Curse

Former Ruling · Feb 16, 2006, 02:39 PM // 14:39

swaaye -

Your a bit to overcritical. You fall into a catagory of people I hate, that think if it doesn't have the biggest numbers it sucks.

I use one of the older in the FX series...And Run Guild Wars just as good, or better, then some friends that have PCI-e or AGP slot cards...Just because some etsts show bigger unmbers and stats for them..it really isn't shown in the game.

Guild Wars really isn't graphically intensive- Its the connection speed and RAM that screw you over.

swaaye · Feb 18, 2006, 06:05 AM // 06:05

LOL. I'm glad you hate me.

I have a FX5600 256MB in the drawer next to me. I have it because a buddy gave it to me when he upgraded to a 6600GT and was more than slightly wowed. It runs GW at about 1/2 the framerate of a 4yr old 9700 nonpro. And that's when I overclock the snot out of the 5600. FX cards are junk. Period. A 5950 Ultra can be beaten in some games by a 9600 Pro.

Actually the FX architecture is fascinating and very forward looking. Problem is they couldn't get the performance up because of limited die space back when they were designing it. They couldn't build in enough shader processing power with the size constraints. And the design of the chip requires an extremely sophisticated driver compiler to get pixel shader code going fast. NV35, the 2nd gen FX chip (on 5900 and 5700), has additional math units to make it a good bit faster, but it's still no match for a ATI 9700 even. NV sort of abandoned FX's architecture with NV40 (6x00) abd G70 (7x00) and has changed to a more "conventional" design. NV40 has some elements of NV3x, but it's actually simpler in many ways to make it faster believe it or not.

NV30 is actually far more flexible than ATI 9700 era cards, even X800 I suppose. The chip could do many fancy effects potentially, far exceeding many of ATI's limits. The problem was there was NO WAY the chip had the performance to use its potential. Developers often forced their games to run in DX8 mode on FX cards, such as Half Life 2. Developers discovered that performance was so poor, and they had to put so much effort into programming around the card's speed problems, that it was not worth the time and effort.

My biggest peeve with the FX boards are that NV cheated in their drivers. They detected programs and replaced shader code with less accurate versions to make their cards run passably. So, the games would run acceptably but look noticeably worse than the ATI cards which ran faster still anyway. LOL. They also hacked up 3DMark03 to render only visible parts of scenes to artificially inflate their scores. NV knew their chip couldn't compete so they cheated big time. ATI totally caught them offguard with 9700 at the time.

Fortunately Guild Wars is well programmed and not very demanding. A PCI card might run the game passable, but it's still a waste of money better saved for an overhaul.

Serafita Kayin · Feb 18, 2006, 04:48 PM // 16:48

Did you use the StarScream or Omega mod drivers for your FX? You can get all that quality back and then some...

The FX had some hiccups, but the 5900/5950 were great cards. I had one, modded to some crazy ass specs, and it was a GREAT card. Still holds the socket 423 air cooled AQ3 top spot.

There's merit to anything that can help a person play a game, even if it's not the best out there evar.

My uber awesome test rig with XMS Xpert, a Sapphire PURE Innovation, a DiamondMax 10 SATAII, and X-Fi, and a seriously modded AMD64 uses an X600 XT 128 MB. Why?

It was 99 bucks.

Nazo · Feb 18, 2006, 07:16 PM // 19:16

The biggest problem with the FX 5x00 series -- besides the fact that nVidia designed them to be cheap to produce and thus weaker than the Ti4x00 series -- is that they supported Pixel Shader 2.0, but, ran it so slowly and badly that it killed their performance. Games would ask the card "do you support ps 2.0" the card says "yes" and bam, the games start using it and run like utter crap. Mind you, you were still better off with a Geforce 4 Ti4200 than a FX5500 or so, and there was the 4400 and 4600 to cover the next models up. Nvidia stopped selling the real GF4s though.

And, on that subject, please do not ever tell people to buy a Geforce 4 MX. Geforce 4 MX is essentially an uberized Geforce 2 core with a few new features mainly pertaining to watching videos added in and supporting more memory. People buying these WILL regret it when they discover the hard way that more and more modern games are quite simply refusing even to run on these due to their lack of real pixel shaders (yes, they have the most basic DOT3 type stuff for shadowing, but, that's about all you can do, and most games want the real programmable pixel shaders that can be used for anything from a pretty water effect to in-game special effects.) Investing in a MX card right now is a huge mistake. If you already have one, fine, you can still play a lot of game and somewhat decently since that ancient GF2 technology has been suped up quite a bit, but, it is NOT a card with a future, and actually buying one when you can put the same cash on a card that will last is dumb.

