Recomended graphic card

[mikedep333]

Hey munch.

First of all, the ATI 9250 supports directx 8.1 features (shader model 1.x). The 9550 and higher in the 9000 series support directx 9.0 features (shader model 2.0.) I believe this is what Spring uses right now. GF FX cards have part of directx 9.0c, shader model 2.0a, although they suck at doing shaders compared to all the other series that do them. ATI X700 and x800 support part of DX 9.0C, shader model 2.0b. ATI X1x00 series cards and GF 6000 series cards support full directx 9.0c shader model 3.0. Getting a SM 3.0 card is useful, but not essential. Spring may support SM 3.0 later on, either for more effects or improved performance at existing effects.

As for spring performance of ATI cards, I haven't seen specifics, but I know that ATI's opengl peformance is much worse than nvidia's. Like only 2/3 the speed. ATI can optimize the drivers for opengl games, but I doubt they'll be doing that anytime soon.

Also note that Nvidia has far better linux drivers than ATI.

The whole 256 megs of video ram only really help you in games if you are getting a much better card, like a 6600 or x700 series card. Rumors are that Windows Vista will want 256 megs though (in addition to needing directx9 (shader model 2.0) features.)

Here are how the model numbers compare in general performance (not opengl), but keep in mind that the GF FX's are sill much worse at any game using shaders.

ATI 9200/9250 = GF FX 5200 (and the X300 is a little better)

ATI 9500/9600 = ATI X600(PCIe only) = NV FX 5600/5700 = NV 6200

ATI 9700/9800 = ATI X700 = NV FX 5800/5900 = NV 6600

I would recomend getting a NV 6600 or 6200 series card if you can mostly because of the good opengl and shader performance. The 6600 is probably worth the extra money because the chipset has 2x as many pipelines and the memory has a 128-bit interface instead of a 64-bit one (some 6200 cards have a 128-bit interface, but they're very rare). Thus it is theoretically like 2x as fast.

Remember to get a card by a reliable brand. Sapphire is very good. Just post the options and I'll let you know how good they are.

[BeastmasteR]

I recommend the Geforce FX 5950 Ultra /256mb video RAM

Supports all options on full except the ones that mention the word "slow"

This card is discontinued so you'll have to do some scavenging around online retailers. Online price in the U.S. for this card is around $369

[Caydr]

I recommend the Geforce FX 5950 Ultra /256mb video RAM

Supports all options on full except the ones that mention the word "slow"

This card is discontinued so you'll have to do some scavenging around online retailers. Online price in the U.S. for this card is around $369

What a ripoff. A 9800 SE can be softmodded to 9800 XT stats without any difficulty and will cost you a fraction of that - AND outdo that crappy FX card.

[munch]

Fantastic reply - exactly what I wanted =) Thanks.

OK since you ask here are a few candidates. The budget is £50 including VAT and delivery, and I have AGP, not PCI-E, so that makes NV 6200 and ATI 9600 the best cards I can buy for the cash:

Sapphire Radeon 9600SE Atlantis 128MB

PNY Verto GeForce 6200 128MB

Other than that, I'm quite tempted by the Gainward 6200 card that somebody posted earlier in this thread, except that I really want to avoid e-Buyer if possible - they seem to be fine as long as nothing goes wrong, but of course things sometimes do go wrong.

Thanks again

Munch

PS what's the deal with buying a decent make? What do you lose buying an unreliable make - do the cards just not work half the time or what? Sorry to ask dumb questions, but I just don't know the answer.

[mikedep333]

Hey much,

Because of the OpenGL performance, I'd recomend either of the 6200's. The 9600SE is the worst of the 9600/9500 series anyway. Either will be good, but I think gainward is a little bit more reliable.

The deal with reliability is mostly how long the card is likely to stay functional. Cards by crappy brands have like a 50% chance of breaking within the first 2 or 3 years or so I'd say. Compatibility problems and whatnot are much less likely but they do happen. For example, my friend's XFX graphics card broke after a year or so, and when my other friend bought a XFX motherboard, it was only compatible with certain hardware out of the box. This was fixed by a bios update, but then it still had trouble. Less stuff can go wrong on a graphics card, but stuff like that still can happen with crappy brads.

Generally if a card has a good warranty, it's likely to be reliable.

[TA 3D]

Hate to bust anyones buble, but it's true about the next version of windows. Here it is: Windows Vista will require a 256mb video card to run. It will also require DX9 support on the card. And OpenGL is going to be software emulated, were as DirectX will be fully supported. So much for people wanting to upgrade, because Spring probaly wont run with Vista. All the companies that use OpenGL(Card manufactures, programers) are up in arms about it.

As for ATI, there OpenGL support is pathetic, were as their DirectX support is to "Microsoft's" standard. They have been succered in by Microsoft.

As for cards go with a 128mb GF 6 6600. That is a good all around card, and it can run shadows. A 256mb version is going to be double the price of a 128mb version. It fully supports OpenGL 2.0, shadermodel 3, ect.. And Nvidia cards work great on Linux.

