Which Video Card

[Canada Guy]

I currently have 2 machines.

1. Windows XP - ATI 1550 (I recently bought an ATI 4670 and it is a fantastic card but unfortunately, it gives the bad text problem for CMBB/CMAK. This means the kids will get the 4670 - 1Gb card)

2. Windows XP - ATI 800GT (My machine and want to upgrade)

Currently I can play CMBB/CMAK with no problems but I would like to upgrade to a more capable card so that I can play CMSF+ on my machine with greater bells and whistles as well as CMBB/CMAK.

Question: I want to replace the 800GT with a newer card. Anything later than the ATI1950GT seems to cause the white text problem no matter what I attempt. What is the best card that I can buy that will both let me run CMSF with bells and whistles and let me continue to play CMBB/CMAK?

I am assuming that I will have to go to Nvidia and price wise, the 8800GT seems like the best bet. Does this card cause any problems if I continue to run XP? What other cards are recommended that would give me the results that I want?

[costard]

Hi Canada Guy

I run XP with Nvidia 7600GT. CMSF and all the CMX1 games run fine.

[Canada Guy]

I was thinking of a more modern card. The 7600 is probably similar to what I already run CMx1 with right now. I would like to get a 8800GT but have not heard if it suffers the same problems that a 4670 card does (either does not run or it displays white text).

It seems that ATI has changed something in their DX10 capable cards so anything after the X1950 is effected.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

[Redwolf]

You can use any card as long as you don't combine Vista with a DX10 capable card (8xxx, 9xxx and GX2x0).

There's no ATI 800 GT.

[George MC]

I run a GeForce 8800Gt card on WindowsXP and it plays CMSF, CMX1 just fine.

[Canada Guy]

It seems that the 8800GT or the 8800 GS are the way to go. I have never used Nvidia as ATI was nice enough to start including the fog tables for us.

Redwolf,

The ATI X800GT does exist. Trust me as I have been reinstalling different video cards in my system for the last 2 weeks.

Here is a site that creates a heirarchy of Nvidia/ATI video cards. The X800GT is listed on the same line (and to the right of) the Nvidia 6600 GT.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Best-Graphics-Card,2033-7.html

I bought the 4670 for a song (<$100) but it was a no go. I am thinking now of getting the 8800GT (512mb) even though it is a little pricier ($135) but it might solve all my problems.

Now to figure out uninstalling ATI drivers and installing Nvidia's.

[Canada Guy]

I finally broke down and bought my video cards.

4670 (1 Gig) for the kids machine (but they will not mind if I accidentally install CMSF on it just in case). I got this one for US$99. I bought it for my machine but CMBB/CMAK is not playable with it. I am running XP but the best I could get was with the text fix. Not exactly what I wanted.

8800GS (384Mg) for my machine. I have not installed it yet but for US$40 I thought this was a steal. I will install it this weekend as I have to remove my old X800 GT and all the ATI drivers for it and then find the latest Nvidia drivers. Having never had an Nvidia card I am not sure what to expect. It should also play CMSF a lot better than my old 800GT (6600 equivalent) and am looking forward to seeing what CMSF really looks like with the graphics turned up.

Any advice that anyone could give would be helpful.

[Schrullenhaft]

You're probably aware of most of these processes, but I'll just write them out anyway.

Download the latest Nvidia drivers before uninstalling anything and remember where you download them to. Uninstall your Catalyst drivers for the X800GT before you physically remove the videocard. When and if the uninstall requests to reboot, just perform a Shut Down instead. Power down your computer and unplug the power cord from the power supply, just so that there are no stray voltages flying around on the motherboard (Standby Voltage, etc.). Remove your ATI and install the 8800GS, plugging in any necessary power connectors (most likely a 6-pin PCIe power connector).

When Windows boots up, 'cancel' any hardware detection dialog boxes and once everything is settled then install the Nvidia drivers from the previous downloaded location. After installing these you'll need to reboot. Nvidia will stuff a couple of utilities in the System Tray, but they're not necessary and you can 'kill' them to save memory, etc.

