Hello there,I'm gonna upgrade my 3D card and I was wondering which of these two card I should buy ? I would like the best card FOR flight simulator because I know that some card are better in something than another one but in the case of these two cards I didn't know which one I should buy.Tell me which one you prefer and if it really makes a big difference in FS. Currently I have this one: ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder 4X AGPits the one that I had in the computer when I bought it.Thanks for your help

Because of my past experience with ATi, I will stay way from them as far as I can.I would suggest you to get 4200 since it will work flawlesly with FS2002 whileATis, even they are being fixed, still have drivers issues and are far to reach Nvidia's stable cards.

Nvidia drivers are much better than ATI's, performance wise the cards are pretty similar.

I would have to disagree with the posts made here so far. While I am not an ATI fan (or an NVidia fan for that matter), I am a fan of particular boards: currently, the Radeon 9500 series among them.As a result of what I do, I've had quite a bit of experience with all ATI and NVidia cards on a fairly wide variety of systems (including my own). Flight Sim and all other sims have a strong appetite for Aniso filtering, as well as Anti Aliasing simply due to their nature (huge horizontal expanses peppered with thousands of auto-gen or custom buildings). When it comes to AF+AA, nothing beats the current Radeon series. While FS is indeed still extremely dependant on the CPU for the majority of its display abilities, if you plan on running Flight Sim at high resolutions with decent AF+AA, you'll most certainly benefit from a Radeon compared to a Ti of any form.As far as drivers, ATI *now* have one of the best driver teams going in the industry. While not world-class just yet, if I had to put a number to it I'd say they're no more than 15% behind the excellent NVidia team these days (when it comes to the latest generation of cards such as the NVidia GeForce-FX, the ATI team is far ahead of NVidia - they've been stumbling badly). That, in and of itself, is one of the most important aspects of the new ATI: historically they've always had great hardware, but their driver team has been severely lacking. Because of that, their hardware has always seemed much worse than it actually was. ATI finally realized that and for more than a year now (since the 9700 introduction), the have dramatically addressed that shortcoming resulting in a massive investment in their driver team to compete as one of the best. They now have frequent releases that fix the majority of game compatibility problems, and the quality of their drivers are almost second to none - the current sets take great advantage of everything the hardware can give.One of the most important factors of the 9500 series beyond its ability to completely outclass the Ti series in speed and visual quality on DX7 and 8 games, is its full DX9 compatibility. While the current and next version of FS won't need that ability specifically, many other sims and general games *will* in the coming months and year.While I'm sure some exists (the same as NVidia customers), I don't know of many people who own a current Radeon that don't fully enjoy them - including myself (among a variety of NVidia cards as well).Good luck,Elrond---MS Flight Simulator Tips and TricksEnthused AVSIM Peon - with minor Bucket and Mop duties (they only let me roam near the AVSIM toilets!)

Do what Elrond said!!

Hello guys,Thank you for your help. But I have a last question for you.Since this would be a big investment for me since I'm not really old and I don't have a lot of money (I will have a summer job ;) ) I want to be sure that my performance will become better and if this is really worthy.Here are the specs of my computer and under I wrote my future specs and I would like to know if it will make a big difference and if it's a good idea to do that.Current specs:AMD Duron 1.1GHz (256KB), 384MB, 75GB IDE HDD, Microtower (4x4), ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder 4X AGP, 16X DVD-ROM, CD-RW, cable modem, Accton 10/100 Ethernet, Windows 2000Future specs:AMD Duron 1.1GHz (256KB), 896MB (or 768MB), 75GB IDE HDD, Microtower (4x4), ATI Radeon 9500Pro, 16X DVD-ROM, CD-RW, cable modem, Accton 10/100 Ethernet, Windows 2000PS: I'm not sure about the memory because I don't know if I can add a 512MB to the actual 384MB (do you have an idea ?)Thank you for your help,

bump

Elrond, you have answered all the questions I have been askingall over the Net!!! THANK YOU!I also remember the great hardware/poor driver days of ATI all too well. The only gaming I do is FS2002 and have now, thanks to yourpost, set my sites on the ATI 9500 PRO. Here where I live it ischeaper than the Ti4600 and VERY close to the Ti4200 128.If you are still around there is one question I still have.In a flight sim is the frame rate as important as it is in the"role playing games" like Quake, etc? Someone told me it wasn'tas important and to look for "the other features" of high end 3Dvideo cards. Unfortunetally they didn't explain what other features they were talking about.FaxCap