Reccomand a video card.

[Gota]

I wanna upgrade and am not sure which card to take...ATI 5k series?if yes than which 5*** is best efficiency for cost?
If Nvidia than which one?

[Tribulex]

Dont buy ati.

Nvidia gtx 295 imo.

[imbaczek]

ati 4850 is still king in price/performance, but it's going to be out of stock soon, it's been discontinued. ati 5xxx is a good choice.

buying anything from nvidia now can't be justified economically tbh.

[Gota]

ati 4850 is still king in price/performance, but it's going to be out of stock soon, it's been discontinued. ati 5xxx is a good choice.

buying anything from nvidia now can't be justified economically tbh.

Yeah was thinking the same..I read a bit about Radeon HD 5850 and it seems like a good choice for a gaming rig if you disqualify multiple cards in crossfire.
This is also not for Spring and i have never encountered any problems running any other game using my current ATI 4850 ..

[imbaczek]

imho upgrading from 4850 doesn't make economical sense either the only way to go is $200+ range, which is quite expensive.

[Gota]

imho upgrading from 4850 doesn't make economical sense either the only way to go is $200+ range, which is quite expensive.

Im not upgrading my machine.Unbelievably even after 2 years i can still run every game at almost highest settings with the 4850.
If it wasn't for Spring this would be my best video card purchase ever.

[Master-Athmos]

The ATI 5000 series is probably the best one available right now. Their prizes just are a bit too high making the 4000 series the best pick in terms of bang for bucks. Prices should fall though when NVIDIA decides to finally release their new chip and it doesn't suck in either performance or price (which both currently is quite questionable as there are some disastrous reports of NVIDIAs adaption to the new production process being a big fail leading to rates of functional chips of <10% per wafer)...

Technically speaking ATI's 5000 series currently is the best available though without any real competition. But yeah updating from a HD4850 isn't necessary. What exactly don't you like about it in combination with Spring? I have a 4870 in one and a 4830 in another PC and both run Spring fine without any problems. Only e.g. certain water shaders don't run properly but I wouldn't call that a serious problem...

[Gota]

As i wrote,I'm not upgrading MY machine(sorry wasn't too clear about it).
Well ATM 4850 works fine with spring with a few minor issues but that can change again with some new driver or spring release as it happened in the past.
Point is,if I have a good card i want to be able to see all Spring visuals.

[MidKnight]

Code: Select all

[13:22:40] <[1uP]MidKnight> Remember
[13:22:45] <[1uP]MidKnight> Remember, and never forget
[13:22:50] <[1uP]MidKnight> ATi is the devil

I own an ATi Radeon HD 4870. IMO, wait for NVidia Fermi.

[Tribulex]

Developed at Fermilab with a 2 picometer process

[rattle]

anything nvidia and a dictionary

[bobthedinosaur]

yes nvidia is worth the extra $ for the lacking of driver errors and having support.

[Gota]

Perhaps,but personally i have had 0 problems with drivers in all games but Spring..

[Umbra]

Nvidia driver quality is a lot higher then ATI.
If ATI could have a lot less bugs and memory leaks, and their compatibility with games is at the level of nvidia, then I would prefer ATI over nvidia due to the better price/performance.

Recent ATI cards make me consider getting one anyways, especially hearing with what they plan to do with the (AMD) CPU's arriving next year.

[bobthedinosaur]

what do they plan to do?

[Master-Athmos]

Well imo people usually exaggerate about how bad the ATI driver quality is. The only point where they might be not that good is the OpenGL sector. I wouldn't really call that sector really buggy though but some things just are done differently / should be done in a different way and might need another way to work than for NVIDIA cards. So when talking about Spring if someone writes a shader and it works fine on his NVIDIA card it needn't to run properly on an ATI card...

With that said I cannot remember any AAA OpenGL application that had any severe problems with my ATI cards (and I am using them constantly since like 2005 just as others I know). Also people shouldn't glorify NVIDIA drivers too much. While they're very nice people often describe them as next to perfect which they aren't. They also introduce bugs now and then and can have severe problems (like the never really funcitonal hybrid power which mostly was about a matter of luck if it worked or not)...

Well ok this is the way it is for Windows. When you're exclusively using Linux the situation is a bit worse but even here things are not as bad as they were some while ago - AMD "recently" started to make more and more of their specs available pretty much changing ATI's initial strategy of not giving anyting and to my knowledge the open source 2D drivers are perfectly stable while the 3D part still needs some work but from what I hear it's progressing and if AMD continues it's attitude towards Linux there'll be little to complain in a matter of 1-2 years...

[Spawn_Retard]

Perhaps,but personally i have had 0 problems with drivers in all games but Spring..

you play spring a whole lot so why make a dumb comment like that?

ATI RULES UNLESS YOU PLAY SPRING WITH THEM.

why post in a spring forum and not expect everyone to tell you to go nvidia

[Tribulex]

Spawn not everyone has a daddy who will buy them a pc with two high end SLIed Nvidia cards like you do

[Gota]

Perhaps,but personally i have had 0 problems with drivers in all games but Spring..

you play spring a whole lot so why make a dumb comment like that?

ATI RULES UNLESS YOU PLAY SPRING WITH THEM.

why post in a spring forum and not expect everyone to tell you to go nvidia

I don't actually play Spring that much anymore..
I just posted hoping people here have some inside knowledge or tried some of the newer cards/seen good comparisons on the web.

[Master-Athmos]

If you just want some good comparisons look HERE for info on performance and HERE for power consumption (of the entire system)...

There are many websites which provide reasonable tests though - that really shouldn't be a problem...