graphx card upgrade

i have a celeron 1.4 ghz ... and was wondering what video card makes a good match for it ... i have the PNY geforce 5200 FX ... now generally speaking that is enough power for me to play most of my games(especially after overclocking it) ... but neverwinter nights chokes alot at the res i want to play it at(1280x960) ... would it be worth it to get the 5700 or should i just save for a better CPU? or is there a better match for my CPU?

it is my understanding that a CPU limits the amount of "graphics output" a video card can do ... if i'm wrong then i should just go ahead and get that ATI X800 XT then huh?

 

Ultimately, yes, the graphics card is limited by how fast the CPU can push data down the AGP bus to the video card.

I have a Geforce4 4200, and it plays Neverwinter Nights just fine (although I play at 1024x768). When I first got the game, I played it at 800x600 on a Athlon 1 GHz (T-bird) and a GeForce2 MX 400 (with all the widgets turned off, of course). Try turning off antialiasing, ansitropic filtering, and v-sync in the advanced display properties. Also, disabling your real-time antivirus scanner when you use a game can help a whole lot.

If you have less than 512MB of RAM or you're not running Windows XP or 2000 (that is, WIndows 98 or ME) then I would upgrade those before your graphics card.

 

oh ... i have 640 MB of RAM and windows XP ... it's just that once you play it at a higher res you get spoiled and never want to play it a lower res, ya know? it's just annoying when you get like 10 or more characters on the screen and it starts choking on ya ... and i do turn off anti-aliasing ... i honestly dont really notice much of a difference .. maybe im weird

 

You'll only notice if AA is off on lower resolutions. If you ever see the lines between textures or see jagged edges, that's what AA gets rid of.

640MB is great. I take it you're playing the game online with a bunch of people? If anything I'd suspect your processor was limiting you there. It might also be the case of one guy on really slow Internet lagging your machine (it's waiting to get the data so it can do the next step).

 

i don't play it online ... i play unreal 03 online and even in heavy firefights w/ 1280x960 res it doesn't chug ... i think it has to do with the fact nvrwn is more processor hungry, i could be wrong on that, but i can't explain it any other way

also i've notived (by benchmarking my system) that i get alot more performance gain by overclocking my graphx card rather than my CPU

3dmark 03
before oc:1306
graphx oc:1498
cpu and graphx oc:1524

so if my experience tells me anything it's a better investment to buy a graphx card rather than a new CPU ... untill it's absolutely nessecary (im thinkin im answering my own question LOL) ... my only problem is that my mobo can't do 8x AGP but im told that isn't much of a performance gain

 

Well, your test says you gain more graphics performance by OC'ing the video card. That's a biased test, since game performance is not based solely on graphics card performance.

What you need to do is OC the vid card and then play NWN. If the problem goes away, there's your problem. If not....

 

i have the 5200 FX and it does quite fine on such games as Unreal Tournament 2004 and Halo. I would suspect it to be something else.

 

come to think of it ... neverwinter nights would only chug when I had an item(like a suit of armor for example) that would emit light ... now it would always chug, as in the frame rate would be at like 5-10 or less fps, when there was more than 1 or 2 maybe 3 light sources ... im thinking that this is graphz card related as i understand that the graphx card and not the CPU, is responsible for light sourcing ... also that i could oc it all i wanted to and still not have the proper hardware to do the light sourcing properly