recommendations for video card

[tanq_tonic]

presently using a 450 Mhz PII; 32mb ram; matrox millenium. built it myself.

due to work considerations, will be buying a new system.

would like recommendations for:

a) if i keep the old system, a video card that would allow the ful features of the game to be used; or

if i decide to give the new system some "oomph", say a PIII 700+ w/ 128Mb, what is a good choice for a video card for that system.

thanks in advance

[Schrullenhaft]

There will be a lot of opinionated recommendations on this. Absolute speed may not be the best judge of a card when it comes to using it in CM. FSAA is a major selling point of the higher end cards. Most reviews will compare screenshots in FPS games like Quake3 or racing sims. Some people prefer to just run a higher resolution which negates a bit of the need for FSAA, but others prefer to have it on all the time (especially when they get close in to an object).

For the 450Mhz PII a TNT2 or GeForceMX card (get the SDR card rather than a DDR one) should be fine. You should find 32Mb versions of either card for around US$150 or less. The GeForceMX is slower than the GeForce 2, but is quite cost effective.

For the PIII 700+ you may want to get a GeForce2 (or GeForceMX) or possibly the Voodoo 5500. One problem with the Voodoo card is that 3dfx just got bought out by NVidia and it is questionable how much future support the 3dfx Voodoo line will get. However the cards are at bargain prices (US$190 or so). The V5500s have 64Mb of RAM, but due to the way the card works this is actually equivalent to 32Mb. Some users on this forum prefer the Voodoo's FSAA quality over the NVidia GeForces (thought that can be a very subjective judgement).

The ATI Radeons aren't too bad, but they don't currently support fog-tables (at least the way that CM uses them). This may change, but there still isn't any fog in CM with the latest BETA drivers. Otherwise the card performs well (there are 32Mb & 64Mb models - the 64Mb model is faster).

The fastest card out there at the moment is the GeForce 2 Ultras, but they are very expensive at US$450+ and distinguishing their performance advantage in CM may not be all that obvious. There are also 64Mb GeForce 2's out there that aren't really much faster (if at all) than other GeForce 2's, but they may hold more textures in memory which may help when you go "mod-crazy".

Of course all of this will change next spring when NVidia and ATI release new video chips and cards based on them. I haven't followed Matrox much for gaming cards. They've had good visual quality in the past generally, but haven't really kept up in the 3D performance arena.

[This message has been edited by Schrullenhaft (edited 12-18-2000).]