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Is a Geforce3 still viable for today's games?

D

Darkhawk28

Diamond Member
I have a Gainward Powerpack Geforce3 64MB video card. I'm using the following as well....

Abit KT7A
AMD 1.4ghz T-Bird
384MB PC133 RAM

Now, if I change the MB, CPU and RAM to the following will it be a hinderance to the system....

Abit NF7-S Version 2.0
AMD Barton 2500+
2x256MB Kingston PC3200 RAM


What you guys think?
 
sure it is... just that u might have to play those games at lower resolutions and and lower quality settings. going by the assumption that gf3 > gf4 mx440... check this out.
 
You're picking the right part of your system to upgrade at this point. The vid card should be the last thing to upgrade when your system is up to a reasonable spec.
 
Originally posted by: spanky
sure it is... just that u might have to play those games at lower resolutions and and lower quality settings. going by the assumption that gf3 > gf4 mx440... check this out.
Click to expand...

No need to assume, take a look at the Radeon 9600 review which includes data on Geforce 3 Ti500 (which many Geforce3's can nearly overclock to).

Review

My take is, as long as you can live without AF and AA for a while, the Geforce3 can hold on until the Fall season. This is when there are generally some great deals on Video cards because all the new cards are coming in.

$0.02
 
I had a GeForce 3 original, and I was not comfortable running UT2K3, Unreal 2, or C&C Generals, or anything similar. Of course, it might have been my slow (AthlonXP 1900+) processor, or my penchant for eye candy.
 
your penchant 😛

I had XP 1800+ w/ GeForce 3 Ti200 overclocked to Ti500 speeds, running those games fine.. highest detail on C&C Generals and UT2003. and Unreal 2 had medium shadow levels
 
a geforce2 gts or even a geforce256 is viable for todays games. we run alot of todays games at school on our AIW rage Pros (tnt2 level card) and it runs UT2003 great. Generals has issues, but still runs on the rage pro.
 
I'd have to say it wouldn't run the games I play at the resolutions and in game settings I like.

If you can stand low resolutions with low to medium in game quality settings then it can play them-but the whole joy of the newer games is the eyecandy.

rogo
 
I don't think it really is. I just ordered a radeon 9700 pro after using my GF3 for 2 years.

C&C generals runs awesome on my rig, I hear it's much more cpu dependant then vid card, and I only have an 1800+, so *shrug*.
modern FPS at high res and quality levels choke to death hardcore. I have a 21" monitor, so I <3 high resolutions. It's time to move on.

Plus think of what else you get. You get better 2d quality (the gf4 lineup fixed most of this, but man, my gf3 is a dog), you get hardware mpeg decoding (which is nice for dvds and the such), you get the option of dual head display, and you get a decently future proof card. All this for $220 shipped in the fs/ft forum. Less then I paid for my GF3.
 
My G3 ti200@210/515 scores 10100 on 2k1se and does most games fine. However it struggles with Blackhawk Down and is choppy@1024x768x32 with no AA/AF on a 3ghz P4 with DDR418 so I'm looking to get a faster card now.
 
Yeah, I'd agree with these guys. The GF3 is showing it age, but it's more than adequate for the current games out there right now unless you're really anal retentative about your framerate. It can even run the (very) unoptimized Doom3 alpha. I still have one in one of my backups. Still, I'd think about an upgrade since you're really not doing your 2500xp Barton justice by bottlenecking it with a slower video card.
 
The two games I play alot of are Forgotten Battles and Raven Shield-and I find those two games to bring down my system at high to excellent settings!

I couldn't imagine it on a g3 level card.

rogo
 
It depends on what you mean by "viable". To me, viable right now means 60fps at 1280x1024. With the newer games like splinter cell, gta vice city, and nfshp2, my r8500 at 300/300 dips under 30fps sometimes. I'm upgrading to a 9700 non-pro to alleviate this.

If you play mostly older games tho, you're probably fine.
 
If you can't play UT2003 on a 9700 acceptably, I would guess you've got some other issues going on.
I play it at 1280x1024 high quality with a Radeon 7500 clocked at 300/300 and it looks great. Gets 90 fps in the flyby which is good enough for me at this point. I have been considering an upgrade but can't justify it if the card I have now works this well.

A Geforce3 should still be a good card for the vast majority of games, but I was never thrilled with the 2d quality on Nvidia cards. Part of the reason I made a jump to ATI a while back...all their cards have been sharp as razors 2D. If someone knows a manufacturer of Nvidia based cards with consistently good 2D quality I would like to know.
 
Originally posted by: earthman
If you can't play UT2003 on a 9700 acceptably, I would guess you've got some other issues going on.
I play it at 1280x1024 high quality with a Radeon 7500 clocked at 300/300 and it looks great. Gets 90 fps in the flyby which is good enough for me at this point. I have been considering an upgrade but can't justify it if the card I have now works this well. .
Click to expand...

oh, it runs at the proper speed (and the flyby score is meaningless, run a botmatch demo). i run 1024x768, high quality textures, everything on high, with 2x FSAA and 8X AF. i generally get between 40-75 FPS at these settings. i simply consider that minimum to be too slow. turning off the eyecandy really doesn't help that minimum FPS number very much. i believe the game is very CPU dependant.
 
I played UT 2k3 with a MX 4 and the image quality was great and the framerate was not choppy. 800 x 600 of course.
 
Are you sure? I've been playing at 1152x864 and I don't see any jerkiness at all. The botmatch benchmark shows 39 FPS. The game seems really smooth...In the original UT I routinely saw framerates near 200 at 1280x1024 with this cheapo card. AA is set to application preference.
 
wise upgrade....
I'm still happy with my Radeon 8500LE.. it's about the same with GF3 Ti. It's still handle todays games pretty well
 
I play all DX8 games at 1280x1024 smoothly with my GF3Ti500@stock speeds by just tweaking around with each one's video settings. No AA or AF enabled of course-if this is enough eye candy for you it's ok! 😉
 
The Ti200 doesn't scale much beyond ~1GHz IIRC, as Anand's UT2K3 CPU Scaling article shows. Your framerates should improve slightly because of your new CPU, but you'll probably be video-card "limited."
 
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