I come to you, the experts.

[Dofarlow]

Hello friends,

I am currently in the market for a new video card, and I had a few questions that I was hoping I might get some help with. I don't want this to turn into a flame-fest, like so many others like this have done, but I'm looking for some STRAIGHT facts about a few products and their performance. First of all, I want it to be known that I'm not NEAR as knowledgable as most of you on this forum, so please excuse my ignorance. I am currently running an AMD 1GHZ with Win 98se, but i can upgrade to 2k at any time if need be. TO say that I use it quite a bit for games would be a DRASTIC understatement. The fact is, I use it CONSTANTLY for games. Everything from Q3 and UT to EQ and Sacrifice, I Play. I've been looking at ATI's Radeon cards, and I'm VERY impressed with the versitility of their All-in-wonder Radeon 32MB DDR. The other card I'm looking at is simply the 64MB Radeon. here's what I'm trying to find out.

1. From what i understand, they are both very fast and stable cards, and from what i was told, I really wouldn't notice THAT much of a performance decrease with my games unless I was running at EXTREMELY!! high resolutions at 32 bit. Is this the case? If so, the clear chioce for me would be the All-in-wonder. Like I mentioned before, I do LOTS of gaming, so what is your advice? IS there THAT much of a performance decrease dropping that 32MB? Please let me know what you think, as I value your opinion highly.

2. Before now, I've been using an AGP V5 5500 (I know, I know you're gonna tell me it sucks), but how do either of these cards compare to it performance-wise? I didn't know if the 32MB DDR would be better than the 64MB SDRAM? please give me all the information and advice you can (in dummy language so idiots like me can understand it please =) )

thank you very much in advance for all your input, and I look forward to hearing from you.

 

[RoboTECH]

1) The difference between 32MB and 64MB isn't all that noticeable at lower resolutions and 16-bit color. Of course, if you are going to get a Radeon, you won't want to use 16-bit at all.

2) Anyone that tells you the 5500 sucks needs to talk to me so I can b|tchslap them. The card kicks ass.

3) If all you're doing is playing games, the Radeon won't be an upgrade from the 5500 in most cases. Sacrifice and Evolva will be the games that'll show the biggest difference due to Dot3.

 

[Biggs]

The extra 32MB will be more beneficial if you run your games at higher resolutions like 1280 x 1024 and above. The extra memory is needed to store more textures thus making it slightly faster.

 

[Sunner]

The GeForce family is faster than both the Radeons and Voodoo's, all the way from GTS which is a bit faster to the Ultra which is alot faster than anything out there.
Image quality is another issue though, the GeForces have quite a bit worse image quality than the other cards, though the Elsa's and Visionteks(same cards anyway, Visiontek makes cards for Elsa) are better than the avarge GeForces.
GeForces are pretty good when it comes to features, not perfect, but not bad at all either.

Get a GeForce for pure speed.

The Radeons have the best feature set, good speed, faster than the Voodoos in most cases, and excellent 2D/3D quality.
Not much to say, the most well rounded cards no doubt, speedy enough for anything out there at the moment, good image quality, supposedly good drivers these days for both Win2K and Win9x.

Get a Radeon for a very good all-round card.

Well, you know about the V5 since you have one.

If I were you I'd stick with the V5 unless you have any compelling reason not to.

Oh and BTW, if you do get a GTS or Radeon, go for the 32 meg versions, they're alot cheaper and almost as fast, definately the best value at this time.

 

[Dofarlow]

Thank you very much for the good advice so far. The reason I'm looking for another card is because my V5 got cracked in the transition to the new computer. I noticed that most of you said it may be a good idea to stick with the V5, but with it already out of the equation, would you recommend trying the ATI or NVidia now instead (since it IS still possible for me to get another V5 if i wanted to).

Robotech, I noticed that you said that the V5 might be better than the 32MB DDR radeon. How drastic would the quality decrease be do you think? If it's not THAT much, I really do like the features that the Radeon All-in-wonder uses. Please keep your thoughts coming.

Thanks again, and please keep that good advice coming in.

 

[Dofarlow]

Still looking for more advice. Keep it coming

thanks

 

[Taz4158]

<< Robotech, I noticed that you said that the V5 might be better than the 32MB DDR radeon. How drastic would the quality decrease be do you think? If it's not THAT much, I really do like the features that the Radeon All-in-wonder uses. Please keep your thoughts coming. >>


Well there certainly won't be a decrease you'll notice an increase. If you like the features and will use them by all means go for the AIW, there's certainly nothing wrong with the 5 though.

 

[Dofarlow]

GREAT! thanks Taz =)

 

[Taz4158]

Enjoy it it's a marvelous card. If you need any tweaks or assistance after you get it feel free to PM.

 

[Sunner]

Read Anand's reviews of the cards in question.
The Radeon is generally faster than the V5.
Frankly, I'd only recomend a V5 if someone plays ALOT of glide games, or ALOT of sims.
Its not a bad card, not by a long shot, but IMO the Radeon and GTS are simply better cards, especially now that driver support for the V5 is gone.
But anyway, for pure benchmarks, have a look-see at Anand's review.

Other sites that have reviews are Aceshardware, and Tomshardware.

 

[TravisBickle]

what do you want the all in wonder for? i am wondering because if you just want a tv tuner it might be best to get that separate because if you change to an nv20 or whatever in a year, you'll have to put that in your antistatic bag along with your cool Radeon. I think the AIW is a great idea but apart from real time mpeg coding assistance it might be less flexible.

 

[BFG10K]

The Voodoo 5 is still a great card and unless you get a GF2 or a GF2 Ultra your framerates won't increase by that much. Keep the Voodoo 5 until you really need to upgrade.