Shopping for a new graphics card

[Goriax]

I'm looking to buy a new graphics card and wanted to get some input about what would be a good buy. I'm more of a software guy and haven't been tracking the latest graphics cards. It's really other things which are driving this but since I use this comp to play HZ too I wanted to make sure I won't hose anything there. These are my requirements.

1. MUST run HZ well. My current system has very few problems and I want to keep things that way.

2. Should be at least as good as my current card which is a GeForce 4 Ti4200 with 128 MB of memory. Preferably it should do better of course. It should DEFINATELY do better overall on most apps or there's no reason to change.

3. I'd like to pay no more then $300. That's a soft number but if I go over it must be for a good reason. If possible I'd like to spend less then that.

The rest of my system specs are 3.02 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM, XP Home edition with SP 2.

IS there anything better out there? Anyway, I thought I'd ask.

[Seokaf]

I'd recommend looking here to see a ranking of video cards by speed. It doesn't tell you which ones work well with Horizons in specific, but it's a start.

[Enos Yorl]

I'm running a 6800 GT Ultra, best performer I've ever had across the board; keep in mind Horizons' render engine is very limited at this time, due to the obscene amount of overdraw (though I read that the Devs were working on that issue) so, performance with Horizons is subjective for now.

You might be much better off buying matched sticks of RAM up to 2GB (I'm running 3GB).

[Enos Yorl]

I'd recommend looking here to see a ranking of video cards by speed. It doesn't tell you which ones work well with Horizons in specific, but it's a start.

Excellent Link man, Thanks!

[Goriax]

Thank you!

Just to refine the search, are there any major graphics cards known to have problems with HZ nowadays? I remember that for awhile on the Tazoon technical forums a lot of people were having problems with some flavor of the GF 6800, but alas that forum seems to be gone for good [:@] Also, I don't konw if the problems were fixed or not. I recall hearing all sorts of ATI issues but again, without access to the forums I'm relying on my own very faulty memory. I've been hearing that lately the ATI cards seem to have the edge over the nVidea ones for price/performance so that's even more of an issue.

It sounds like Enos Yorl isn't having trouble with his 6800 GT Ultra so that's one data point. Maybe I'll just go with the best 6800 that fits my budget.

I'll hold off ordering anything for a few days more just in case.

I'll probably upgrade my memory at some point too. Luckily memory upgrades are a lot more cut and dried.

Thanks again for the replies!

P.S. Considering all the pitfalls HZ has with specific hardware configurations, perhaps AE could start putting together some sort of public knowledge base of what is known to work and what is known to give problems. Just make public the data the undoubtedlyhave alreadyaccumulatedin-house.

[Elkandriel]

It may be that gf4ti series is still the best graphics card for this game. This game engine was orginally made for xbox or something like that afaik. At least it was multiplatform engine. Anyways gf4 may be the last card generation that has got some optimizations in the engine. Unfortunately there isn`t currently anything too great at 200$ market for graphics cards. Just same old radeon 9800 and gf 5900 which has been available long time. There is currently pci express gf6600 which blows these away at their price point but I dunno when agp versions come out. High end radeons got bad availability which increases their prices I think. Anyway there was some issues reported on old Tazoon forums with gf6xxx series cards. I`ve heard that latest beta drivers have solved these problems though. I`d not change that card for Hzs. btw if your cpu isn`t top notch you shouldn`t get the highest end cards since those are very cpu limited.

[Goriax]

After reading the thread so far, doing some price shopping, and having a heart to heart talk with my wallet I'm thinking of paying the extra bucks for some sort of 6800 card. As I said, this is really aimed at other things which will be run on this comp so I may still go ahead and get it if the 6800 is at least as good with HZas my old Ti 4200. I just don't want to go backwards.

However, I'm a little worried because I remember that at one time a lot of people were having problems with the 6800 or at least in some spots (I think Tazoon and/or the floating island were particularly bad for some reason). I don't want to get it if that's the case. Of course it's also obvious that many people do ok.

Here's another question. Assuming I go with a 6800 of some flavor, do I really need 256 MB on the card or will 128 MB do almost as well?Only getting 128 MB would allow me to save a few bucks but if 256 MB is substantially better I'll just pony up the money and not eat for a week or something (after all, one must have priorities [;)] )

But again, I don't want to get it if there's any place in the world where that card will cause me to crash or something. The last thing I want to do is put out several hundred bucks for a card and end up with a worse HZ platform then I had before.

[padishar]

A good and not so expensive video card is the gefore 6600 GT.
I run the 6800 ultra, and it gives me very good frame rate even when I enable X4 AA and X8 AF, doesn't really change if I enable them or not, so I'm thinking either the engine is pretty bad, or the game is more cpu limited.

[Radzy]

I have foundthat nVidia based cards to be the best, despite the paper graphs posted by different companies.

Primary reason: Drivers for nVidia are not proprietary. ATI does not release some information about the workings of their drivers, thus many companies trying to use their drivers for development of software (such as games) continually have problems until ATI rectifies their driver.

This may help in your choice of cards.

I have owned and tested many of the ATI and nVidia cards and because of diversity I always end up purchasing nVidia for my systems.

[Enos Yorl]

Ditto, The main issue is still the engine itself.

Every polygon the computer has to render a texture on takes a bit of processing power. Rendering textures onto objects that are behind the player, or hidden behind other objects basically wastes that processing power for no good reason. That processing power could be better spent on rendering objects that would be in the player's field of view, not blocked by other objects.

