what shuold i buy

[forgiveme]

i am looking at buying a new graphics card what would be best the g200 or the g40016mb i have seen some poor reports on the g400 are they all they are cracked up to be
thanks in advance
mark

[Petter]

THE G400!!!
It totally rules!
I´ve got mine today (G400 MAX) and even if I only have a P2-350, 64Mb RAM, everything looks absolutely beautiful.
Today i played NHL2000 on my SONY triniton TV in 1024x768 whith every feature on and it looked much better than any console-station (including Dreamcast)!
This card rocks!!!!

///Petter

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[Nuno]

Hey, calm down Petter! Glad to see that you´re that happy with your G400, but I would like to hear forgiveme system specs, and if you are on a budget or if you really after something big.

G400 is way better than G200, for sure, but in a low end system the differences vanish, because either card becomes cpu limited.

[bacid]

how did u get nhl2k on tvoutput?! mine just flcikers like crazy on the TV> only game i have a problem with

[Zwisch]

bacid,

uncheck the use optimal refresh rate in the clone option or enable the use of V-Synch for this game. This should stop teh flickering on your tv!

[Zwisch]

forgiveme,

i recommend a G40 dual head 32 megs if you can put the extra $$ might be a bit better and that dual head is cool for tv or anything else you migth do...

[Bohrn]

I was worried that my paltry 337(4.5x75) iCeleron wouldn't be powerful enough for the G400. I had a G200 and was mostly happy with it, but it was over a year old and a but slow fill rate wise. So I agonized over,G400,Savage4Pro+,TNT2,RagePro. I got the G400 because even if it was a bit slow with my current processor, I knew that it would open up a serious can of whooop ass as soon as I got a faster CPU. And I knew that the G200 was seriously fill rate limited, and even a P3 wouldn't help much. So when I got the G40032meg SH, I tentatively fired up a series of benchmarks. Boy was I happy to see that even with my slower CPU, this baby rocked. Only problem I have is on NFS4. It is a "Glide at Heart" (tm) game and really shows it. It is still quite playable. But I gotta turn a couple of things down. Janes WW2 and D3 really take off! Pardon. So I guess I would say, grab the G400. If money is an issue get a 32meg Single head,oem card.
Or you could buy my G200. hehe

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AssuP2B ,iCeleron337, 128megs PC100, G40032megSH, Yamaha PCI sound, 2 small HD's, 42X Sony CDrom and 98SE w/shutdown patch, PD 5.30 w/beta ICD

[Mormegil]

I just got a dual head 32mb G400.

A friend of mine just got a TNT 2 Ultra.

The G400 compares favourably to the TNT2 Ultra and was $100 cheaper (I'm in Australia). The TNT 2 seems a little faster but my friend also has more RAM than me (otherwise our systems are almost identical). I have no complaints about my latest purchase. Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament (my 2 favourites at the moment) both run well and look great.

Of course, if money isn't an issue (it was for me) you might want to look at a GeForce 256.

[CMB]

OUCH
i ordered my marvel earlier today,
because at heart i prefer video quality over gaming. But still :O(
i guess there will be no Q3 with everything on at 1024x768 for me????????
how about 800x600??????

[CMB]

whats the difference between 16 and 32 mg?

i understood that it enables you to run games in 32bit colour at higher resoloutions!

my monitor only supports 12x whatever is is
i cant remember would i notice a differnce if i got 32mg over 16mg?

[Nuno]

CMB: for you to get an idea, Quake3 1024x68 all detail up is already filling up all the 32 mb in the video memory and going AGP. So 16 Mb ONLY if you are on a budget - the question is not of it supports hi resolutions and color depths, it also has to have space for textures.

[Nuno]

CMB: This might interst you:
http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardwar...ndepth/d.shtml

if you don´t want to see it all I think this is what might answer your question:

G400 16MB: 16-bit & 32-bit

The graph below compares 16-bit and 32-bit performance of the 16-megabyte G400 board. In addition to 32-bit color depth, textures and Z-buffer were set at 32-bit as well. At low resolutions of 640x480 (307,200 onscreen pixels) and 800x600 (480,000 onscreen pixels), color depth has no effect on performance. At 1024x768 resolution and 32-bit color, fillrate plunges to a much greater extent than would be expected of bandwidth limitation. This is because the G400's 16-megabyte video memory is insufficient to store all the textures. Therefore, it resorts to AGP texturing.

[CMB]

Thanks for the info,
so i guess when you read about the max doing 1600x1200 (or whatever :O)
it resorts to agp texturing too?

so ill be abe to run games with all on
in 800x600, what im used to anyway :O)
but if i were to switch to 1024x768
what kind of hit would i take? anyone outthere with a 16mg g400 wanna help me out

my system is a pII 450 128g of ram

and in anycase, im sure whatever i end up will be improved over the 8mg marvel g200 I have now :O)

[IceStorm]

So what happens when I run DualHead? If I shut down the second display via the Display Control Panel, can I get all 32MB for gaming, or do I have to COMPLETELY DISABLE the Multi-Monitor setup to force the primary display to use ALL 32MB?

This could explain why my UT FPS scores plummet when I do 32bit color...

Anyone know the technical answer to this one?



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Primary System: PIII-540 (450@4.5x120), Soyo 6BA+ III, 2x128MB PC100 ECC SDRAM CAS2, G400 MAX in multi-monitor mode. V2 SLI rig. Two Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 900u monitors, 3Com 3C905, SoundBlaster Live!, DeskTop Theater DTT2500 DIGITAL Speaker System (Sweeeeeet!), WD AC41800 18GB HD, WD AC310100 10GB HD, Toshiba SD-M1212 6x DVD-ROM, HP 8100i CD-RW, Epson Stylus Pro, OptiUPS PowerES 650, MS SideWinder Precision Pro USB joystick, Logitech 3-button mouse, Mitsumi keyboard, Win98 SE, Belkin OmniCube 4-port KVM, 10/100 5-port Linksys Ethernet switch (30~40MB/min under Win98SE)

Secondary System: PII-266, Asus P2B BIOS 1008, 1x128MB PC100 ECC SDRAM CAS2, Millennium II, 3Com 3C590, ADSL Modem 640kbit down/90kbit up, 3Com 3C509, Mylex BT-930 SCSI card, Seagate 2GB Hawk, NEC 6x CD-ROM, Linux distro S.u.S.E. 6.1 (IP Masquerade works!), Sharp JX-9400 LJ-II compatible

Tertiary System: DFI G568IPC Intel 430HX chipset, P200MMX, 4x64MB EDO Parity RAM, Millennium II, Intel Pro/100+ client NIC, SoundBlaster 16 MCD, Fujitsu 3.5GB HD, WD 1.2GB HD, Creative Dxr3 DVD decoder card, Hitachi GD-2500 6x DVD-ROM, Win98 SE

All specs subject to change.