Video Card advice

[Naki]

Thinking of upgrading my video card ...so I can run FSX a bit better FPS wise..I am not hardware savy..so I do not know what the hell most the info below means!

My current card is a 256mb Nividia 8600GT

Any ideas on whether these would be any good would be appreciated:

Option 1

N9500GT-MD1G OC/D2
Product Information
PI DATE : Jul 2009
PRODUCT DESCRIPTION : MSI Graphics card
CHIPSET : 9500GT
CORE CLOCK SPEED : 650 MHz
MEMORY CLOCK SPEED : 1000 MHz
MEMORY SIZE : DDR2 1024MB
MEMORY BUS : 128bit
FORM FACTOR : ATX
3DMark VANTAGE : Performance - E9602, Extreme - P1689
* HDMI support

Option 2

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION : Sapphire HD 4670 graphics card
I/O OUTPUT : DL-DVI-I+HDMI+VGA
BUS INTERFACE : PCI Express 2.0 x16
MEMORY INTERFACE : 512MB /128bit GDDR3 memory interface
* Single Slot Active Cooler
* HDMI compliant via dongle
* 7.1 Audio Channel Support
* Microsoft DirectX 10.1 support
* Shader Model 4.1 support
* 320 stream processing units, 128-bit memory interface
* 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic
filtering
* Dual mode ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU support for highly scalable
performance
* Dynamic geometry acceleration, Game physics processing capability
* ATI Avivo HD video and display technology
* Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) for Blu-ray and HD Video
* Accelerated Video Transcoding(AVT)
* DVD Upscaling, Dynamic Contrast, Built-in HDMI with 7.1 surround sound
support

Option 3

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION : Sapphire HD 4650 graphics card
I/O OUTPUT : Dual DL-DVI+HDMI+VGA
BUS INTERFACE : PCI Express 2.0 x16
MEMORY INTERFACE : 512MB /128bit GDDR3 memory interface
* Single Slot Active Cooler
* Native HDMI support
* 7.1 Audio Channel Support
* Microsoft DirectX 10.1 support
* Shader Model 4.1 & Native Hardware Cross Fire support
* DirectX 10.1 & PCI Express 2.0 support
* 320 stream processing units, 128-bit memory interface
* 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic
filtering
* Dual mode ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU support for highly scalable
performance
* Dynamic geometry acceleration
* Game physics processing capability
* ATI Avivo HD video and display technology
* Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) for Blu-ray and HD Video
* Accelerated Video Transcoding(AVT)
* DVD Upscaling, Dynamic Contrast, Built-in HDMI with 7.1 surround sound
support

[jastheace]

i used a 9600gt 1 gig, that was a good card, seems to work well with fsx, i am now using a hd4850 in the new pc and it seems to be working well too,

Jason

[privatehell]

what is the maximum you are able to spend?

[INTOX]

If you are looking for a really good performing ATI Card you cant go past a 4870 1GB Memory card
You should be able to pick one up at a good price too.
It will depend a little on your Budget of course
Im presuming your Motherboard is PCI-E and not AGP (Just thought I would check........cus if its AGP then none of those PCI-E cards will fit and a Motherboard upgrade comes into play)

Cheers

INTOX

[brownbox]

hmmmm. I think you will be disappointed with all of those. While they are upgrades, the performance gains achieved will not be worth the trouble, or the $$$.

To get a decent boost, you will want either
GTX 2xx -nVidia
HD 48xx - ATI

hope this helps

[Naki]

Thanks guys for the pointers ..my budget is around $100 to $200 and I have a PCI express card..but wondering whether (as you say) a video upgrade would have much of an affect on FPS unless I have a more substantial upgrade including more RAM and a better CPU.

I did some more tweaking last night last night and got a bit more FPS.

[shotgun]

That will get you a low end gfx card.
middle range starts at about $300+

[brownbox]

$100 to $200 is plenty, especially if you plan to flick off the 8600 on trademe (an extra $50 or something).
IMO, stay away from ati. I never had any good experiences with them, and nvidia always seems to get better performance with fs.

$180-ish will get you a 512mb 9800GT which would be a good upgrade (probably about twice the graphics processing power of a 8600). How much of that you would get as a performance gain in fs depends on the rest of your system. If your CPU is lacking , a graphics upgrade will yeild very little gains.

Post the rest of your system and we will go from there.

[Naki]

Its an AMD Duo Core 2.3ghz with of 2 gig Ram. Windows XP OS

[brownbox]

I would look at those rather than graphics cards. Do you have more specific information?
I.e. CPU name - it will be something like athlon 4000 or 5000 or something. Also, the type of ram you have-will be something like DDR2-533 or 667 or PC5300 or something along these lines

[Naki]

Its an Athlon 4400 not sure what RAM I have ..where do I find that?

[shotgun]

Sorry that was high range $300+

[happytraveller]

There is a very good comparison of graphics cards and frame rates here:-

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon...on,2007-18.html

hope that this helps,

smooth landings.

[creator2003]

Id just get a 8800 GTS 640 mb or along those lines ,still a awesome card and good value for money

[Naki]

My hand was forced in the end anyway..my card fried itself a couple of days ago and I'm getting a 1gb 9800GT so I am hoping I can crank up the FSX settings a bit especially the autogen and water settings.

[Ian Warren]

Naki , that should easy kick the scenery to life , one other primary is also your RAM , If you have a dual core running XP have the maximum of 4GB , simply by one stick if cheaper or two off the same , don,t mix and match older or different brand named .

[Naki]

Yeah..next on the shopping list when money allows..unfortunately my camera died the same day!

[Adamski]

For what it's worth, I've had nothing but trouble with ATI cards over my 20-30 years' gaming. The cards themselves are OK, but the driver software stinks big time (just like Saitek sticks).

I went against my own better judgement last week and replaced a mid range (work, not gaming) PC card with an ATI card - HD3450. After five attempts at getting the ATI CP to work (thoroughly cleaning the system each time) I gave up. Yet a 3rd party utility worked fine. It simply brought back memories of all my previous woes.

Of course, your mileage may vary

[Kahu]

QUOTE (Adamski @ Feb 8 2010, 04:05 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

For what it's worth, I've had nothing but trouble with ATI cards over my 20-30 years' gaming. The cards themselves are OK, but the driver software stinks big time (just like Saitek sticks).

I went against my own better judgement last week and replaced a mid range (work, not gaming) PC card with an ATI card - HD3450. After five attempts at getting the ATI CP to work (thoroughly cleaning the system each time) I gave up. Yet a 3rd party utility worked fine. It simply brought back memories of all my previous woes.

Of course, your mileage may vary

Agree with you on both accounts there as im running a ATI card and took 2 weeks tofind a driver that would run the card properly and my Saitek joystick constantly needs recalibrating.

[markll]

QUOTE (Kahu Project @ Feb 8 2010, 10:25 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Agree with you on both accounts there as im running a ATI card and took 2 weeks tofind a driver that would run the card properly and my Saitek joystick constantly needs recalibrating.

Wow - I've got to disagree..my personal experience has been the complete opposite - never had driver issues, Catalyst CPL worked fine, and in fact offers you more options than the Nvidia panel does....only reason I switched BACK to nvidia was because I bought an SLI board, and SLI is Nvidia's dual gfx card implementation so doesn't work with ATI cards.

EDIT: this was on Vista as well, in the early (ish) days, when Nvidia's drivers were a REAL MESS

Mark