A Geforce video card question to those who have experin

[Guest]

Current systemPIII 450512 sdramXP PROI can get a Geforce 2 MX 400, but do you believe that there will be a noticeable difference if I decite to go higher in the Geforce range with this system and all settings at default with FS2002 ?If you believe I will see a difference how high could I consider going with the card until I notice nothing more.

[Guest jase439]

You're pretty weak on CPU - very weak actually. That is your bottleneck. Better video would enable you to run at higher resolutions and have a better quality image (support for trilinear and anisotropic texture filtering, FSAA, etc...) - and it *may* "feel" more fluid (increased clock speed on the video card, and improved memory bandwidth and size, etc...) - but FS2002 is extremely CPU bound with regard to raw performance, so no, I would not expect you would see any visible improvements with regards to performance w/o first upgrading your CPU.J

[Guest]

Really, you will need to upgrade your CPU to gain anything out of a better video card. The 450 is woefully slow for FS2002. Fortunately, CPUs are pretty cheap these days. UNfortunately, you will (probably) have to upgrade your motherboard too. AND, you should ahve a minimum of 256 MB of RAM (if not 512!). I would concentrate on the CPU first. Although I don't know what type of video card you have currently. I have a GeForce2 GTS 64 and I am waiting to upgrade it later as prices fall. I am upgrading my Athlon Tbird 800 to an Athlon XP 1900 on a 333MHZ chip MBO first!!John-PaulToronto

[StoneC0ld 5]

The others are correct, upgrading the video card in this case is not enough, you'll need to upgrade the motherboard and cpu, and possibly new RAM...I have a PIII 800 with 384MB RAM.I bought a new geforce3 video card for my system, to replace my Riva TNT2, thinking the same thing. Big, expensive mistake.... I'm now considering pulling the geforce3 back out, and going back to the TNT2, because I'm actually getting WORSE performance in FS2002 out of the geforce3 than the TNT2....... (Despite the geforce3 outscoring the TNT2 in the 3DMark test 3500 - 700) So, I'm stuck with lousy FS2002 performance until I can buy a faster computer :-(...

[Guest]

I know I am weak on cpu but disagree that I am very weak cause the sim is performing quite well at this power, passing the 24 fps very well at some points.- which is the rate of fps required for the eye to watch a movie. The Geforce 2 does not render higher qulity at my Sony trinitron screen than the tnt2 that I have, however it does produce slighti more fps.

[Guest]

You quys totaly surprise me with your answer, although well meant by you all. Upgrading the video card if only to Geforce 2 does make quite a difference, I have seen this myself on my own system, just wondering if the difference of going higher would do anything. My performance is not bad at all and I do not understand how you hve youre maschines configured get this slow results. The tnt2 is doing surprisingly well and a lot better than with FS2000. Going for 512 ram was a good jump in performance but any highe want do any good cause the difference between 256 and up to 512 was just slight in comparison going from 128 to 256. Anyways, as you must have read here in some of the msg in the forum, those parts that give us optimimum results with the most dense scenery have not been developed so far and I like to believe that MS has to improve the architechture of FS in order for a medium speed pc to play the sim completely satisfactory in all situation. Terminal reality proves this is possible, so does Austin Meyer with his X-plane althoug I prefer still to use FS2002 for a reason I don

[Guest]

the mx GF2 is nothing more than a Voodoo3 beefed up alittle.If your going to spend the money get a GF3 ti.Stay away from the mx series or else you are wasting your money.If your going to spend the money on MX I do not think you will be as happy as you would be with a GF2 or a radeon 7500 if your on a budget Richard Dillon KATLSr First Officer www.jetstarairlines.com"Bill Grabowski's"ERJ-145 panel Beta TeamMD-11 panel Beta Team____________________________"Lets Roll" 9/11 Specs AMD 1600 XP 512MB DDR GF3 ti 200 64MB SBliveCh Products Yoke and Pedals(usb)Windows 2000 SP2

[Guest]

what are you arguments for getting GF3 ti, whay you say to not tell us much

[Guest]

Hello there, ArniI would go for the GF2 MX4, PRO or GTS. Don't bother buying anything above that. FS2K2 does not take any advantage of the Ti series features. I've seen many people complaining about expecting improvements when upgrading their GF2 to GF3 and not having it.BTW, I understand if you were asking for advice on a new processor your question would have been answered before.Regards, my friend.

[Guest]

Arni,The GeForce 3 ti200 is the lowest entry point into the DirectX 8 series of hardware support. Anything before that is not hardware support, it is done at the driver level in software.The MX cards are basically a waste of money, being the option for folks who simply can not afford something better or as a cheap card that system builders can throw in to keep prices down. Any money spent on cards in the Geforce 2 or older series is simply pointless, find someone else who wants to upgrade and buy their older card for cheap! ;-)I was in your boat a year or so ago, when I dumped my old TNT card for a Geforce 3 card. It did not change my framerates one bit, but it allowed me to crank up some of the detail to make things look much better. Being able to turn anti-aliasing on may let you run things at a lower resolution yet look as good (which will actually increase your frame rate).The Geforce 3 ti200 is simply the original Geforce 3, reworked and mass produced (slightly slower, much cheaper, but exactly the same feature set). It is the most cost effective entry point into higher end graphics cards.It also depends on your future plans. Odds are your current motherboard is only AGP 2x/1x so the card will likely only run at half it capable performance. You may encounter power problems with your system depending how old it is.If you go for at least a Geforce 3 card, odds are it will still be of some use during an upgrade. Anything less then that, and you'll probably be replacing it again.Hope thats a bit more of the detail you were looking for ... Find some place you can go and try the card out with the option of return, depending on what you pay for it, you might not find the price worth the change ...Ray

[StoneC0ld 5]

True, gf2 to gf3 may not be worth it, but I truly think I should have seen a performance boost from a 16MB Riva TNT2 to a 64MB geforce3 pure instead of a performance drop..... :-( Oh well.....

[Guest]

Thanx Malves this is the answer I was looking for

[Guest]

thanx Ray, good answer 4 me

[Guest]

I have a system similar to yours and also get acceptable performance. I upgraded from a TNT 16 card to a GTS2 32 and saw some improvement, enough to let me increase the sliders some. For the price I am happy with the upgrade until I get a new computer smetime. Roger