Steve's new video card

[+Dante-JT]

As Thunder-works will help funding Steve's purchaise of a new videocard for JT development, I'd ask for suggestions about a good video card in UK with a good cost/performance ratio.

 

At the moment JT is being developed in a 1.4 GHz machine with GF4 MX card. Very humble, but IMO it's good to develop a flight sim with such low resources as it motivates extreme optimising - as a result, JT runs very well at the moment and doesn't even has any LOD approaches implemented.

 

But to stay current, we agree that we must use latest graphic technologies like shaders...so, I ask, what's a good card ? Steve wants to dive head deep into shaders programming, to have nice bump-mapped sea and post production effects like the specular glow in metallic surfaces and other effects seen in latest games.

 

(Remember that a uber card such as 6800 or X800 wouldn't be a welcome suggestion, they're too fast and Steve would become be lazy at optimizing the display routines B) :D

[PG_Raptor]

How about an Nvidia 6800, or an ATI X800 PE? :D

 

If you want a card that is used a lot nowadays, get a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. If you dont' want to go that high, a 9700 Pro should do. Don't know much about nvido cards.

[Scout_51]

How about an Nvidia 6800, or an ATI X800 PE? :D

 

If you want a card that is used a lot nowadays, get a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro.  If you dont' want to go that high, a 9700 Pro should do. Don't know much about nvido cards.

you could also go the fx 5600 or 5700 ultra,they are decent cards..as for the game,hell make it so its decent even on a ati 9600,then allow folks scale up on detail if they prefer perhaps

[KevBaz]

id go for a radeon 9600pro if your on a budget, should be able to pick a decent version of it for around the £100 mark, although if a nvidia card is being used at the moment, the transition between the two normally causes a few problems and the best thing to do is a format, if thats not a option then a fx5600 or 5700 should suffice

[bad_karma_2one]

Get the Radeon 9800 pro (256MB) from H.I.S, available from ebuyer.com, you can even upgrade it with an nVidia dustbuster style fan for about £10.00, which is actually quieter than the stock one and allows MASSIVE overclocks

 

I did this and was able to go from 378MHz to 460MHz!!!!!!!, that was in the winter months, at the moment I can run it at 420-425MHz as its hot at the moment already, at no point did i see artifacts or corrupted textures, nor did it lock up.

 

I just cant express how impressed I was with this, 82MHz OC and I hadnt even taken it to the limit, now thats price/performance.

 

In 3Dmark03 it scored ~5800 points but when overclocked that jumped up to ~6600 points

Edited August 7, 2004 by bad_karma_2one

[Nobby]

5900XT - nice compromise between price / performance.

[scary_pigeon]

hello nobby.

 

its what I ended up getting.

 

now my next problems are:

 

new pair of glasses - my specks are scratched to bits.

 

and also now to actually utilise the card properly.

 

I'm still only using opengl 1.1 functions as my opengl book only goes up to 1.1.

 

The bits and pieces on the net I do find baffling at the moment - when there is more time I will investigate. But maybe we will get other programmer(s) in to the team.

 

Anybody know anybody who can do Pacific Fighters type oceans?

[SDirickson]

I'd go for a Radeon card. Seems like most flight simmers nowadays use Radeon because of their OpenGL support.

[Nobby]

May be of interest.....

 

ftp://download.nvidia.com/developer/Paper...ex_Textures.pdf

[scary_pigeon]

May be of interest.....

 

ftp://download.nvidia.com/developer/Paper...ex_Textures.pdf

I've read it. it scares me.