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Help! I need to buy video cards today!

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  • Graphics Cards
  • Gainward
  • Graphics
  • Product
Last response: in Graphics & Displays
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Anonymous
a b U Graphics card
January 24, 2002 3:19:04 PM

Ok, I'm confused as hell now. I had bought 2 GeForce3 (non TI) Gainward cards for $264 which seemed pretty reasonable, only to find out one was backordered and now can not be attained. Additionally almost nobody has GeForce3 TI500's, and if they do the price is now $370+. What's going on?

Ok, well I have to get 2 more video cards pretty damn soon here. The one Gainward Geforce3 I have rocks and rolls, but apparently I'm not going to be able to get another without divine intervention. So should I consider a couple ATI 8500s? I can't live without FSAA, and they seem to still suck in performance when enabling it from all the reviews. Are the GeForce4 cards really coming out soon? Help!

Ron

More about : buy video cards today

January 24, 2002 3:49:52 PM

First soon in the video card industry could be tommorow or 3 months from now so i would not wait for them to come out.

Second, although the Radeons do take a preformance hit when at maximum settings, the quality of the picture blows away NVidia's FSAA settings, and at the same level of quality, actually outreform the Geforce line of cards. If I were you, I would get the Radeon 8500, as the drivers are continuing to increase its preformance, and it offers more value in its price, features and specs. Also If you are running Windows ME/98SE, you should have no problems. Just make sure that there are no NVidia drivers on the machine when you install an ATI product as they will not like each other,

If it works for you then don't fix it.
January 24, 2002 4:16:25 PM

where have you been looking for Ti500s?
I suggest going to <A HREF="http://www.pricewatch.com" target="_new">www.pricewatch.com&lt;/A> and searching there. You should be able to find anything you want at reasonable prices. And I'm also sure that computer stores in your are have Ti500s cheaper than $370, I know best buy sells the Visiontek for $350. And for a product that has a lifetime warranty I'd say $350 isn't THAT bad, but the same can be had off the internet for around $300-320.
The 8500s are looking to be pretty nice, but I still refuse to buy one until they have drivers that show me performance. And I'm talking support for all Operating systems, I want support in 98se, win2kpro, XP pro, and Linux. It has the potential to spank Geforce 3 cards but just isn't doing it yet. My friends that own 8500s always bitch and moan that the card only works good for them in 98se or ME and gives bad performance in win2k and XP.

I'd have to say look how much money you want to spend, the performance you expect to achieve, and the operating system you want to run and then decide.

Trusting every aspect of our lives to a giant computer was the greatest thing we ever did -Homer
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Anonymous
a b U Graphics card
January 24, 2002 5:35:28 PM

Yea, that's my concern with the ATIs.

On Pricewatch, I'm always concerned when dealing with someone that I've never dealt with before. I always try to go with someone that I've either had recommended to me or where their customer rating is really good. If someone could recommend a good place to order from, I'd do it right away.

Ron
January 24, 2002 5:57:12 PM

Quote:

My friends that own 8500s always bitch and moan that the card only works good for them in 98se or ME and gives bad performance in win2k and XP.

Not anymore, try the certified 6014/6015 under Win2K or WinXP(same thing) and you'll be getting the same performance under those OSs as Win98 and ME.

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor
January 24, 2002 6:01:00 PM

<A HREF="http://www.newegg.com" target="_new">Newegg</A>

<font color=orange>Quarter</font color=orange> <font color=blue>Pounder</font color=blue> <font color=orange>Inside</font color=orange>
Anonymous
a b U Graphics card
January 24, 2002 6:05:01 PM

Do the ATI's still lag in performance using 4X FSAA or Smoothvision which is supposed to be comparable but better performing? That's my biggest hangup. I use FSAA and can't imagine going back to not using it, on games like Everquest (which is EXTREMELY demanding using DirectX 8.1, complex textures, and T&L effects). The picture quality with Quintex for instance is FAR superior to even 2X FSAA, and runs pretty darn well (Athlon 1900+, Gainward Geforce3). If it can't match that performance, I really don't want to buy it.

