when i look to buy a video card...wat r the most important things i look for?

Question

wat affects the FPS and the game preformence the most? for eg. the memory, bandwidth, ..etc im not sure just help me thnx

Answer 1

u could have given info about ur computer specs!it would help us a lot !anyway , before buying the video card make sure that the following are there in ur pc:
1.1GB ram
and
2.p4 or any dual core processor [ AMD OR INTEL]
3now let us see about the video card!first of all while buying the video card , u must see what ur mobo has:AGP SLOT or PCI-EXPRESS slot!see it in ur motherboard manual!two companies are mostly preferred by everyone : ati and nvidia.
what u r going to buy depends on ur budget.bcoz both companies r good!but remember about the slots!bcoz ur mobo must support ur v.card!
#second most thing u should see during buying a v.card is:
1.the gpu speed [ must be higher ]
2.amount of ram
3.ram speed [ more the better ]
and
4.ofcourse the cost of v.card!
HOPE THIS HELPED !GOOD LUCK!

Answer 2

Here's the low-down.

If you don't have a PCI-e system, don't buy a video card as AGP cards are way overpriced.

Secondly, the idiot who post seconds states you need a P4 or a dual core CPU. The thing is, the P4 is widely regarded in geek circles and in general as inferior to the AMD Athlon64 single core. Just check out wikipedia...the P4 is garbage, it was all marketing hype by Intel.

Third, research the cards and get the best for your budget. If you only have $50 for a card you're not going to be gaming...maybe a 3 year old game.

Fourth, Current games using Windows XP use an instruction set named DX9c. It's been around for what seems like forever- games still look fantastic with a good card. Games supporting DX10 are coming out later this year and only the newest cards support the DX10 instruction set. Oh yeah, you have to be using Vista to use DX10.

Fifth- the best cards for your money.

DX9 cards:
$90 Nvidia 7600GT
$125 ATi x1950pro

DX10 cards:
$180 Nvidia 8600GTS
$260 Nvidia 8800GTS 320mb
$330 Nvidia 8800GTS 640mb

Anything above the 7600GT needs a quality, 450+ watt power supply. These run $75+ on newegg.com. Look for Seasonic, FSP, Silverstone, Tagan, PC Power & Cooling and other tier 1 brands.

Read reviews on Anandtech and TomsHardware.com

Here is a chart that allows you to select the card, the game and the resolution. They use the Core 2 x6800 extreme CPU and the best of everything else when benchmarking, so anything less will have lower scores.
Blue lines, 1950pro vs 8800gts
http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=725&model2=707&chart=277

Answer 3

There are 3 major "slot" types for video cards:

PCI
AGP
PCI-Express


Also note that within AGP, there are different speeds. 1x, 2x, 2x/4x and 8x. This refers to the amount of bandwidth available for video.

You can do a few things to find out.

a) open the case
b) run a program like everest ( http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4181.h... ) or belarc advisor ( http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html... ) to find out what your motherboard has. You can use either of those utilities to identify your motherboard, and then run a websearch for your motherboard model and see what type(s) of video card slots your computer has.

I have seen some ECS, MSI and Gigabyte brand motherboards that had multiple slot types for video cards (PCI, PCI express AND agp all on the same board) though this type is not too common

Once you have determined the type of slot your motherboard has, beware the type of card you choose, as many people get a video card purely rated by the amount of memory the video card has and the amount of memory is in no way an accurate representation of the speed/power of a card. You can, for example, have a 256mb nvidia fx5200 video card that gets completely obliterated by a nvidia fx6600 with only 128mb

Another thing you should take into consideration when upgrading your video card is that nvidia cards before the 8xxx series could not handle AA and HDR simultaneosly, whilst some ATI cards can (ati x1600, x1650 as examples).

Also beware some cards with "turbocache" like capibility, which generally refers to the video card handling up to x amount of memory (512mb for example) but really only having 128mb or 256mb of memory actually on the card

Also, don't always rely on model numbers and assume they are signifficant upgrades. For example an fx5500, while better than a fx5200, is not THAT much better and you will definitely get a bigger increase in performance with a fx5700 of any type, than a 5200, 5500 etc

I am not trying to freak you out, but dont be afraid to ask questions...its YOUR money, dont buy into a lot of these companies ploys to scam you with numbers...

Answer 4

izzy you really didn't give much info other than knocking that poster. i do believe the question was about video cards not about knocking pentium 4 and pushing the AMD fanboy agenda (please note my own rig is an am2 socket athlon 64x2 5000)

as for the question, many things affect performance. Speed of memory is a big factor, ddr3 will pretty much give you best performance as far as far as memory goes but don't forget the GPU.

Like snaredbyfalcon said above, nvidia cards before the 8xxx series could not handle hdr and AA simultaneously so if you're not going to be shelling out loads of money for your card, stick with ati for hdr and aa

the 7600gt cards were really good as far as nvidia was concerned and only a handful of games really needed the hdr and aa that ati cards offered. I had a 7600gt for awhile and it was a pretty cool card...my 7950 gx2 is way better tho heh

Answer 5

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Answer 6

1. GPU architecture - More pixel pipelines, vertex shaders, stream processors, the better.
2. Core clock speed - Higher is better
3. On board memory clock speed - Higher (ddr3) is better.
256Mb ddr3 will always beat 512Mb ddr2