Video card help

What are your current specs and price range?

I'm assuming that your video card is PCI-Express.

Depending on your budget:

~$100: BFG 7600GT OC'd -- After MIR

~$200: ATI X1800XT

~$300: MSI X1900XTX -- After MIR.

Since you already have a 6800, any other AGP card would marginally give you better performance than the 7800GS and would be a waste of money. Might as well save it for an upgrade next year when DX10 is here.

This one is recertified but I feel that if you pay over $270 for one, you might as well upgrade your system and get PCI-Express. eVGA 7800GS

Here's one benchmark of the 7800GS vs 6800 GT. Since the 6800GT is better than the 6800 that you have, it only means that the 7800GS is that much better than the 6800. Video Card Benchmarks

The ATI X850XT PE might be better than the 7800GS but it's hard to find, expensive and only supports shader 2.0.

Make sure your power supply is at least 350W.

BF2 should run fine on a 6800; however it does need 2GB RAM to run smoothly.

You're using socket 939, right? What's your exact mobo model? ASRock makes one model (939Dual-SATA2) that has both an AGP and a PCIe slot.

Unfortunately, this doesn't have BF2 benchmarks. Some games take advantage of the 2GB, some don't. If anyone has BF2 benchmarks with using 1GB or 2GB, please post the site here.Memory Benchmarks

These benchmarks use only 1GB of RAM. It doesn't explicitly say 1 or 2 GB, but when this article was written, 1GB was standard and that's what I'm assuming. BF2 Benchmarks

I'm going to assume that the 6800 and 6800GS are very close in performance.

From the benchmarks, you can see that a better video card will get you better frames and that 1GB of RAM is fine. Depending on your resolution of your monitor and how much eye candy you want, BF2 can quickly make the 6800GS grovel.

Personally, if you have a PCI-Express slot then I highly recommend getting either the X1800XT or X1900XTX if you can afford the extra 80 bucks and wait for the MIR.

those things are gonna be expensive i bet

That's the wrong 7800GS; the link you posted was to the 7800GS+, a 512MB 7900GT bridged to the AGP BUS. That card can't be found in the U.S. and already costs more than an X1900XT.