Anyway, I say go with the ATi. It has real pixel shader support, and at that time, ATi did pixel shaders much faster than nVidia.

As for PCI, the problem with it lies in the fact that it really isn't designed for high speed and/or high bandwidth data transfer. That's why AGP was invented after all. A frequent problem you will run into in a lot of games will be that they will jerk, halt, and stutter while data is being transferred through the much slower 33MHz PCI bus that lacks all those advantages given to AGP such as the direct to CPU connection. Some games, such as the Unreal series, solved the problem by loading as much data as they could into the card before real gameplay started, but, not many modern games are going to do this anymore since it raises load times a lot and people already complain about them as they are (though not many games have bothered me personally, but, the devs must please the majority, not the minority, and PCI is an old slow minority.) You will get some games to run kind of ok, especially the ones that are smart enough to actually look at what kind of video card you have and load more data when they can to prevent pauses and such, but, it is true that PCI just is not meant for this purpose and you will experience troubles here and there.

As for PCI-Express, no big deal. Video cards werent' fast enough to take full advantage of AGP 8x when PCI-E came out. I don't know about the absolute latest and greated PCI-E cards out there, but, I'm willing to bet they still haven't surpassed AGP 8x just yet. Anyway, I can tell you from personal experience that my AGP 8x X850XT Platinum Edition has scored in 3DMark05 at least what others have scored with a PCI-E version of this card (though I can't compete with some who have managed to get some serious overclocking -- my core maxes around 570 or so, and the memory won't oc 2MHz past stock even.) A 7800 GS has just been released for AGP utilizing an HSI bridge, though I've heard no benchmarks yet I suspect it will perform equally to it's PCI-E counterpart and even if I'm wrong it will be no more than 5% less I'll bet, so AGP isn't dead yet. But, people who have the money should go ahead and go PCI-E to save themselves a royal pain trying to upgrade later.

BTW, one thing to consider if you have a PCI-only system is that PCI video cards will work on AGP and PCI-E systems. And let's not forget that there are onboard video accelerators such as the 6100 which don't have the greatest performance ever, but, are closer to AGP than PCI by far and, if you have enough memory (they share your system memory, so they have to put up with slower video ram and you have to put up with less available system memory, if you have 256MB time to upgrade anyway, but, otherwise you're ok) will get some tolerable performance, especially compared to a low end PCI card.

Loviatar · Feb 18, 2006, 07:35 PM // 19:35

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nazo

BTW, one thing to consider if you have a PCI-only system is that PCI video cards will work on AGP and PCI-E systems. .

note that this applies ONLY if the late model motherboard even has any pci standard slots.

many new boards have dropped pci -standard completely

Old Dood · Feb 18, 2006, 08:56 PM // 20:56

Quote:

Originally Posted by Loviatar

note that this applies ONLY if the late model motherboard even has any pci standard slots.

many new boards have dropped pci -standard completely

That would be premature to do that now. There are too many PCI related cards that you can still use. Hell...I still install Floppy Drives.

HDS · Feb 18, 2006, 09:13 PM // 21:13

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kaguya

PCI-X is not PCI-E. X is 64bit version that has been around for quite some time on server computers.

Atleast I haven't seen anyone advertising their express card as 'PCIx', and googling for PCIx vidcards yields no results.

LIEEEESSSSSs

Google "PCIX graphics card"

http://www.ecost.com/ecost/shop/deta...mail,ECOSTDEAL

Loviatar · Feb 18, 2006, 09:25 PM // 21:25

Quote:

Originally Posted by Old Dood

That would be premature to do that now. There are too many PCI related cards that you can still use. Hell...I still install Floppy Drives.

hi Dood

lots of things are being shed faster than you think.

that spiffy 7800 nvidia chipset is pce-e only with no agp version available and there are a LOT of AGP MB out there

are floppy drives something that can be fixed with v...........RX

HDS · Feb 18, 2006, 09:41 PM // 21:41

Quote:

Originally Posted by Loviatar

hi Dood

lots of things are being shed faster than you think.

that spiffy 7800 nvidia chipset is pce-e only with no agp version available and there are a LOT of AGP MB out there

are floppy drives something that can be fixed with v...........RX

NOT TRUE

LIEEES

7800 chipset got released for agp.

