Yea, I was wondering, too. I have a 9600, and I don't have enough graphics power to get smooth performance in Quake 4 all the time. It's enough, but not terrific.Gnome wrote:And of course BF2 and Quake 4 don't run on that card... you can't spend pennies on a graphics card that's barely better than onboard and expect it to play the newest games. Graphics cards are one of the areas you simply cannot skimp on as a gamer...
Actually, I recommend you do what I did. ATI has a great thing called the trade-up program. You just send them an old video card (it really doesn't matter what, I sent them an ancient piece of crap card), and you get something like $50 off a few select video cards. Like I said, I sent them some primitive 32Mb card (it had a terrible GPU, just lots of VRAM for the time), and it cut the price of a new 9800XT from $150 to $100. It's not always that cheap, but it's still a pretty damn good bargain, especially if you have some old crap card lying around.
http://shop.ati.com/tradeup.asp
Go ahead and check it out. You'll be surprised.