Heck most might think of this as outdated(well it is old), but I use a GF 4 Ti4200 128mb card thats 8x AGP(running on 8x AGP) , and it runs 1280x1024 great at 75Hz and it runs great. Heck I even get 60-65 FPS with it running a 19" LCD on 32Bit color on DVI. The only thing I have found so fare is 3DS MAX 8 trial, and it started to slow with that.

[Torrasque]

Windows Vista will require a 256mb video card to run

Please stop spreading such bullshit.
In vista, the graphical interface will be separated from the core, like Linux.
Only one interface will require a card graphic ( and it's more 64mo than 256 )
And I'm not sure, but you will certainly be able to launch it in console mode

[AF]

Why bother, the major changes in vista are going to be sidelined as XP compatible, there's already beta versions of the avalon GUI for XP, and when vista is released it'll be released as a download for XP too. The same with the WinFS filesystem and a mass of other things.

Combine that with the apps already out that emulate vista's GUI in XP (see dashboard project, and the many longhorn transformation packs with themese and backgrounds).

[jcnossen]

And OpenGL is going to be software emulated, were as DirectX will be fully supported. So much for people wanting to upgrade, because Spring probaly wont run with Vista. All the companies that use OpenGL(Card manufactures, programers) are up in arms about it.

No, microsoft will implement an OpenGL wrapper to Direct3D, probably so hardware manufacturers don't necessarily have to write an OpenGL driver. So it will keep like 90% of the performance of the direct3D equivalent because it will still use the hardware through d3d. That's completely different from saying OpenGL will be software emulated.
But since ATi and nVidia both have direct OpenGL drivers to their hardware, I think there is a good chance they will just continue supporting them because they are faster than the microsoft OpenGL wrapper. After all MS can't stop them from writing an opengl driver.

As for ATI, there OpenGL support is pathetic, were as their DirectX support is to "Microsoft's" standard. They have been succered in by Microsoft.

When the first radeon just came out, ATi's drivers were buggy but now they are just as stable as Direct3D.
Performancewise they are just as good as D3D, and they actually had support for shader model 2 much earlier than nVidia. But then again that's because of the hardware.

Seriously, ATi doesn't invest a lot of money in developing faster hardware to loose it again in driver overhead, that's BS.
Would id software/carmack write the Doom3 engine for OpenGL if a major hardware vendor such as ATi would have seriously bad drivers?
Please show us where you read all that nonsense...

[mikedep333]

Zaphod, I believe that the reason why ATI purposely does not invest sufficient time in their openGL driver development is because few games use it. I believe John Carmack stuck with OpenGL because he is masterful at programming in it, because it is cross-platform, and because Nvidia helps them however they can.

Nevertheless, numerous benchmarks speak for themselves, Nvidia is much faster at openGL than direct3d. Here's one example of quake4, and keep in mind, quake4 is based on doom3, which was already optimized by ATI's drivers.
http://www.pcstats.com/ArtVNL.cfm?artic ... 01&page=10

going to the max settings:


NV 6800 GT: 55.82 FPS
ATI X800 XL: 36.2 FPS

NV 6600 GT: 40.75 FPS
ATI X700 Pro: 20.72

The latter is kind of unfair because the x700 xt was intended to match the 6600 GT but couldn't be produced in volume, but 2x the performance for a card only a little bit higher on the product lineup - that's amazing.

EDIT: oops, i meant to say nvidia is much faster at opengl than ATI

[PauloMorfeo]

... The same with the WinFS filesystem ...

Are you sure about that WinFS thing? From last i've heard, they were abandoning development in that file system.
It was already subject of jokes. If they really go forward with that file system, i'm gonna have my laughs at the amount of bugs it will bring. I, for one, can't be convinced that a file system with the features it will be suposed to have will come from Microsoft stable unless within quite some years of existance.

...
No, microsoft will implement an OpenGL wrapper to Direct3D, probably so hardware manufacturers don't necessarily have to write an OpenGL driver. ...

That's the whole scary part of it. If it becomes the standard way of using OpenGL in Windows, Microsoft will have taken control of another standard, doing what they want with it, increasing they're monopoly over software.

If Microsoft done things like modifying Sun's java compilers to make them produce code that would only run on Windows, what will keep Microsoft from ill-implementing the OpenGL standards greatly enforcing the use of DirectX over OpenGL?

[jcnossen]

Nevertheless, numerous benchmarks speak for themselves, Nvidia is much faster at openGL than direct3d. Here's one example of quake4, and keep in mind, quake4 is based on doom3, which was already optimized by ATI's drivers.

mikedep, that's an unfair comparision.
Showing that a particular nvidia card runs faster than an ATi card in OpenGL says absolutely nothing about direct3d.

What is really happening is that GF >=6600 support shader model 3, with all the new program flow control instructions in it. The ATI x600/x800 however supports only sm2. What you are comparing is efficiency of the two shader models in rendering, you're not really comparing speed of the cards in actual processing speed/memory speed.
There aren't any apps optimized for both opengl and d3d, so there really isn't a good way to test it I guess.

