Advice to the really unknown

i have a limited dollars and cents budget till early 2004

i have two options at present for a new card, i can get one of them so i will use the majority rule.

• a Radeon 9000
• an nVidia 5200

yeah i know, each is a low end card, but its all i can afford at this time. and not to mention, all my little town offers.

any useful info is appreciated.

you know, a second piece of advice just came up as i was googling around..

DX9.0 is supposed to be 24 bit compliant, and DX 8.1 is supposed to be 16 bit.

until something needs, or can use 24 bit, wouldn't i be better off staying with 8.1?

i currently have 9.0, but am curious if i should downgrade back..

does anyone have any info on these drivers?

I don't know about the 24 bit thing. From what I have hear it doesn't make any real difference. But for under $100 you can get a radeon 9600 which is DX9 and will run HL2 just fine. In my opinion you are better off waiting until you can afford something better than a 9000/5200 than you are buying either of those cards... christmas coming up, maybe you could get santa to bring you something? Also when you do buy something, get it from newegg.com, it will be cheaper and delivered.

you don't seem to understand jeff, i AM santa in this house, and these are my choices.

yes i could wait, but the onboard video sucks and won't handle the pitcrew map in hammer.

my decision is based solely on time, i am unwilling to wait any longer ( i can afterall get another card next year and the prices will surely drop more by then), in fact i now have the 9000 installed and am impressed, but not as much as i thought, mainly because it refuses to load the taboo HL version, and that sucks

especially since radeon vid cards all seem to use essentially the same drivers, the only limitation being the cards architecture in using them. (there is only one download link for all the 9xxx series cards)

on a good note, i did a mark2001 benchtest and the scores were ok, but as we all know scores are inconclusive. my old nvidia 440se 64 meg pci card scored 2700, and my new 9000 64 meg agp scores 4750.

anyways, does anyone have a clue about the 16 bit vs. the 24 bit thing? it seems the 24 bit 9.0 drivers are causing a few (many) framerate drops..

[EDIT] this is my error message mentioned above.

"fail to lock vertex buffer in CMeshDX8::LockVertexBuffer"

[/EDIT]

I'm not sure about the 24 bit thing, but the reason that card won't play half-life 2 is probably that it isn't a DX9 card.

scary_jeff said:
I'm not sure about the 24 bit thing, but the reason that card won't play half-life 2 is probably that it isn't a DX9 card.

my nvidia 440 se played it just fine.

m8, Get a 9600 pro. dx9 card, Very efficient & cheap. I absolutely love mine.

I considering getting a new card sometime early next year to replace my GF4 4200. Is Radeon definately superior for performance to buck ratio?

ReNo said:
I considering getting a new card sometime early next year to replace my GF4 4200. Is Radeon definately superior for performance to buck ratio?

Depends for what game, But generally I would say yes.

I'm not much of a PC gamer these days I must say, I tend to prefer my consoles, so I wouldn't wanna spend too much on a new card. It would mostly be for HL2, Doom 3 and the like.

I'd go for the Radeon ... I've heard the Nvidia 5200's are very noisy.

And stop complaining about low-end cards, I'm running a GF4 mx here :razz:

Its one of the nvidia cards that are horrendously noisy anyway, Might be the 5200. Not sure tbh.

I think it just counts for the whole "FX"-product line.

Most of them need an AGP slot and a PCI slot (for the huge cooler). Go figure ...

To be fair, most new cards will overheat if you have something in the PCI slot next to the AGP one anyway, so it's no real loss having a heatsink that takes the extra space by default. Also, you have what 6 PCI slots? What are you going to use them all up with?

