from a new Gamespot article for Crysis. They were using dual GPUs and the frames were still laggging. Performance still looks promising for DX9 cards.

As other had stated your request is unrealisted to say the least. I would (again as other suggested) just go ahead and pick a nice AGP card from ati the x800xl for 120 or the pro for 850pro 140. With that in your current system you will be able to play the current generation of games out at 10x7 with some eye candy on and should be able to at least play the Ut7 and cysis at minium (maybe a little higher depending if the directx 9 path path is more forgiving since there is less options on).
At the very least I think if you upgrade to any of the cards on your list (even the cheapest) will be leaps and bounds more powerfull than your current card and you would not be disapointed.

Not surprisingly I like your analysis, pretty clearly outlined.

the only thing I'd add to it is that GW is selling his GF7800GS for $199 (see his sig), so that's a nice price compared to what we usually see.

I'm still not a fan of the card, but if I were going to recommend any card for those games, regardless of unrealistic expectations, that would be a good starting point IMO.

Dammit, I should have seen that :!:

If you want to buy a card for a specific game that's not out yet, wait until that game is out, read all the benchies published on the net, THEN you'll know what's card's best. This is what I did for Oblivion.

Dude, you need new everything!
You might play DX10 games in a compatibility mode.

True it just always makes me laugh that there isn't any, like calculating everything on the other sied of that hill that I can't see, or the other side of that wall, etc.

Yeah I'd really love to see what they could've done with DX10 and all the front end culling that has been added.

i didnt read all the replys to your posted question but if i were you i would buy something better for cheap, poss used from ebay and save my money for my next system upgrade and play the games you are into now and do upgrade when money allows.i had a system p4 3.0 ghz and 9600 ati card and played fear at decent resoulotions before i built current system.pick up a 9600 xt or 9800 on the cheap and save for later

Three things Bethesda's not good at:
- stability
- human bodies
- animations
Heck, even the ragdoll-physics generated animations looked so wrong that soon after the game some guy published a mod to fix them.

But I'm curious how better animations are going to require "a hell of a lot more rendering power". Word doesn't have a harder time opening a text file because it's Shakespeare. Oblivion wouldn't require any more rendering power if it's animations were more realistic. :?:

You took my words out of context.

Firstly, you missed this:

"Crysis will be videorealistic (as opposed to photorealistic)."

Secondly, you cannot use the MS Word analogy. It is not the same thing. I will use a more appropriate analogy and ask you this:

Do you think that rendering a still (2D) image requires the same amount of power as rendering a dynamic (moving) 3D image of the same level of detail?

Oblivion animations are mostly stiff (I like the horses though ). Therefore it is easier for the hardware to display high level of detail on armor, weapons, etc. Make the animations fluid and lifelike and it will require more processing power to maintain proper level of detail, shadows and lighting.

So, going back to Crysis, I've read that the level of video realism will be unprecedented and will include facial expressions, cuts and bruises on people's bodies, faces and limbs, real time terrain deformation (for example, you can set a corn field on fire, watch how it changes and - through your scope or binoculars - observe the ensuing chaos and horror on the faces of your enemies caught in this field).

In short, all else equal, maintaining high level of detail on realistically animated characters and environments requires more rendering power. WoW textures are rather simplistic and even the most elaborate objects are not very detailed so it runs well on slower machines even though its animations are quite good.