ya but Radeon 8500 is way better and u'll get it cheap as hell, and who needs SX9 anyhow ( for now ) :]

Well, he wants to do it for pixel and vertex shaders, and the 8500 may not support all of the newer ones.

If you want to make serious games, I would recomend the 9600XT or even the 9800 or 9800 Pro. Great prices at www.newegg.com

came from geforce to ati
the ati9600pro has a good performance
and cool price - in germany ~160 €.
if you buy it second-hand is about ~120 € thats fair!

I would recommend ati 9800 pro card. They are very cheap right now.

Or... if you like taking chances... I bought 9800SE with a 256-bit memory bus (you know that its a 256-bit card if it has L-shaped memory chips) and i modded it to 9800 Pro using Omega enhanced Catalyst drivers. Works like a charm (not to mention i only paid 120 euro's for it ).

hello,

I'm going to buy a new video card.
After reading your posts and looking at the prices I came to two video cards:

Nvidia GeForce FX 5200
and
Radeon 9600

which one is better??

as my PC is not the newest one (AMD Athlon 1333 MHz, 256 MB DDR RAM) I think that better video cards are not for me...


thank you in advance
Elena.

hey... i've started a wild fire here

ok - here's what i've done.

i started out by buying the geforce fx 5700 with 256 ddr ram.
it was on sale for only a couple dollars more than the 5200 version so i couldn't resist. at first blush i was quite impressed with the card - THEN - i '3d benchmarked' it and was considerably 'underwhelmed' with it's score - 1325 compared with my buddies 5000+ on his radeon 9800 pro.
next, i installed and tried to play far cry (awesome game btw), on the bare minimum for video settings, i was still running into some fairly serious fps issues (especially on indoor levels).

frustrated with all of this, i payed an extra $100 bucks and bought the 9800 pro (yes, my budget has taken a serious butt-kickin)

this card is everything that folks say it is! fast and beautiful. far cry sails along at the 'high' qualilty video settings with no framerate problems.

i love a happy ending

Hi there, definately don't buy a ATI radeon 9200, but buy a radeon 9600 (256mb) instead!! It's not that expensive and it has lots of shader support for games......

edit: oops, so you've bought yourself a even better gfx card huh?! Well the 9800 is superb too! Currently I'm running a P4 3 Ghz. with ATI's 9600 256 mb and FarCry, Splinter Cell 2 etc. run very very nice indeed!! I wouldn't recommend anyone buying a NVIDIA card actually, my dad has a FX 5700 256 mb, and it's sucks compared to my radeon 9600 256mb and I mean some serious quality differences here !!!!!

Cheers!

Hi I currently own a Geforce FX 5200 and a Radeon Wonder 9800 PRO. Of course Radeon is better, but if I were to buy a card now if I did not have a good card, I would still buy the Geforce FX 5200, only 80 dollars for a 128 MB RAM one, and it's great, works with all the new games. But Geforce FX 5200, so cheap and you'll be happy, I garantee it

Or you can always buy a radeon 9600XT, they're cheap as dirt now!

Other cool and cheap cards - Nvidia FX 5900XT - kicks ass, but radeon rules

Radeon 9700 card - best buy today, also can be modded to 9800 pro

I would reccomend a radeon 9700 card.. or a 9500 pro or plain 9500 because they can also be modded