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Hornit

New Vid Card..Oh My! Why did I wait so long!!!!

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I just finished installing my new GF4 Ti4200 yesterday. All I can say is Wow. I don't know why I waited so long to do this, what a refreshing improvement Ive seen in ALL my sims and games. I'm writing this for the die hard Voodoo 5 users. Get rid of that thing NOW :) While the Voodoo was a great card, it can't keep up with the latest offerings from Nvidia and ATI. I have to admit up front though that I have seen a small decrease in the FSAA quality. Its a loss for sure, but so many other areas have gained that it is easily worthwhile. I can now turn everything up in the sim except AI traffic and mesh. This card just plows through it on My 1.4ghz Athlon rig. I am currently using Riva tuner to get the improvements in aniso and LOD. It really gets close to the FSAA of my Voodoo, but there is still a bit of shimmer in the runway lines occasionally, but thats pretty much it. The image quality is superb and I can now run in 1200 or even 1600 res in 32 bit, which the Voodoo could do, but it really chugged in these resolutions. Another area that has improved remarkably is the texture pop and blur. Also many aircraft models had little areas that had some anomalies I thought were model related..not any more! All my high res skinnned aircraft suffered occasionally from blur and mipmap swapping repeatedly with the V5. Now I see NONE of it. I attribute that to the 128mb ram on the card.I have crisp terrain, the clouds look better, and virtually no blurries, they happen so fast as to be barely noticeable now. So it was a satisfying experience and I highly recommend it to those who are contemplating an upgrade from the V5. I got a Gainward Golden sample board and its evident that it's a quality part. The Golden samples have been tested and are better for overclocking(which Im not doing yet) than the standard boards. I also looked at the Leadtek kit as its also supposed to be decent hardware.If your contemplating waiting its probably not a bad idea, but for this money (159$US) I can use this card until the price drops on all the newest boards coming out and not have to be a beta tester for drivers :)Hornit

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Guest

Quite a difference for sure. Time to windup the clocks :-) . I'd be interested to hear how far you can push the memory on the 128 GS and still keep things stable. If you do OC the card share the results with us. Enquiring simmers want to know.TripNorthwood 2.2a at 2.72Ghz Abit TH7II-R512MB Samsung 40ns PC800Gainward 64MB GF4 Ti4200 300/57040.41's DX8.1 WinXP ProInwin case / Enermax 431W PSU3DMark2001SE = 13089http://service.madonion.com/compare?2k1=4330740

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I may do some testing shortly and will definitely post the results. By the way, look at my post entitled "latest repaints" thats with my new card! and its compressed to boot!!!hornit

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I hear ya, Hornit.I upgraded from a more obscure Kyro II-based card. It was fairly fast and a good deal for the money (it was pretty cheap), but I upgraded for the stability and support available on the NVidia chip. I was plagued with lockups, and the GF4 solved those. And with so many users, its pretty easy to find answers now. The constant updating of drivers is also nice.And the Ti-4200 is no small potatoes in the graphics card world. I think I saw a list where the Ti-4200 was #3 -- surpassed only by the higher GF4 boards (the 4400 and 4600), including the newest ATI, the Matrox Parahelia, and all the other mainstream competitors.Got a benefit in frames, smoothness, and quality as well. It fits nicely in my system.See ya,Greghttp://www3.sympatico.ca/gregory.moffatt/sig1.jpg

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Yep. Even with the compression the textures really look good. That's the really nice thing about the Ti4200, the rendering is identical to the 4400 and 4600. The only difference in the cards is the clock speed. And FS2002 is so CPU-bound that there is very little difference, if any, between the 4200 and the 4600 as far as framerates go (all mileage is, of course, variable).TripNorthwood 2.2a at 2.72Ghz Abit TH7II-R512MB Samsung 40ns PC800Gainward 64MB GF4 Ti4200 300/57040.41's DX8.1 WinXP ProInwin case / Enermax 431W PSU3DMark2001SE = 13089http://service.madonion.com/compare?2k1=4330740

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I hear ya loud and clear... I am another person who upgraded from a Voodoo5 to a GeForce4 Ti4600. I upgraded the rest of the computer at the same time so I cannot pinpoint what improvements were made as a result of the card, but there is no doubt that the GF4 had something to with the crisp textures and rendering effects that I subsequently experienced. I was able to get reflective textures to work on my Voodoo5 but it involved editing cfg files and reversing the alpha channels of the aircraft textures. I noticed like you that the only real drawback from the Voodoo is the antialiasing, because the GeForce's highest AA setting of 4xS is only comparable to the 2x level on the Voodoo. It's too bad that 3DFX went under because I think they could have had an edge over nVidia, but since that is not the case it is best to move on. Nonetheless, if I ever find a PCI Voodoo5 in stores I may buy that and use it as a secondary vid card :).

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Guest JonP01

Hornit,Weren't you criticising me a couple of weeks back when I was telling Reddog these exact same things and recommended that he go out and replace his Voodoo 5500 with a Ti 4200? Sounds like I was right after all ;)

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Guest JonP01

Reddog, check your mail please.Just a general comment about AA quality. I have always had trouble convincing people who never saw a Voodoo 5500 in action that no other consumer card ever produced has the same AA quality. I am hoping the NV30 may put this right, but we will have to wait and see. The problem in gauging AA quality is that you need more than screen shots. The quality of AA also needs to be judged on moving images. If you just have a screenshot, the current Geforce cards look about as good as a Voodoo 5500. It's when you have moving images that all other AA solutions other than the Voodoo 5500 show their shortcomings.Roll on the next generation of graphics cards!

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