I don't know then Orph. Perhaps because it's just a pre-beta that it isn't compatible with everything.

scary_jeff said:
I don't know then Orph. Perhaps because it's just a pre-beta that it isn't compatible with everything.

granted, with no evidence to the contrary, i am forced to agree, but am doubtful.

i think its a program error thats fixable, but i know so little about programming i cannot say.

did you even google it? i did, there are mucho references about it, i think it has something to do with the meshes it takes to construct the levels. i furthermore believe its directly due to the DirX drivers, cause they also keep coming up while i searched. (since the error in question also effects legal games according to google, lets us also assume i have those and need the advice anyways :wink: )

i wish, one of our program savvy peeps could google it just long enuff to inform me if i can solve this or not, considering a patch to a questionable program is VERY unlikely.

also since the proggy in question was built especially for radeons compatibility ( i think ) would seem odd that an old 440 nVidia can do it and not radeons newer 9xxx series.

please, can someone in the know about program errors and tweaks google this error for me,

thanx

Well HL2 is built around Dx9 and from everything I've seen HL2 loves Radeons a lot more than GeForces...not to say it won't work, just not as well. And really you want to get the drivers from the card that fit it best, not always the newest. (i.e. I have a GeForce 2 Ti right now and I use the 30.81 detonator drivers and not the newest because the card was meant for Dx8.1.) But the way things are swinging these days if you asked me I'd say get the Radeon.

Well for Christmas I'm getting the Radeon 9600 XT. A very powerful card, and it comes with a ticket for hl2 :biggrin:

The radeon 9000 isn't actually a member of the Radeon 9xxx family I don't think. I think it is based on the previous ATI core.

scary_jeff said:
The radeon 9000 isn't actually a member of the Radeon 9xxx family I don't think. I think it is based on the previous ATI core.

considering 2 things i wonder.

1) there is only one set of drivers for all the 9xxx cards.

2) all cards before 9600 are less than 9.0 DX compliant, meaning 8.1 or less, so that makes the 9500,9400,9200 and 9000 cards not 9xxx cards jeff?

yeah i am perfectly aware i got a cheapy model, i wasn't asking for verification of THAT fact :wink: all i was asking was, of the 5200 and the 9000 which of those two crappy cards was best :rolleyes:

Radeon 9500 IS a Dx9 card. I'm checking into the other ones right now as well.

[edit] I believe the 9500 is the lowest of the #s to have Dx9 support. Also if you need older drivers just go here (this is for XP, but if you have a different OS just search around) -> http://www.ati.com/support/products/radeonwinxppreviousdrivers.html

if you're gonna use ATI cards, don't use ATI's drivers, they almost always atrocious. Goto Omegacorner.com and get the Omega Drivers for the ATI cards. Note, they are 3rd party drivers and ATI will not be responsible for things that go wrong. Having said that, 9 times out of 10, they beat the ATI drivers into the ground.

And as for the whole HL2 thing, Valve had better damn well write a good OpenGL renderer. Anyone who says one can do more than the other has no really no fricken clue what they're talking about. There's not terribly much they'd have to change, DX9/OGL come in at the very end of the rendering pipeline, when you actually have to draw to the backbuffer and then the screen.

Orph, that's because every radeon card uses the same drivers. It doesn't mean they are all the same card.

scary_jeff said:
Orph, that's because every radeon card uses the same drivers. It doesn't mean they are all the same card.

sighs

i could have swore i said the same thing a couple pages back :/

I thought you were saying that it must be a 9xxx card because it uses the same drivers as the 9600 etc? What I'm saying is that this isn't always true - just because this is a 9000, doesnt mean it has the same core generation as the other cards that start with the letter 9 - and doesn't mean it will run any of the same stuff. So wheres the mystery/problem?

Orpheus said:
especially since radeon vid cards all seem to use essentially the same drivers, the only limitation being the cards architecture in using them. (there is only one download link for all the 9xxx series cards)

scary_jeff said:
So wheres the mystery/problem?

jeff, my original question is moot now (since i have opted for the 9000), but to clear up your confusion (seems only you got lost) i was asking of those two crappy cards, which was better.

i am perfectly cognizant of architecture in cards, not all 9xxx are created even remotely equal, i would have to say they created the 9000 as a stopgap between fair cards and total s**t ones :/

Oh I see. I thought you were asking why HL2 won't run on it.