Purchasing a new video card

Holy crap...check this thread out....

http://forums.winxpcentral.com/showt...1843#post21843

D***, thanks for the warning. I used it a few times and have not found any problems. Even played a game with Punk Buster and did not get kicked or banned.
But the warning is enough to stop me using it. No need to take unnecesary chances!

thank god I tested it on the wifes pc.....and not mine.

I can now, no longer "go back to windows defaults" everytime I open the program warp speed is grayed out and i can only click on windows defaults. I restart and it tells me the same thing.
Whoever made this program should be drug out in the street and shot

System restore?

What the hell do I care...its the wifes pc HAHAHAHAHAHA

besides, win2000pro....no option for that

Hello,

Here is my ?...

I have an AMD athlon 1G , 384RAM , GF2 mx 32ram, and a MOBO that I would assume only takes PCI (Gateway). I am wanting to upgrade to a new VID card. My budget is at the high end at $125. What would you guys suggest? I don't want to get a whole new system right at the moment... but is it even worth it to get a new VID card with my 1G processor? I am a gamer (CS, trying to play Call of duty on my old cpu:)) / Photoshoper.

Thanks for any and all help :)

Brandon

Here's the updated version of the site that someone linked to on page 1 of this thread. Gives a good comparison of cards and frame rates on different games.

VGA Charts

From the list of cards you listed, these are gamers cards. Even though you not wanting a card that for gamers, it might be a good idea to move into one. My reason are cause not all high end card are just good for games, but they are good for video. If you plan to do anything movie recording. I have an on-board Savage 3D video, so it's pretty much built into the motherboard, but has an option to disable and install AGP video card, but right now money is tight. I got my MSI motherboard with prosseror for under $200.00 and thats with an on-board video card installed! I paid an extra $60.00 later on down the line and had a ATI T.V. tuner card installed. ATI Readon 9700 w/t.v. tuner is about $160.00. A great buy. But alittle more if you want a remote.

hey all,
i am new here.
can someone tell me wat a video card is?and of course wat does a gamer do?i'm a little ignorant about all this
hehe
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http:www.zonelinks.com
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The Power Link Dimension

Hi Zonelinks, and welcome to Vdr :)
Simply put, a video card handles the graphics of the computer. A gamer is one who plays games. In order to play games, you need a video card. The better the video card, the better graphics you can get in your games. If you have an old card, most new games will not even work on your computer.

HTH :)

Hello zonelinks,

I'd just like to go into a little more detail about video cards and gamers. Pretty much anyone who uses their computer mainly for game-playing is considered a "gamer". Someone like me, for example. I build my own computers mostly for gaming purposes. Most computers made within the last two years, or so, can run things like Microsoft Word, Photoshop, and internet browsing. You don't need an extremely fast computer to run these programs, nor do you need a computer that has a good video card.

Pretty much every computer has a video card (if you use a monitor with it). A video card is basically the part of the computer that takes the information a computer churns out and makes it into a video image to be sent to a monitor. Some video cards (like most of the ones in computers you'd buy at Wal-Mart, Staples, or Best Buy) are built onto the motherboard of the computer. This is called "on-board video". The computer must have some memory to use in order to render the graphics on the screen. Most computers with "on-board video" share their video memory with the system memory. This means that there is no memory dedicated just for the video portion of the computer and makes a huge difference with games.

Video games have to do what's called "rendering". Basically it's making an environment, objects, creatures, etc. that you can interact with. In order to create these objects and make them look real the computer has to "draw" them from every angle, so that if you're in a game and you look at a table for instance, you can walk completely around it and it exists as a complete 3D object in the world. If it were 2D, you would only be able to see it from one angle and wouldn't be able to walk all the way around it.

How do the game-makers create these objects? They start with dots, points in 3D space. Then they connect these dots to make what's called a "wireframe". The game-makers can then use this wireframe to move around the environment and make up the game mechanics. They use the wireframes because the computer doesn't have to do much work to create them. There is a relatively low amount of data to create the wireframes so the game makers can work with them to tell the game how characters move, interact with certain objects, and paths they can take in the game, versus places they can't go. Once the wireframe is done they use shaders to make the objects seem to have depth and shadows in the world, which makes them realistic.

The final step is to "paint" the objects, which gives them the actual look of a real object. Painting is the final step that gives the skin on a person, the clothes, the hair color, etc. When you factor in all of these things, and consider that a video game has to run all of this data billions of time a second, you can see why having a faster video card with more memory can help a game run better. The video card is taxed with a very large amount of the workload in creating the graphics you see on the screen. As games become more and more life-like, video cards (and processors and memory) must become faster to deal with the amount of data that is required to create these life-like images in real-time.

Hopefull that helps to explain the importance of video cards to you a little.

Later,
Webshark2000

i was browsing www.newegg.com over the weekend and they have an chaintech geforce 5200 with 256 mb ram agp 8x card for 82.00 check out www.newegg.com and search for the part # N82E16814145083 i may even have to scoop one of those up at that price fo my current project pc

not sure where this thread has headed as I am too lazy to read it all, but just my 2 cents, after years of preaching Nvidia, I have come full circle. I have lots of driver problems over the years with my ti4600.

I went out this weekend and got a ATI 9800 pro (256).

It runs DOOM3 at high great.
runs MS flight sim
runs SOFII with no probs.

so far, I am back to an ATI fan.

im all nvidia all the time they just mesh so well with amd cpu's ive had great luck with em and everyone i know whos used an ati card hasnt been happy withthem...

Hello,

Just purchased a 17" LG Flatron LCD monitor and I notice that it has "ghosting". Is this normal for a flat monitor and if not what can I do to correct this problem?

Cheers