Which is the BEST Video Card for Flight/Racing Sims?

[Bachfire]

I am building a new system with a Pentium III 866Mhz CPU and Asus CUSL2 mainboard.

I only play flight sim and racing sim games and need a recommendation on the best choice of a video card for my system and applications.

Would you recommend a Nvidia GeForce 256 GTS based board, the ATI Radeon based board, or a Voodoo 5 5500 board?

Also, I will be using 128mb of PC133 High Performance CAS 2 ram. Should I opt for 32mb or 64mb DDR video memory on the board you recommend?

Thanks for your help!

 

[RoboTECH]

You have a high-end Intel CPU, and a good bit of system RAM. You want to play flight sims and racing sims.

Holy mother of God, I think even the most ARDENT 3dfx haters will concede this one to the 5500.

This is a no-brainer/no-contest. Go for the 5500.

Several flight sims support glide, BTW.

www.nfshq.com
www.simhq.com

both have reviews of the 5500 and compare it to the GTS in flight and racing games.

 

[han888]

i would recommend ati and matrox card

 

[Dark4ng3l]

I would recomend the 5500 because of fsaa that rocks

 

[pac1085]

Same here. Flight/Racing sims dont have super complex graphics, so you should go with the 5500 and enable FSAA, that way it will play at a nice speed and look awesome

 

[Bachfire]

Every comparison I've seen listed on the various testing sites all show the Voodoo 5500 getting trounced in frame rates compared with the ATI Radeon and GeForce 2 GTS cards.

I would like to run my flight/racing sims at full graphic detail settings. Will the Voodoo 5500 give me the frame rates I need for stutter free graphics at these settings?

 

[whateverdude]

the 5500 gets trounced....in 3dmark and Q3. other than that, the 5500 competes very well with those other cards.

I have a 5500 and it rocks for flight sims and racing games. crimson skies w/4x AA is awesome.

 

[BenSkywalker]

"I would like to run my flight/racing sims at full graphic detail settings. Will the Voodoo 5500 give me the frame rates I need for stutter free graphics at these settings?"

Flight and racing sims are by far more CPU dependant then they are fillrate intensive. With a V5, you can run Glide which is a less CPU intensive API which will give it a small but noticeable edge in framerate.

For visual quality, since you will almost never be fillrate limited playing even at 1600x1200, you can instead enable FSAA which will eliminate the horrible texture aliasing/shimmering that sims tend to suffer significantly from.

The V5 5500 was pretty much designed for your exact purposes.