Doom 3 and $250 for a new card

kherman

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I have an Athlon 2800+ WITH AN ati 9600 SE. I figure I'm looking at 640x480. Not going to happen ;)

So, I am leaning towards the Geforce FX 5700 Ultra w/128 meg. newegg has them for $160. I can't see a better upgrade path. Any ideas for a sub $250 card?
 
Forget the FX5700U it sucks ROYAL<b>L</b>LY!

Go with the FX5900XT at least. It's a much better card, and will not only give you the boost you need in D3 but in every other game. Depending on how much of the $250 you want to part with you may be able to find a cheap FX5900/5900U if you look hard enough. Also check pricewatch and other sites.


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priyajeet

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<A HREF="http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?name=HIS-98PROQ" target="_new">This</A> again.
A lot of threads deal with sub 250 card. Maybe u shld chk them.

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davemar14

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I would get a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro from newegg.

<A HREF="http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-102-286&depa=0" target="_new">http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-102-286&depa=0</A>
 

Obtuse

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Agreed, 9800pro can run Doom III at medium, probably run it acceptably at high if you finagle the settings a bit.

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sweatlaserxp

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I've been playing Doom all afternoon, and at high detail the 9800 Pro gets choppy framerates very often. Not going to be much better with the 5900. Also, the framerates aren't much better at medium detail, which leads me to believe that lowering the res. (nooo!!!!) will improve performance significantly.
 

kherman

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Well, I ordered a card. A friend convinced me to spend an extra $50. I ended up spending $300 on an NVidia 6800 128 meg card. The base 6800 essentially. With shipping it came to $300.

Also needed a bette rpower supply. Got a 520 watter for $60.

Should be here on Friday. As an extra piece of info, I got Doom 3 and ran the time demo (without watching it) and did 17 frames per second at 640x480 with no AA and medium quality settings. OUCH.
 

kherman

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Oh, I did read all the posts. I was considering a 5900 at minimum. Not the 5700 I originally had in mind.
 

phial

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Agreed, 9800pro can run Doom III at medium, probably run it acceptably at high if you finagle the settings a bit.

actually a 9800pro could probably run D3 at 1024x768 @ high detail and stay over 40fps min probably (the threshold where i start to notice mouse lag. a big nono for first person shooters. of course ive never played it yet so im speculating based on reviews)


and Hardocp said the game doenst need AA, theres very little aliasing for some reason. 800x600 even looks nice with no AA from what they wrote

from the screens i seen , Ultra detail setting doenst look that much nicer than High detail

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sweatlaserxp

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Yeah, but you're referring to average framerates- there are critical scenes where the FPS takes a significant hit, like wayyy below 30. It depends on the exact location, but it can be really annoying when it actually happens.
 
G

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Still a few sharp edge here and there and I tryed the game with 2X AA and it did look better @1024 but it was barely fast enough.
But it does still look real good without AA


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