best vid card for BH6 w/1.1 cel for Flight Simulator 2002

[KeithP]

Subject says it all. My Dad is running an Abit BH6 (Slot 1) with a Celeron 400 and a VooDoo 3. He just got MS Flight Simulator 2002 and wants to upgrade his system a bit for better visuals. I tried convincing him to let me build him a new rig and couldn't.

Soooo.....figured I would go with a Celeron 1.1 (128K cache) and a new video card. I am thinking a GF3 or GF3Ti200 would probably be fine.

What do you folks think?

Thanks,
Keith

 

[Rand]

Flight Sims are typically almost entirely processor limited, and MS Flight Simulator 2002 exemplifies this trait.
If your looking to run Flight Sim 2002 I would STRONGLY recommend getting the fastest processor you can afford, even if that means going with a weaker graphics card.
For Flight Sim 2002 the difference of 200MHz is worth more then the difference between a GF3 Ti200 and GF4 Ti4600.

It'll really pay dividends to geta faster processor. The graphics card is a distent second for MS Flight Sim 2002. As long as you have a GF2 GTS level card or better your not going to gain substantially. Even the old TNT2/V3 can perform quite reasonably in Flight Sim 2002 when backed by a decent processor.

In terms of graphics card, I'd probably look towards whatever offers the highest quality FSAA implementation. As FS2002 in mostly procesor limited most current graphics cards generally lose only 2-5FPS worth of performance when enabling 4X FSAA on FS2002. Flight Sims also tend to be one of the genres the best show of the impact of FSAA on image quality.

Under the circumstances, I'd be inclined to recommend a Radeon8500LE over a GF3 Ti200 for FS2002. ATi's FSAA implementation is considerably more bandwidth intensive, and consumes drastically more memory... it also tends to perform quite a bit lower then nVidia's Multi-Sampled FSAA. On the other hand, it tends to look a bit better then nVidia's implementation and doesnt blur textures as much either.
Since FS2002 tends to see only an incremental performance loss with FSAA on any modern graphics card that would mostly nullify the performance differences, whgich leaves ATi's board offering a better quality implementation.

That said, your MUCH better off dropping to a weaker graphics card (GF4 MX/GF2 Ti/R7500/R9000 etc) and spending the extra money on a faster processor.

 

[KeithP]

Thanks for the input Rand!

-Keith

 

[kgraeme]

With FS2000 on a Celeron450/BH6, I found that also giving the system more ram helped more than the faster video card. I went from 128MB to 384 and went from a TNT to a Radeon64.