Best sub $200 NVidia card?
Been having a hell of a time trying to find a suitable sub $200 video card to rpelace my dieing 9700 Pro. I don't want to spend too much becuase I hope to buy a top notch system sometime within the next year, but I can't afford anything right now however this crashing bullcrap is becoming too much for me to handle now.
I like to play Unreal Tournament 2004 at highest detail, but also want a card that can handle some high detail 3D modeling I do. My understanding is that NVidia is best for that last part. UT2k4 is currently the only game I really play, though I would like to get DOOM3 sometime soon too. And now that I think of it, BattleField 1942 and the Desert Combat Mod are alot of fun too, but haven't played that in a LONG time due to crashing.
So, any advice? I'll go with a Radeon if NVidia is just too expencive to compaire to ATi.
I like to play Unreal Tournament 2004 at highest detail, but also want a card that can handle some high detail 3D modeling I do. My understanding is that NVidia is best for that last part. UT2k4 is currently the only game I really play, though I would like to get DOOM3 sometime soon too. And now that I think of it, BattleField 1942 and the Desert Combat Mod are alot of fun too, but haven't played that in a LONG time due to crashing.
So, any advice? I'll go with a Radeon if NVidia is just too expencive to compaire to ATi.
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True and this is one of the reason I love ATi so much, but I do some models that are well over 2million poly's And this 9700 Pro can't handle anything smoothly past 200,000. I understand that NVidia can handle up to 800,000 or so according to Nomad. Plus we use GFFX 5200 cards at school, and they run pretty damned smooth for some models I do. Wishful thinking on my part to believe that I could find a good NVidia card for less than $200 huh?
I have a 5900XT right now, soft modded to a quadroFX 3000, its incredibly fast at pro work, and average in gaming - when i bought it a few months ago it was 210 .. and now theyre about 175 or thereabouts. I couldnt tell you which one is the best but theres numerous threads @ nvnews / guru3d about this ... or maybe someone here can chime in ..
m
I'll look at those sites as well...
RWB ...what specification determines whether it handles high polygons smoothly?
What do you mean?
Large Scenes.... mostly me testing ideas out.
a 1600*1200 screen, would be rendered totally opaque @ 1 poly per pixel - thats one seperate polygon for every infitessimal point on the screen...with less than 2M polys ... even accounting for perspective, it seems that if youre just trying ideas out then youre vastly over modelling ...
just a word of advice - if you want ot work in the film/FX/game industry - then 2M+ scenes just arent going to cut it ...
[/jaded realist mode]
m
True, but I tend to test ideas out for various things, I think the one time I had 2 million poly's, and I was in mesh mode, it took a long to find out how many I had, it was like 1.8 or so to be more exact. I had multiple instances of the Union Class dropship I made, plus many high poly trees and bushes... in the end it took 7 hours to render out a very small scaled movie that was only 10 seconds long, 320x240 I think. It was nothing less than an utter dissapointment.
But on many occasions I do near and slightly above 1 million, I have tried many versions of a landscape idea I got from Star Trek: Insurrection... but that was before I learned new tricks, and doing this crazy stuff allows me to learn those tricks. Gonna start messing with Normal Mapping soon for my real time game, I hope my teacher allows it, cuase that would be SUPER! Right now the package we have doesn't have the module or whatever it needs to support the Normal Mapping, or he can't get it to work. For $300,000, you'd think it would allow it or at least work.
I meant in the specs of the card ...is there anything that would tell you whether the card will do what you want?
I'm looking thru the specs of the wildcat vp cards right now ...you could prolly getta vp760 around $200.
Sooner or later ...you're gonna get a wildcat ...just don't rely on it to play games.
Not sure if this would help, but nVidia has a plugin for Photoshop that does normal maps. I was screwing around with Doom 3 skins when I found it.
Yeah I've seen it around before, and we have learned how to use them in class the other day and got to play with it some, but in our game project we can't use them. It confuses me why we "can't" use them if it doesn't work, yet he was able to get it working in class. Doesn't make any sence, but this guy knows what he's doing, cuase DAMN he is good. But he's also been in the industry for a while...
I'm sure the R9800 Pro is faster than a FX5900 or whatever the NVidia card is that is sub $200, but by how much? I am buying A CARD tonight. If I had more time to do anything I would, but 12 hour days at school really bog me down :P
Anyways, back to work
Very nice, but this kinda stuff was done before I got into my Real Time 3D class, and as I said, I liked to test out ideas. Think of it like this, many people like to play games, well I do to, but I also enjoy playing in 3Ds Max just to see what happens when I do something. I'll put in a Sphere, bump up the poly count as high as it goes, then start applying Mesh Smooth, then perhaps I'll test out a few different Modifyers, or perhaps see how far I would have to go to get it smoooth, yet have no smoothing groups Animate the ball with whatever wierd combination of mod's and perhaps do something wierd with the video from that in After Effects, create crazy things.
Just having fun in it, but either way, I got my self a new Radeon 9800 Pro, the MSI card had sooo many goodies bundled with it too.
Forgot to mention that, I read the reviews on Newegg, which is usually the way I go about things on newegg, and they were all saying that. Of course, I had to get it then