Good gaming video card

I was wondering what is a good starter video card for powering games far cry?
thnx!!

 

Has your dad finished building the system yet?
You need to know what kind of a motherboard it will have, meaning will there be an onboard Video Card? (I hope not!) but even more importantly will there be an AGP slot or a PCI-Express slot to be used? How much are you planning on spending?
You should plan on coughing up at least $150 for a decent card. Either way try to get a Video Card such as ATI Radeon 9800Pro or GeForce 6600GT or FX5900 at the very least to be able to enjoy the newer games. But no matter what card you get make sure it has at least 128MB.

 

Good is a term that can be relative to tons of ppl. So you should say "What is a good video card for X amount of budget". Regardless 6600GT would have to say be the minimum for your gaming needs; 9800 chokes on farcry.

 

PS: Stay away from the FX series.

 

may i know whats wrong with the FX series?

 

Me too?

ATI and Nvidia have great offerings right now.

 

It was Nvidia's first try at DX9. The cards performance for dx9 based apps were ussally piss-poor compared to the long standing dx9 features of the ATI series. This was fixed on the 6xxx line of NV series. Think of the FX series like Windows ME...not really 98 not really XP but somewhere in between. If you want the FX series to run dx9 games your gonna get crappy performance out of it.

 

I beg to differ. I had a 128MB Leadtek FX5900 and never had any problem and the performance was simply amazing, just recently got a 256MB PNY 6800 GT and dang if I can tell the difference on quality of pic, only an improvement on performance when playing pixel-hungry freak games like Doom3 and FarCry, other than that it was a 'hmm' upgrade of $340.

Most of the Video compatibility and drivers issues are experienced by ATI users...regardless, it is not right to speak badly about a product simply because the person had a bad experience with it...

FX5800 series was bad I agree but do not generalize the entire FX series.

 

5900XT was maybe a "good budget" card but thats it. If your going to press high resolution and top grahpx the FX series chokes like a bone too big for the puppy.

 

I didn't want to get in to irrelevant debate but since you made the last comment I had to say this:
If you take a few years old card (even it might be a top performer back in its day), you can't expect it to keep up with the newer and GPU extensive Games of the current year...
My 6800GT appears to be more than enough for todays's most demanding games using decent resolutions and Graphics settings but who can guarantee that it will not choke on a game that comes out next year twice as demanding as FarCry (even using the same resolution settings, etc.)?

Yesterdays performance cards (FX5900 series and Radeon 9800Pro) is Todays budget cards, what does that tell you?
Who knows, by the time SpawnDemon is ready to buy a card he can afford, no one might remember the FX series...

 

Spawndemon0, even though Far Cry has great graphics, it is a very scalable game.

I've played it on my old machine which is a Pentium III 866 with a GeForce MX440 64 MB card and it plays great.

The 6600 GT Nvidia chips in my opinion are currently the best value at the moment.

90% performance of the top of the range cards at 30% of the price.

There aren't really any current games that this card wouldn't handle unless the detail settings were bumped up.

 

I have two gaming machines. One has the FX5900 and the other has a 9700Pro. So far, no game (and I try them all) has made me want to upgrade. Yet. Neither of them "choke" on Farcry so I'm not sure where that comes from.

Simple advice for gaming, get the most card your money will buy. Even better, buy one step above your comfort level. Don't forget the system RAM, it's important as well. I won't run anything less than 1GB these days for games.

 

get a 6600gt you will not be disappointed

 

I play FarCry (well, the demo anyway) on a Gigabyte Radeon 9600XT and an AMD Athlon 2500+. I get a satisfactory frame rate on it after disabling one or two bells and whistles.

A Gigabyte Radeon 9600XT goes for around $150 on NewEgg (you may be able to find it for a cheaper price if you shop around). The power of the card is good, and the extras that come with the box aren't bad either.

 

"9800 chokes on farcry."

I've got a 9800Pro 128Mb and it runs Far Cry just fine. I'd suggest the Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro 128Mb. It's a good card and can be found for around $200.