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...e_7800_gs_agp/

Nazo · Feb 18, 2006, 09:50 PM // 21:50

7800 "chipset"? No such thing. You mean video cards? The 7800 series is officially PCI-E only, but, a nice company has heard our pleas and slapped an HSI bridge on the bottom of one of the 7800s to give us an AGP 7800, which should have started hitting the stores just about now or even a bit ago. EDIT: Lol, oh, I misread that. So we said the same thing really. Well, I suppose you might call it "chipset" since nVidia makes the chips and other people make the actual cards, but, you really shouldn't because the term "chipset" refers to motherboard chipsets normally not video cards, so will cause confusion.

Just so you know, nVidia has intentionally chosen to ignore the literally thousands upon thousands of requests for an AGP 7800. They have abandoned AGP and the products they still make for AGP are unofficially no longer really supported (officially they would NEVER think such a thing.) They ignore most AGP specific problems such as the nForce 3 bug despite numerous complaints and even contact from companies like BFG, and they make no actual new cards for AGP (6800 GS is just a 6800 with a smaller process to save them some cash since they can't dump the 6800 line just yet, and cards like the 6600 and 6200 are actually weaker cheaper cores based on the original 6800 core. Not new at all.) I was a nVidia person -- especialy since I occasionally make real use of linux and ATi tends to suck at linux -- but, they ticked me off with their intentional choice to ignore us and the problems they are causing us and I went with an X850XT PE. So far I don't regret that decision. Until games start requiring pixel shader 3.0 for their most advanced effects (I don't count programmers too lazy to do the same effects in 2.0 at the cost of a bit more work on their part -- I've seen HDR type effects done in 2.0 in games like NFSMW, 3.0 is mainly just easier to program for) I'm happy. Games won't truly require 3.0 for a good while yet I think. They know a lot of us have things like the X800 and X850 series cards, which are quite decent cards even today (if I recall my last 3DMark05 score correctly, it was a 6900 exactly. If I could oc my cpu or memory a bit more, who knows, I might have been able to hit 7000.) Decide for yourselves, but, I tend to really think that I just don't trust nVidia right now with anything other than PCI-Express. I'm not entirely trusting them with that because AMD is just about ready to switch to DDR2 now that it's finally caught up to the performance of GOOD DDR1, and that means nForce 5 will be out soon. Considering how they abandoned us nForce 3 users so quickly, nForce 4 users who spent so much on their setups may be in for it too for all we know right now.

As for "PCIX" yes, PCIX is indeed a different thing from PCI-Express. The thing is, PCIX is so uncommon and unknown to most of us, that it's quite easy for people to forget and just call PCI-Express PCI-X, which is an easier term to use for obvious reasons. Doesn't mean PCI-X isn't really something else, just that they don't know better.

And Loviatar, I have not yet heard of any system with 0 standard PCI slots. I've even looked recently at some mini-ATX boards (those 6100s seemed to be mini only for example) and they had at least one standard PCI slot. The reason this will not be 100% thrown away for a LONG time is because, despite the advantages of PCI-Express 1x, there's just no need for it with a lot of devices such as soundcards, modems, capture cards, and etc. You can't for one second tell me that a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS isn't good enough simply because it's standard PCI, and you sure can't tell me that it's not better than quite possibly any onboard audio on the market. Also, a lot of us have such devices and aren't about to throw them away just because a motherboard we kind of liked didn't have standard PCI slots. What I mean by this is that any company run by people who's brains haven't been switched entirely off will immediately realize that by choosing to get rid of such slots, they narrow their potential customers to a very very small minority when having even just one such slot means they don't narrow their potential customers hardly at all. As I understand it, PCI-Express is basically an extention of PCI, so it shouldn't be hard, chipset wise, to continue to support the old standard. Oh, and btw, one thing that's really popular lately would be the HTPC systems, and they will need things like capture cards, which you definitely have to support standard PCI for (I dont' think I've seen a PCI-E capture card, but, I know that you have to make do with a very small amount of HDTV capture cards, and I know that none of them were PCI-E last I looked.) No, standard PCI isn't going anywhere in any kind of near future. It's going to take longer to move away from than ISA without a doubt in the world.

I must say that, if you see a board with no standard PCI, even if you have no PCI cards, do not buy such a board. It WILL limit possible future upgrades such as a higher quality (and better performing) soundcard, a capture card, and etc. Onboard may seem sufficient, but, later you WILL regret that. Not might, will (unless you just use it for e-mail or something, but, if you do, why are you here?)

