rec.autos.simulators

Are both the ATI Radeons and GeForces compatible with both GPL and new
games?

Thanks.

"Holtzman"
   The Radeon 8500 or the Geforce 3 & 4's will work very well with GPL(using
the d3d patch) and most newer titles.  The thing to shop for these days is
onboard memory.  You must get a card with at least 32 megs...but even that
is too small I think.  Unless cash is a major problem, a 64 meg vid card
should be the starting point.  Both ATI and Nvidia have 128meg cards.
  Titles like N2002 use texture compression, and even they recomend 64 megs
if you use the opengl display.
  Be prepared for some major hair-pulling tho, especially if you are
migrating from a 3dfx card.  Track down and eliminate EVERY 3dfx file before
you begin installing the new card.
dave henrie

Cya
Joe Janasov

Thanks for the reply.  I definitely am planning on something in the 64meg
range.  As I said, I haven't done _any_ sim-ming (I _never_ do *** :-))
for quite a while so I'm actually upgrading from an ATI Xpert98 (8meg) card.
No 3dfx for me.

One last thing:  I am on a tight budget (under $100.00 because I need a new
wheel too) and I'm thinking about a Radeon 7500 because of the dual monitor
support (I gotta work on this machine too).

I've seen other manufacturers such as Sapphire, Apollo, etc using the ATI
chip.
Are these 3rd party manufacturers OK?

Should I go for the ones with DDR over not-DDR?

I am looking at [ATI RADEON 7500 128MB SDRAM W/TV/DVI OUT] for $89.00 or
[ATI RADEON 7500 64MB DDR TV/DVI/DUAL VGA] for $79.00.  I haven't seen
Geforce 3 or 4s for $100.00. but I'm still looking.

Thanks again...

Bill

The difference between an SDR and a DDR card is chalk and cheese. The
DDR will blow the doors off an SDR card. Don't consider going to a
128MB card, this is nothing more than marketing hype. You will NEVER
use more than 64MB of textures with any current sim, especially at a
usable speed on a Radeon 7500. So make sure you don't get suckered in
by a salesman. The extram mem doesn't buy any extra speed!!!

Radeon 7500 is equivalent to a GF2 ti, the Radeon 8500 is equiv to
something between a GF3ti 200 and ti 500. IF money is tight, go for
the 7500 DDR. Or the GF2 ti 200.

If you want more power, go for the ti500 or Radeon 8500.

Don't know about these 3rd party makers, I'd be a little suspicious
personally.

But the main question is what CPU/mobo this is to go with. If you are
upgrading your PC from the old 8mb card, you won't have the CPU power
for these high end cards. If you've got anything 500mhz or slower,
stick to the Radeon 7500 and save you're cash, cos you're bottleneck
will be CPU power.

Rafe Mc

"Don't touch that please, your primitive intellect wouldn't understand
alloys and compositions and,......things with molecular structures,....and
the....." - Ash

Robin, that's an interesting article. I can see some circumstances
with their test where the 128mb RAM made a noticeable difference, more
so with the GF4s. I question whether the 128mb card's better
performance is due to the extra RAM though. The tests on Serious Sam
and RTCW showed it with a clear lead over the 64mb cards at 800x600.
There's pretty much no way they could have 64mb of textures in
800x600, so it seems like they have optimised the design of the card
to pull some extra performance. The other two were straight reference
designs, and they both had the same scores.

It does seem like a very well put together card anyway, regardless. Of
course, all the tests were on a P4 2.2ghz, so you would want some
serious cpu power to get that performance.

Rafe Mc

I agree, if you can afford to get the best then you should, but I hate
the fact that sales ppl use the mem of a card to sell it. Like a GF2
MX200 with 64mb of ram will be sold to a computer newbie as a better
deal than a 32mb GF2 ti or similar. With DDR. The 32mb DDR card would
kill any 64mb SDR card, but the sales/marketing ppl will talk up the
SDR version.

It seems that Holtzman is on a tight budget, so a 128mb SDR card would
be major overkill against a 64mb DDR card.

Rafe Mc

The problem between comparing GFs and Radeons is consistency of
texture quality. There was a (very) long review of this on
www.anandtech.com where they tried to determine which settings were
needed for each card to have the same image quality.

ATI's 2x and 4x FSAA were WAY better than the GFs, and were generally
a LOT better in image quality. The GFs needed max anisotropic
filtering and 4x FSAA to get to the quality of the ATI 2x trilinear
image qual.

So it's a bit misleading to see a comparison between the two based on
2x or 4x FSAA, because the GF doesn't have to work as hard. And the GF
always appears to be the speed champ.

Rafe Mc