Which graphic card is better for flight simulation

[madmickey]

Which graphic is better for flight simulation the Radeon 8500 or the Geoforce 3. I plan to use an AMD XP with a windows 98 system; I like the dual monitor of Radeon 8500 and am more worried about quality of screenshot over maximum FPS. Price wise I can get a Radeon retail box for 60% of the cost of the GF3 TI 500 and less money now allow me to upgrade to better product in future. I use my computer 75% for flight sims and strategy game and 25% for internet.

 

[dbwillis]

Sorry, this isnt exactly an answer, but Im using a GeForce 2Ti 64MB DDR card and its great in flight sims, on the other hand, if you like flight sims, Im selling the IL2 Sturmikov game I just bought if your interested for $40 shipped.
Im not in the mood to buy another controller and its pretty hard to play with the KB.

 

[JOSEPHLB]

I'd recommend a "plane jane" GeForce 3

You should be able to get one of the first generations for a very good price. With your processor speed, coupled with a Geforce 3, you would not notice very much of a difference than with a Geforce 3 Ti 500. Well, you will notice one thing.. You'll have some money/funds left over to buy a few games

I'm running my Elsa Gladiac 920 with a Core Clock of 225 Mhz, and a Memory Clock of 510 Mhz with absolutely no problems at all... Stock heatsinks of course as well..

 

[Broadkipa]

I have used every Microsoft Flight Sim up to the latest 2002 ver and it has been my experiance the CPU power is just as important as graphics card. There is an awfull lot on number crunching going on in a flight sim. I have a one Gig Pentium3 with a Gforce3 card and I only get an average of 25FPS with all detail on ,this slows down when in areas with lots of buildings. I get about the same perfomance from my P4 1.7GHz which has a Gforce2 GTS. Microsofts Flight Sim 2002 needs a very powerfull machine to get decent frame rates. Out of interest my 3dmark2001 score is much greater on the PC with the Gforce3 card but in the flight sim both machines are about equal in performance.

 

[cbuchach]

Flight Sims are entirely CPU limited--at least the MS Flight Simulator series is. For example, on my Athlon 1200 with a Radeon 32DDR, I get the same framerates if I set the resolution from 640x480--> 1792x1344. If the graphics card were limiting my framerate, it would drop off as I set higher reolutions since the load on the CPU regardless of the resolution.

What I look into is antialiasing quality, since with a powerful card you could probably set a high level of antialiasing at a high resolution to get a really awesome picture quality. If you are a simmer, I'm sure you know that antialiasing is very important.

 

[madmickey]

None of the reviews truly answers which one is better in flight sims (screen shot quality), I like the dual monitor ability of radeon. The voodoo line were always the best at this type of card. Whether geoforce 4 will use voodoo aa technolgy succesfully is a question.