Video Cards and LCD gaming

[Diasper]

What with the growth of LCD screens and their increasing performance in games I thought that perhaps video cards should be categorized according to the LCD they're suitable to given their maxium resolutions.

Given 17-19" screens are 1280x1024 and representt the majority of the market what would you say the miniumum card is capable of 1280x1024 with good,steady fps:
- under high quality settings but no AA etc
- under very high quality settings including AA etc?
Also, bearing in mind future games?

I myself have a 17" LCD and have been lookign to upgrade from my 9800pro, but it seems a card like the 6800GT, alot of its power would go to waste..

What do you guys think?

 

[icejunkie]

A lot of cards can run high resolutions without AA/AF, and at insane resolutions the idea of AA is quite, well, stupid and not worth it.

First, list your full system specs so we can nail down the bottleneck. See, having a 6800 Ultra Extreme Quadruple Elite Edition isn't going to do much if you're running a Pentium2 450Mhz lol...

Second, A 6600GT should be able to handle all that in games like Doom3 and HL2, so you're pretty much set. If you have the little bit extra cash, spring for a vanilla 6800 and try your luck at unlocking the pipes (EXTREMELY easy to do). That way, you are SURE to be set...

 

[Hadsus]

One thing to keep in mind is that some LCD screens do a better job of interpolating than others. I know that before I purchased by 2001fp alot of people claimed that if I don't run at native resolution I would get a less than good image....which turned out to be completely false. Perhaps they've seen interpolation from another monitor and assumed all interpolated the same way. I've played hours of HL 2 at 1152 lines of resolution (I think....one of those odd resolutions between 1280 and 1024) and the you wouldn't know what, if anything, is compromised.

 

[Diasper]

My system specs are in my profile sig now so you can check. My computer is 1.5 years old now and I'll be looking to upgrade to a rev E AMD64 and overclocking from there probably within the next year and so would be looking for card able to handle 1280x1024 with full detail and some AA etc on current and some future games.

However, I was originally asking the question because I was looking to help my brother out finding suitable componenets to probably run with 17-19" LCD ie 1280x1024 in a nearer future build. Other components would include a AMD643200+ overclocked as much as possible with attention to noise.

ps. my monitor is ok at interpolation at 1024x768 but then again the loss due to interpolation probably equals about -4x AA ignoring chunkier textures alone!

 

[Diasper]

What graphic cards are people running with their 17-19" LCDs to get near maximum quality?

 

[NordicNINE]

I'd say you'd want a GeForce 6600GT to get the best performance at 1280x1024.
You can run Far Cry, Doom III & Half-Life 2 at that res without AA and pretty much everything else with AA at that res.

 

[Diasper]

Thanks,

Seems would need an ATI X800XL to really ensure the maximum from 1280x1024. That's from tweaknes.net - http://www.tweaknews.net/reviews/x800xl/index10.php

One thing that is important is the minimum frame rate and ATI cards seem to have a much better than average min frame rate and more specifically handle higher number AA and AF with less drop in performance.

 

[Mykl]

My 6600GT has run everything I've thrown at it at 1280x1024 at acceptable frame rates. It doesn't start to choke until I start fiddling with the AA and AF settings.