The settings for Nvidia-based videocards are controlled from the "Nvidia Control Panel" in the Control Panel. Select the "Advanced Settings" (however they're offered up, possibly via a dialog box or the menu below the 'text-based' menu). In the '3D Settings' section on the left-hand menu go to 'Manage 3D Settings' and you'll be presented with a list on the right-hand side. Clicking on the 'setting in the right-hand column should give you a drop down dialog of the available settings for that Feature.

You have Global settings (the default displayed 'tab') and Program Settings that you can apply only to certain games - a very useful feature (I can't remember how ATI did this within the Catalyst driver).

Some settings to tinker with:

Anisotropic Filtering - the higher the 'better' your textures may appear at the cost of performance.

Antialiasing - Gamma Correction - On would probably be best, though I don't know what CMSF's reaction/use of this setting is.

Antialiasing - Mode - Application controlled will let the Options settings within CMSF to control this setting. Otherwise 'Enhance the Application Setting' will allow you to manually specify the AA level (below this setting), which can be handy if you want to experiment to find out the trade-off between performance and appearance. At higher resolutions (1024x768 and above) some players question the usefulness of antialiasing - its a subjective call.

Antialiasing - Transparency - You might want this on, since the Strykers utilize it for their slat cages (among other things). However I don't know how well it works or if it causes problems. I can't remember which method looks better, but I think it may be Supersampling which can have a higher performance hit.

Conformant Texture Clamp - Use hardware. Don't know if there's any advantage to the other settings.

Error reporting - Off

Extension Limit - Off

Force Mipmaps - Trilinear. Don't know how much of a difference this makes in CMSF, but Trilinear will look the best.

Maximum pre-rendered frames - I don't know what to select here. Prerendered frames will eat up some video memory. With the size of some maps within CMSF I'd probably recommend that this be set to 0 (default to 3 ?). I'm under the impression that it benefits FPS games the most.

Multi-display / Mixed GPU Acceleration - Single display performance mode. I assume you only have one display hooked up to your videocard.

Texture filtering / Anisotropic sample optimization - On ? I'm not sure of the effects of this setting. It may reduce quality for performance or potentially cause certain display problems.

Texture filtering Negative LOD bias - On

Texture filtering quality - Quality is the default setting. High Quality is better if you have the horse power (I'm not sure how much of a strain this setting is, if much at all).

Texture filtering trilinear optimization - On ? Again there could be potential problems, though I'm not specifically aware of any.

Threaded Optimization - OFF. I believe that this settings causes problems in CMSF with multi-core CPUs. It's best to leave it off and you will probably see a bit of a performance benefit in the case of CMSF (and maybe the older CM titles, I'm not sure).

Triple Buffering - On. Don't know of any particular problems with this setting.

Vertical Sync - Application controlled. CMSF has an Option setting for this. Generally I haven't seen the need for this setting to be enabled, but some people may see 'tearing' (horizontal) on occasion and enabling this setting can fix that.

Other than Threaded Optimization I'm not particularly sure of any of the settings and how much benefit or detriment they may be to CMSF/CM. Experimenting (which will take closing down CMSF for it to apply) is probably worthwhile. Any setting that mentions "optimization" you may want to disable first since they're among the more likely portions of the driver code to have bugs (though some may not have changed much over the last several years).

[Canada Guy]

Schrullenhaft,

Thanks very much. This helps immensely.

I installed the card and following your directions, everything went smoothly software wise. The problem is that the 8800GS card is so much bigger than the 800GT. I would say about 9cm longer. In a tight case, this is a problem but it eventually worked. The fan is also so much thicker that it takes up an extra PCI slot. I had to re-arrange my USB/Firewire card resulting in restricted airflow but I had no choice.

I will be playing with the settings this weekend and seeing which allow me to maximize my CMSF settings while still allowing me to play CMBB/CMAK. On the “Application determined” AA setting, both CMx1 and CMx2 worked. This is a marked improvement to the newer ATI cards which ran CMSF wonderfully but with the text problem in CMx1.

I appreciate the help and the info.