[Flint]

I recommend the Geforce FX 5950 Ultra /256mb video RAM

Supports all options on full except the ones that mention the word "slow"

This card is discontinued so you'll have to do some scavenging around online retailers. Online price in the U.S. for this card is around $369

With all due respect, this is a really bad idea. With you $369 you can get a 7800GT which in graphic processing abilities is 3 generations ahead.

Go ahead and read a bit, the 7800 series is by far the best out there right now. Not to mention its priced pretty well.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814143037

[aGorm]

Plus the 7900's will be comeing out at some point, I belive they have a die shrink to, which means... more speed again!

aGorm

[mikedep333]

Nevertheless, numerous benchmarks speak for themselves, Nvidia is much faster at openGL than direct3d. Here's one example of quake4, and keep in mind, quake4 is based on doom3, which was already optimized by ATI's drivers.

mikedep, that's an unfair comparision.
Showing that a particular nvidia card runs faster than an ATi card in OpenGL says absolutely nothing about direct3d.

What is really happening is that GF >=6600 support shader model 3, with all the new program flow control instructions in it. The ATI x600/x800 however supports only sm2. What you are comparing is efficiency of the two shader models in rendering, you're not really comparing speed of the cards in actual processing speed/memory speed.
There aren't any apps optimized for both opengl and d3d, so there really isn't a good way to test it I guess.

Zaphod, first of all, all GF 6000 series cards support shader model 3.0.
The x700/x800 series cards support SM 2.0b,( a useful improvement over SM 2.0 for performance.)
The x300/x600 and 9500/9600 series cards support SM2.0 itself.

Secondly, if modern Nvidia cards are inherantly faster than ATI SM 2.0 cards because of their SM 3.0 support, that's great; it proves part of my point point that nvidia cards are faster in openGL than ATI cards that aren't in the new X1000 series.

Anyway, what I said there was a mistake. I meant to say that Nvidia cards are faster than comprable ATI cards when doing opengl. This is what I demonstrated with the benchmarks and the comments about it. That is the only thing I'm trying to prove and I'm sorry for any confusion because of that. I believe there is alot of confusion going on.

I am not simply talking about a specific cards. I found a benchmark, and I only compared the cards that are direct competitors to eachother. For example, I didn't mention the regular 6800 because there was no vanilla X800 there.
Nevertheless, here's another benchmark comparing performance.
from this page. Again, if you compare all the ATI cards to their exact equivalent nvidia ones, you see that nvidia is ahead. You can also look at the doom3 benchmark there, Nvidia still wins, just not by as much because ATI optimized the crap out of that game, as they eventually did with quake4. They have not optimized TAspring. Furthermore, that call of duty test uses virtually no shaders at all! I don't even believe quake4 and doom3 use shader model 3.0 stuff, maybe they do, maybe they don't. But simply by looking at call of duty, a pretty much raw opengl game, we can see that nvidia is far ahead in opengl performance. You can go back and fine some RTCW benchmarks too for example, they'll also show nvidia ahead.

Ultimately I don't care what you think about direct3d vs opengl, as comparing that is extremely difficult. I also don't care what you think about nvidia vs ati in general, for direct3d, or even raw shader performance (now that the abysmal GF FX series is dead), as those arguments can easily go back and forth with no conlusion. But as for Nvidia Opengl vs ATI Opengl, there is a clear winner. In the absence of spring benchmarks, that is what matters most for this game.

I offer to help prove that nvidia cards are better in Spring though. I have an athlon 64 3000+ system with a 6800GT and a system with an athlon 2800+ (but with slow DDR266) with a 9600 pro. If anyone has a x800 series card, a x1600 series card (comprable to the 6800 series), a 6200 series card, or a GF FX 5600/5700 card (we'd test without shaders) and with a CPU around 3 or 2.8 ghz or AMD equivalent, let's compare spring benchmarks. You'd just have to set your ram to 266 mhz. We'll create a demo and test the speed with fraps (or taksi if that measures FPS yet.)

[Torrasque]

It could be cool to have a Spring benchmark, cause you are only taking your benchmark from Carmack's engine and that's not really representative.

[Maelstrom]

I would be willing to help with that

I got:
GeForce 6600GT
Pentium 4 2.4 Mhz (or something)
512 DDR ram

[Min3mat]

2.4 MHz?
i really hope u mean GHz..././
i got a pentium 4 3GHz with a GeForce FX5200. no idea how to do what u r talking about but if someone would walk me through then i would be willing to help.

[Weaver]

It could be cool to have a Spring benchmark, cause you are only taking your benchmark from Carmack's engine and that's not really representative.

Interesting idea, it could work with a little app to preset or just record the graphic options. A demo of a game perhaps something scripted so that we dont have to wait for the action. Then something to log the results, to a text format that we can easily distribute for comparisons.

[jcnossen]

Zaphod, first of all, all GF 6000 series cards support shader model 3.0.

I know that, but you weren't comparing anything below 6600 so there was no need to mention those...

However you have proven your point with the other benchmark results... my next card is probably an nvidia