Need quick video Advice (buying)

[Johnbear007]

Awhile ago, when compusa had the radeon 8500 le 128MB for 99$ I got a raincheck.

It just came in, is this a good deal? I really cant afford anything more than 99$ and Ihave a radeon DDR 64 MB (original Radeon) now. I do kind of need a new vid card soon.

Bottom line, can I expect a year out of this card? (I dont mean with SUPER great FPS in doom 3 or anything.) But will I be able to play new games at a decent framerate for a year?


Thanks!

 

[AnAndAustin]

YES! There really is no better card for under $100 and it's only weakness is lack of AA which is no major disadvantage as it can really fly with AF enabled. Of course a lot depends upon the CPU you are coupling (or crippling) it with, but if $100 is your limit Rad8500LE-128MB is a great card. Things to check though are the clock speeds and dual RAMDACs for dual display if that's important to you. These vary by brand and the clock speeds also vary by oem/bulk vs retail so do check. At worst you may lose about 10% speed, a little o/c'ing room, dual display and a little image quality but that is worst case.

Rad9000PRO are inferior while GF4TI4200 are a little more expensive and only really worth it if you want the better 3D, AA or have a fast CPU. Rad8500LE-128 is one heck of a card within the US and Canada where it is reasonably priced.

 

[Johnbear007]

Hey, thanks for the reply!

I went ahead and got the 8500 and it is great. It is an ATI retail boexed LE (built by ATI)

What is the diff between AA and AF?

Thanks

 

[AnAndAustin]

Very nice and a damned fine card!

AA stands for AntiAliasing while AF stands for Anisotropic Filtering. Here's a little bit more about them ...

ANISO (AF):

At a very basic level it enhances in game details and textures and helps to overcome the blurring effect of AA, although AA is not required for its implimentation it is rec to notice the most diff in most games. Radeons do this with little hit while GF3/4TI take a bigger hit but do tend to be slightly higher quality, it pretty much evens out but makes a lot of sense to stick it on for the Radeon cards.

To get a bit deeper I need to get a little more technical. Texture mapping involves wrapping a texture's 2D sample around a 3D object to give the look of a brick wall, fur, wood etc, hence a texture map is used to apply textures to objects. Texture filtering dictates how texels (the elements of a texture) are used to produce the final pixels which make up the image. Through these processes textures are scaled up or down depending on distance and size. Often a series of pre-scaled textures are used to minimise distortion and maximise both speed and quality. Mipmap refers to the sequence of these scaled textures. 2 main types of texture filtering are BiLinear and TriLinear which are best for objects that are at right angles to the viewpoint. Aniso takes things a bit further by coping much better with the multitude of actual angles that a game may use. These 3 texture filtering methods obviously all come at a perf cost. BiL takes 4 texture reads per pixel, TriL 8 (effectively uses 2 lots of BiL) which mostly helps the detail of objects further away. Aniso copes with many more variables and can map more accurately to angled textures, the bottom line is increased quality of textures esp on mid and long range objects.

AA:

Very simply Aliasing is the result of trying to show curved or diagonal lines on a display made up of squares, what you end up with is a step effect (also called jaggies) rather than a smooth line/curve. AntiAliasing (AA) removes this effect by basicly smoothing the surrounding pixels. ATI Radeons and GF2 use SuperSampling (rendering more pixels than used in final output) which takes a larger perf hit and is quite old and inefficient. GF3, GF4TI and Rad9700 use MultiSampling which involves more guess work; much faster but slightly blurrier results. The slight blurriness can be overcome by the use of Anisotropic Filtering which sharpens the textures and results in an image easily as good as Supersampling but is still faster and more efficient. Certainly for the GF3/4TI cards aniso is only officially for OpenGL, but there are many 3rd party utils which can force this on in both DirX and OpenGL. There are many types of AA, generally here they are:

2xAA (GF3 and GF4TI take only a tiny hit with this enabled)
4xAA (noticably better results than 2xAA mode but only Rad9700 can currently do this without slowing down significantly)
6xAA (Rad9700 mode which is even better looking than 4xAA, albeit marginally)
QxAA (GF4TI only take the same hit as for 2xAA, you get a more 4xAA look but with a lot more blurriness, GF3 can do it too but slightly slower)
4xS AA (GF4TI take a large hit but this is 6xAA type quality, nice just to see what it's like but not really feasible yet)
FxAA (Fragment AA found on the Matrox Parhelia which is technically brilliant but does have its short-falls, effectively gives parts of the image 16xAA)

So if you have a GF3 or GF4TI 2xAA and a little AF is what you want, if you have a Rad8500/9000 then forget AA and enable 8tap or 16tap AF. If the res is maxxed out and you apply these settings then you can go ahead and try more but do expect a perf hit, generally you want to higher the res rather than use AA on Rad or high AF on GF3/4TI. Of course those with Rad9700 can enable 6xAA and 16tap AF and still fly, but then that's what they pay the money for!

 

[Johnbear007]

Thanks, that was VERy helpful... I just have a couple questions:

1. Where/how do I upgrade my BIOS to Retail from LE?

2.

In a game like neverwinter nights, it offers in the settings 2x aa 4xaa quinquuxAA and 4x NICE aa... what is the Nice?

What should I set it to? Should I disable it, and just do aniso in my display settings for openGL or for direct 3d?

thanks again

 

[AnAndAustin]

1. I'm afraid I never mess with gfx card BIOS' but there is plenty of info on these forums about it, try a search for 'Radeon BIOS' or 'BIOS LE'. In any account it is best to try o/c'ing your card first just to ensure what its limits are and whether it can run at stock Rad8500 speeds (275/550). So basicly you need a BIOS file prob for exactly the same make of Radeon but the full 8500 as opposed to the 8500LE, then of course get the flash prog and make a backup so you can boot up from a PCI gfx card and reflash the orig BIOS if it stuffs up.

2. It tends to be better to force your own AA (and AF) settings rather than rely on in-game support which is obviously more vague and less tailored for your partic hw. Radeons often have a 'perf' and a 'quality' mode, avoid the perf mode as it is totally pointless only of use to boost benchmark results. NeverWN seems to be offering GF3/4TI modes ... although 2xAA and 4xAA are standard QuinxAA and 4xNICE-AA (4xS-AA?) sound like nVidia modes. On an nVidia card 2xAA is the best setting, very sharp and very little perf hit, QxAA is just as fast on GF4TI while it's half way to 4xAA hit on a GF3. Radeon8500/9000 should only ever use quality 2xAA mode as this tends to take a big perf hit let alone anything more. It is pretty subjective so try the diff modes but see if you can display FPS so you know how much this is slowing the game down, upping the res is often more pref esp on Rad8500/9000 cards.