BTW, there are USB floppy drives, which claim to run twice as fast (and probably do better if not 2x, I imagine the bus used for floppies is rather limited at best.) However, floppy drives are JUST about dead. As soon as moronic bios manufacturers catch a clue and finally support the standards used for flash drives/other external drives, we will finally finish moving away once and for all. Already El-Torito and Isolinux+the Memdisk module have made mostly unwritable floppy booting possible via CD-ROM on even some ancient systems (I'm typing this on an ancient pentium 3 500 smp intel 440gx based system which would not be possible without the help of the bootable DVD I made complete with OS installation and all. Heck, I don't even have real ACPI on this thing...) Heck, the ISOLinux+memdisk method allows write access to the image, even if it is only written to memory (and thus lost at next reboot.) A huge number of systems do ship without floppy drives and few complain, so, I think it is safe to call floppies as dead as ISA at least. Time for you to learn ISOLinux (not hard at all) and get an 8cm CDRW I say.

Loviatar · Feb 18, 2006, 09:59 PM // 21:59

HDS

that is very good news and thank you as i am looking for a new card and not ready for another MB swap just now.

Today, 01:50 PM #30
Nazo

video card indeed

i read a report some were going to pci-e only but possibly they were premature.

i know that i will keep my trusty pci items that have served me well and do what i need them to do for as long as they last

Nazo · Feb 18, 2006, 10:10 PM // 22:10

Loviatar, perhaps you read about some specialized board. For example, mini-ATX tends to be rather specialized and sacrifice what they can due to space concerns and because it's so darned hard to squeeze in all the chips, capacitors, and etc they need so the more room they have for those the easier it is on the board designer. However, I'd tend to say that having no standard PCI at all would be so specialized that we may be talking about micro-atx here. That's for such specialized setups that a lack of a standard PCI slot may not make any difference at all. Even HTPCs normally don't do any lower than micro-atx.

BTW, one thing I wanted to add about the whole AGP version of the 7800 thing. The fact that nVidia ignored the thousands of people petitioning them is worse than it sounds. Unlike ATi, they don't have to make a seperate core just for PCI-E and AGP because nVidia spent who knows how much to create a chip called an HSI bridge which translates (not emulates) the AGP/PCI-E commands so they can create a bridge that allows them to make a PCI-E core that works in an AGP system (the 6600 and 6200 both use this method to save nVidia some more cash in their production.) In other words, they have to do essentially nothing to make an AGP version of the 7800. They already have the bridge that they made in production, so they essentially have to do nothing whatsoever. They don't even design the cards' boards. I'm surprised it took a company like BFG so long to decide to bypass nVidia's decision and just make their own.

Old Dood · Feb 18, 2006, 10:22 PM // 22:22

Loviatar....I was speaking of Firewire cards...Sound Cards....etc.....that can be used in a regular PCI slot. I would still want to have those on a mother board.

Good one on the floppies needing Viagra

. Still I like to have my floppies just in case....they are cheap and last along time mechanically. Good for BIOs upgrades. I am always nervous with the hard drive BIOs upgrades.

=HT=Ingram · Feb 18, 2006, 10:24 PM // 22:24

I used the GeForce FX 5500 OC 512mb AGP 8x and it worked fine. but the same flavor in PCI with 256MB just did not cut it... So maybe look at a different card...

swaaye · Feb 18, 2006, 10:31 PM // 22:31

512mb low end cards?! BTW, I believe a 5500 is actually a 5200 chip clocked higher. Ickyness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_FX

If you guys really wanna know everything there is to know about how a FX (NV3x) chip works, read this piece. http://www.3dcenter.org/artikel/cinefx/index_e.php

I'd add the GeForce FX cards to the do not buy list, IMO. They should be treated as DirectX8 cards because they are all incapable of DX9 performance approaching even a Radeon 9700 from 2002. Yes, even the 5950 Ultra.

The slowest AGP card I would buy today would be a plain GeForce 6600 or a Radeon X700.

Guild Wars' engine uses mostly DirectX 7 features, with a few examples of DirectX 8 shading with the post processing, for example. That is why GW will run on such low-end cards. The developers did their homework on how to make the game playable for the largest audience. GW can run on cards as far back as a GeForce 256. Post processing will really kill off most FX cards, and anything under a Radeon 9600. Unless you accept a lower resolution/framerate.

And stay away from the cheap Sempron/A64 notebooks with SiS's integrated graphics. It may be DX8-capable, but I couldn't get GW running smoothly even at low quality 800x600.

Loviatar · Feb 18, 2006, 11:02 PM // 23:02

Quote:

Originally Posted by swaaye

The slowest AGP card I would buy today would be a plain GeForce 6600 or a Radeon X700.

