Lost on video card specs...

[jtelep]

I know. I know. I am stupid and have never really spent a lot of time trying to understand this so please forgive my ignorance. I have looking to buy a new card and have been comparing quite a few (I need to stick with AGP for at least one more year). I have always liked NVidia cards more than ATI simply because, as I understand it, there are less issues with drivers and they do a better job supporting OpenGL (which I understand is predominately used in most FPS's which I love to play.) (Please correct me if I am wrong so far.)

I have been looking at cards that have great speed ratings (i.e. shader operations, pixel fill rate, texture fill rate and vertex operations) VS cards that have higher memory bandwidth but seem to be slower on the other things I just mentioned. Where I am lost is that it seems that the cards with the higher memory bandwidth but lower everywhere else are generally more expensive than the cards that are faster everywhere else except memory bandwidth (128-bit VS 256-bit). I have been reading a lot of other posts and everything I have read so far seems to point to having more memory bandwidth is the way to go.

Which one is better to have and where will it be the most realized (i.e. where would I see the difference from one type of card to the other)?

Thanks.

 

[Sable]

You're a bit wrong so far. The driver issue is no longer a problem, neither is OGL. And it's mainly only ID engine based FPS's that use OGL, I'd say D3D is more popular.

Your best bet is to give a price limit and ask for card recomendations.

 

[Elderly Newt]

Forget all the speed ratings. Forget all the numbers. Just look at benchmarks, those are the only things that matter. And yes, you're wrong on the drivers and OGL (although nvidia is slightly faster in OGL). D3D is more popular.

 

[gorcorps]

Benchmarks with GAMES give you a better idea then the benchmarks w/ 3Dmark and the like as well.