Newest video cards question

[VAF-Striker]

Does anyone have any experience with any of the newest video cards available in the PCI 2.0 16 family?

 

I'm specifically looking at 4 different cards:

 

Nvidia Gforce GTX 275

Nvidia Gforce GTX 285

 

AMD Radeon HD 4870

AMD Radeon HD 4890

 

I haven't seen anything posted regarding either of these cards chip-sets but I'm concerned about compatibility with older games/simulations like F4AF and crashes/bugs and so forth. I've had much better luck with the Nvidia chip-sets and drivers for older sims and don't know much about the newer Radeon drivers.

 

I'm interested in any feedback, positive or negative so any help is appreciated.

[+JediMaster]

It's not always the card itself so much as the drivers. Newer driver revisions on occasion will strip out older code necessary for games in the past.

Now in some cases you can keep using the older drivers, but of course newer video cards have a limit to how old the drivers can be. Generally speaking you can't use a driver more than a month or so older than a chip's release. That doesn't mean anything per se, because it could be 6 months after its release that code that made game XYZ from 2001 work, so whatever card you're using it would stop working with the later drivers and work with the earlier ones.

 

Really the only thing to do is search out one by one each of those older games and find out from the people still playing it (or that just stopped) what card/driver combos are still good and which aren't. F4:AF still works on my GTX260 using drivers that are now a few revs back, however at some point (I don't know where because I play F4AF in phases and it had been months since my last time) using FSAA broke some stuff in game, namely almost anything using 3D effects in the menu like recon, the arming screen, and the online database. So I either have to forego FSAA or skip those features.

[VAF-Striker]

Thanks Jedi. I appreciate the info!

[+Fubar512]

Dave (USAFMTL) has a GTX 285, and Brain32 runs an HD 4870, so you can ask them.

[VAF-Striker]

Thank you, I will!

[PinkPanther]

Check out this video card comparison chart to get a good idea of what you get for the buck. I just put in a 5870 and it is fast but needs better drivers. If you are on a somewhat tight budget I would probably go for 4890 1GB.

 

http://www.madshrimp...cle&articID=953

Edited October 13, 2009 by PinkPanther