.

considering the small price difference and the huge performance hit of the plain 6600 i think i could only recommend the card i have which is the 6600GT model and for a very long time the best bang for the buck.

with the prices sliding some are saying a 6800 version (forget which) is now the best for a little bit more

Nazo · Feb 18, 2006, 11:18 PM // 23:18

6800 GS is best bang for the buck atm. It overclocks so well that it's around the level of a X800 Pro or so maybe even slightly better, but, it has pixel shader 3.0 which can slightly increase performance of a few things that truly use it (like correctly written HDR effects.) Speaking of HDR effects, I might add that guild wars seems to show just a vague hint of some of that at times on my 2.0 card, so that might be just yet another thing that would kill performance on a GFFX5x00 series card. If you need something that low end, look for a Geforce 4 TI if you can find one (DO NOT BUY A MX, YOU WILL REGRET IT VERY SOON.)

BTW, since the 6600 series is not just a weakened NV40 core, but, has a smaller memory bus (gDDR3 is just stupid on the 6600 series, but, marketing hype sells, so gDDR3 it is) it's performance is really hit. I second the statement that going down to a plain 6600 is a terrible idea since it's further crippled from the 6600GT. Actually, I would suggest that you might want to look for a 6800LE. It's a rare OEM only card that is essentially a vanilla 6800 core with 8 pipes instead of 12 and the same memory (same bus too.) It's performance is roughly on par with a 6600GT. Stock. The 6800LE can sometimes actually be unlocked to 12 or very very rarely even 16 pipes. I've even seen a mod where someone decreased their memory latencies and got some rather uber performance out of the thing (it wasn't far below a 6800GT at all.) I used to have a 6800 with all pipes unlocked (including the vertex pipes, but, they don't do much in modern games) and can testify that it's performance is quite acceptable. (I messed up the thing with a voltage mod because with the voltage of a 6800GT the core would go up to 433MHz, so now it has to be underclocked until it's around roughly the performance of a really good 6200 card to get 100% stability out of it, hence the X850XT PE now in my system. Feel free to buy my old card. d-

Avoid all onboard video whenever possible. Intel, SiS, and etc are all just terrible. They are designed for watching DVDs, checking your e-mail, and maybe playing an old copy of Unreal Tournament if you're bored. Not for games that want real cards. ATi and nVidia have some pretty decent onboards, though mostly just the laptops get the tolerable ones, but, they have to share system memory, which decreases available ram and is slower than real video card memory, so they really are worse than a halfway decent AGP or PCI-E video card. Take them over SiS or Intel any day, but, take them only if you must.

I say if you're really strapped for cash, upgrade your motherboard and get some cheap old used AGP card that performs tolerably. Say a 9600 Pro for example. Pretty cheap, and ocs very well. I played Doom 3 at acceptable quality levels on my old 9600 Pro before lightning killed it. A 9600 isn't great, and I didn't get much by way of quality settings, but, it looked pretty good and ran quite acceptably (especially after a patch that fixed a shader bug for ATi cards.)

You know, I put together a lot of hardware. If you tell me what hardware you have (current cpu mainly) and what your maximum budget is, I might find you a good setup on newegg that could give you a better performance than a pci card for such a price.

Loviatar · Feb 18, 2006, 11:34 PM // 23:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nazo

You know, I put together a lot of hardware. If you tell me what hardware you have (current cpu mainly) and what your maximum budget is, I might find you a good setup on newegg that could give you a better performance than a pci card for such a price.

right now i am in what i might call my holding pattern as what i have works and i have bills to pay.

i will wait until something either breaks or drops below what i need and by that time i may get a MB,CPU, and VC from Newegg

the gig of value ram from corsair in dual mode helped a good bit and should tide me over (hopefully)

Nazo · Feb 18, 2006, 11:42 PM // 23:42

I mainly meant the original poster, Lambentviper, but, it applies to anyone in here. Actually, if you have a budget at all, you might be surprised what you can come up with if you change something minimal like just your motherboard and then grab some old cheap video card. It's more costly in the long run, but, most of us don't get to look at money so efficiently as the long run and have to do the best we can in the short run (for example, my X850XT PE is because getting a new motherboard and a PCI-Express video card that would equal what I was used to would cost more and I just couldn't bear to go down in quality just to save a few bucks in the long run, but, in the shorter long-run -- eg for Oblivion in particular when it comes out -- the X850XT PE would give me enough extra power so that I would be upgraded instead of just even with where I started.) I think I once came up with the setup for a Doom 3 capable system at decent quality settings in under $250 or so. You'd be surprised what you can come up with on the egg.

xxreaper008 · Feb 19, 2006, 01:05 AM // 01:05

I have Geforce Fx 5500, I can run all the options on full, but the only issue is, IT OVER HEATS, AHHH