Culling unneeded rendering allows the engine to more efficently render what is actually important, the visible sides of objects in the scene. The more efficent the rendering, the further the viewdistance can be set without lowering the framerate to unacceptable levels.

Unfortunately with some much overdraw, and little culling, the latest gen cards can actually run much slower in this game under the right circumstances.

Last night (running a 6800 Ultra) I turned off all characters and details, low or high, all of it off.I turned view distance down to the minimum, and then went to New rachival vault and waited3 minutes. After this time, the engine started loading every single unseen texture/object/polygon into the video card and then into memory! [:@]

My memory usage (using freemem to guage) went from a nice 460MB to 2.3GB (I'm running 3GB of RAM)in less than 14 seconds. So, even with options turned down, and off, the engine will still overdraw like mad;the better the video card IS at rendering the worse the performance it seems. I'm thinking any garden variety GF4 really is the way to go

[Dagda]

I'm running HZ on an Asus V9999GE. It's a GF 6800 factory clocked to GT speeds and the only problems I've ever had can be tracked (by looking at the debug logs) to memory overflows.

I get some nice framerates, although with the alchemy engine being a bit of a cpu hog any slowdowns are thanks to my Model 8 Athlon XP and gig of PC2700, which are getting pulled and changed for a Barton XP 3200 and 3 gigs of Geil golden dragon Ram soon anyway :D

The card only cost me 282 GBP, and at that price point I'm very happy with the performance (a flat increase of over 6000 3Dmarks in 3Dmark 03 without any tweaking and the drivers that came on the CD).

As always, it's a case of how much do you really need the bleeding edge when something just slightly less costly gives almost equal performance?

[Enos Yorl]

Nice Price![:P]

[Tigris]

I got myself an Nvidia 6800 and it does as well as advertised. Framerate varies between 1-70fps at the extremes and typical huddles around 20-25 common activities usage, which is up from 10-15 on my 5200. It really is fast.

[Goriax]

I got myself an Nvidia 6800 and it does as well as advertised. Framerate varies between 1-70fps at the extremes and typical huddles around 20-25 common activities usage, which is up from 10-15 on my 5200. It really is fast.

Do you crash in Tazoon, floating island, or anywhere else?

[aceracer24]

I got myself an Nvidia 6800 and it does as well as advertised. Framerate varies between 1-70fps at the extremes and typical huddles around 20-25 common activities usage, which is up from 10-15 on my 5200. It really is fast.

I'm really curious as to how your getting as high as 70 FPS. I'm running the asus 9999 (6800 ultra) and the max I have gotten is 30+ FPS. now granted i am currently running in window mode, and my desktop is 1600x1200 32 bit and I have the screen almost expanded to the full width of the desktop. Also running highest on textures and what ever the other one is. But my view distance is set at about 1/4 of the bar and everything else is maxed. I average about 25 FPS standing still and about 15 while moving/running. But even when Iwent to full screen 1280x1024 and set everything at lowest setting..I think I might have hit 40 FPS. My CPU is a AMD 2600+ so it's a bit over 2 gig MHZ and I am running a lil over 1 gig of ram. Just don't see how you could even touch 70 FPS lol.

[Goriax]

My ancient Ti 4200 gets as high as 50 fps in some areas without a lot of detail. That's rare though. 15-25 fps is more typical. So it may not take much for someone to get up to 70 fps in some areas.

I tend to have the viewing distance around 80-90% max, medium textures, no shadows, and no ground clutter. I've got a 3 GHz processor so that probably helps.My hyperthreadingprobably doesn't help.

I'm beginning to think that if you just want to maximize HZ performance, you should get the highest end Ti xxxx card you can (assuming you can still get them), the fastest CPU you can get, and as much memory as you can get. It sounds like you don't get much improvment if you use a more modern card. At least a Ti card wouldn't cost much I would think. Sounds like what I really want is to swap out cards -- use a Ti card for HZ and a more modern card for everything else. Too bad that's not practical.

Anyway, if you're using a 6800 card, do you tend to crash in Tazoon, floating island, or anywhere else?

[Tigris]

70 FPS is before any objects load and all you see is clouds and sky. [;)]

50 FPS is out in the country with not much going on, logged in there, and the interface turned off.

20-30 is normal everyday operation.

But it still crashes to 1-5 FPS in Tazoon and Dalimond. I suspect that's because of drive seek latency on my 60 GB Seagate Barracuda (ATA). I bought some SATA drives and am looking for a SATA card to use them with to try and resolve that issue.

System specs:

AMD Athlon ~2.2Ghz (32-bit) operating at 333 mhz
ASUS motherboard (don't remember the model #)
1.0 GB DDR400 RAM
60 GB Seagate Barracuda ATA
NVIDIA 6800 w/ 128 MB video RAM on a BFG board
Windows 2000 sp. the latest

[Goriax]

When I first enter Tazoon I may get only a couple fps, but once it's had a chance to load it'll speed up to something over 10 fps.

I assume that when you said "crashes to 1-5 fps" you mean the fps goes down to around 1-5, not that you crash to desktop, have to reboot, or anything similar.

[Tigris]

No CTDs in Dali or Tazoon, it's just dropping to really low fps in those towns.

[snickel]

NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT ....

Played without major problems on Unity server yesterday, then went to New Rachival, crashed 5 times, managed to teleport to Sslanis, have crashed there almost every time I opened a new window like the crafting window, the graphics in those windows suddenly show empty spaces...

Scary. And frustrating. I shall not buy a new graphics card just to be able to play hz. Hope I find another solution (am open to suggestions...)