Ron
January 24, 2002 6:18:31 PM

Quincunx is a naturally faster technology then Smoothvision simply because it uses multisampling, rather than ATI's variation of supersampling. The advantage to ATI's attempt is no blurring on some textures and in rendered text, but it WILL always be slower than Quincunx. ATI's implementation of performance/quality 2X/3X/4X/5X/6X Smoothvision does however give the user more control over Smoothvision and so you aren't stuck with the taxing 4X+ Smoothvision. Also, another thing to consider is that the differences in quality between performance and quality SmoothVision is very small due to the Supersampling nature of the technology.

In any case, high-performance FSAA will never be the Radeon 8500's forte, although, high-quality FSAA supposedly is.

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor
January 25, 2002 12:49:49 AM

quincux is supposedly 4x FSAA at a 2x performance hit. Its a different method than traditional FSAA, but the quality is right around 4x, or maybe 5x if that even exhists.

Trusting every aspect of our lives to a giant computer was the greatest thing we ever did -Homer
January 25, 2002 4:29:22 AM

the quality of both a Geforce 3 and a 8500 seem to be the same when proper tweaks are used. the ATI driver fiasco is going on where ATI isnt giving drivers to developers anymore so "waiting for better performance" might be a long time(forever with ATI's history)....but on most of the current benchmarks ive seen the 8500 squeeked by the Ti500. if u really want FSAA 4X go with a geforce ti500...its performance is better than a 8500 with the same FSAA(6x cause they do it differently) anandtech wrote a big article on this and it can be found here http://anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1562
btw i own a kyro 2 and am happy with it, so all this info is stuff i read, not opinions of me
Anonymous
a b U Graphics card
January 25, 2002 11:25:05 PM

Thanks a ton for the info and thanks a ton for the link. This was just what I was looking for.

Ron
January 25, 2002 11:51:46 PM

Quote:

the quality of both a Geforce 3 and a 8500 seem to be the same when proper tweaks are used. the ATI driver fiasco is going on where ATI isnt giving drivers to developers anymore so "waiting for better performance" might be a long time(forever with ATI's history)....but on most of the current benchmarks ive seen the 8500 squeeked by the Ti500. if u really want FSAA 4X go with a geforce ti500...its performance is better than a 8500 with the same FSAA(6x cause they do it differently) anandtech wrote a big article on this and it can be found here http://anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1562

I'd like to make a couple of things clear:

First of all, lately, ATI has been updating drivers twice as fast as nVidia (leaked or otherwise). I believe in the past 1 month, I've seen 4 different leaked drivers and 1 new official certified driver. Driver update frequency is not the issue anymore, it's the driver quality of the updates. The 6014 seem to be amazingly stable drivers that improve image quality and performance even further than the 6011 drivers but don't include the enhanced anisotropic features of the 6018 drivers.

Why are you comparing 4X FSAA with a GeForce3 Ti500 and 6X FSAA with a Radeon 8500? That's obviously not a fair comparison. The Radeon 8500 has less blurring in textures with FSAA enabled than the GF3 Ti500 due to its use fo Supersampling. You can only compare a GF3's 4X FSAA to the Radeon 8500's 4X FSAA not 6X FSAA. No flame war intended but even Anandtech compared 4X to 4X.

As a sidenote, the Radeon 8500 will ALWAYS have slower FSAA than a GF3 because ATI is using supersampling instead of multisampling. While this does mean less blurring in some cases, I don't think it justifies the performance loss.


AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor
January 26, 2002 12:09:29 AM

Quincunx is really awesome for what it does!
But it's very young feature and needs to mature. Even though there is less performance hit, I could see frame skips on my Ti200 AXP1600, in many new games. I say they go on improving this awesome image smoothing thing, cuz it really almost eliminates aliasing entirely, at cost of blurriness. New GF4 cards should get real Aniso and very good QC performance.

But Ti200s are awesome nevertheless. Rads are also very awesome, but they got to keep up this good driver building, as they just might reclaim their reputation, that is ATI the CANADIAN!!

--
The other day I heard an explosion from the other side of town.... It was a 486 booting up...
January 26, 2002 2:40:50 AM

sorry, forgot to post the link where i got the driver info from http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=fb8a24f4b4... to sum up the link basically ATI said they would stop giving developers drivers, i think they released certified drivers shortly after that though....all of the leaks were unintentional
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