just bought my first ati card

  • Thread starter Thread starter alex
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A

alex

finally put my v5-5500 to rest ( moment of silence please) it lived a hard
long life. i acquired a 8500 LE with 128 ddr memory. i have messed with
the open gl and direct 3d settings and can't find the best settings. any
suggestions. i have a athlon 1.47 cpu, 256 megs of ram. i like my eye
candy, but don't like slide shows

alex
 
finally put my v5-5500 to rest ( moment of silence please) it lived a hard
long life. i acquired a 8500 LE with 128 ddr memory.
Click to expand...

You bought too far behind the curve. A 9500 or 9600 would have been a
much better choice.

rms
 
perhaps, but i got it used from a friend that was upgrading for like $30, it
is night and day compared to the v5, excpet my desktop looks not as sharp as
the v5. i don't have alot of computer cash in the summer when my other
hobbies kick in so it was good for me. there is just too many choices in
the properties and it is a pain to quit a game, change a setting, restart
the game and decide if graphical advantage is worth the frame rate decline,
was hoping for a easy answer. i was stubborn to hold onto the v5 so long,
but i have only had 3dfx cards in my computer since a few months after quake
one came out until a couple of days ago

alex
 
alex said:
perhaps, but i got it used from a friend that was upgrading for like $30, it
is night and day compared to the v5, excpet my desktop looks not as sharp as
the v5. i don't have alot of computer cash in the summer when my other
hobbies kick in so it was good for me. there is just too many choices in
the properties and it is a pain to quit a game, change a setting, restart
the game and decide if graphical advantage is worth the frame rate decline,
was hoping for a easy answer. i was stubborn to hold onto the v5 so long,
but i have only had 3dfx cards in my computer since a few months after quake
one came out until a couple of days ago

alex
Click to expand...

Try the Omega drivers http://www.omegacorner.com/
very good for making it look as good as it can get, in Games etc

Mino
 
You bought too far behind the curve. A 9500 or 9600 would have been a
Dont listen to that idiot - you have a great card for 30 bucks that will play
just about everything out there with ease. There's a lot of crap going around
now about DirectX9 cards - most of which barely, if at all, outperform DirectX8
cards in DX8 games. Whilst some DX9 games are around the parts of DX9 they use
are tiny - hence you can get blazing performance in things like EVE-Online (DX9
required) with a GeF3/8500 card so long as you have DX9 installed.

Quite apart from that an old Ti4xxx card will blow away most new cards
(including the 9600 etc) in 3dmark01 (my Ti4600 gets a score of just under
14,000) and at the end of the day 97% of all games out there now are DX8 and
even then newer games are only using small parts of DX9 which have tiny effects
on performance with a DX8 hardware part and certainly do not justify upgrading.
 
alex said:
finally put my v5-5500 to rest ( moment of silence please) it lived a hard
long life. i acquired a 8500 LE with 128 ddr memory. i have messed with
the open gl and direct 3d settings and can't find the best settings. any
suggestions. i have a athlon 1.47 cpu, 256 megs of ram. i like my eye
candy, but don't like slide shows

alex
Click to expand...

That's really a bit of a subjective question...what games? which settings
have you messed with? I've always tended to just leave things at the
"balanced" position, turned off vsync, then adjusted the AA and Aniso. The
8500 shouldn't take much of a hit no matter how much Aniso you use, but you
will have to find your trade off (performance vs image) point with the AA. I
never used AA much with my 8500, but have started using it a bit with my
9500 pro as there is not so large a performance hit.


Kris
 
finally put my v5-5500 to rest ( moment of silence please) it lived a hard
long life.
Click to expand...

Man, I feel your pain ... a year and a half ago I put my V5 to rest (well,
rather I aquired a Radeon64 VIVO - a good friend of mine now has the Voodoo
card and it's working just fine for him). I miss that card some days. It's
too bad that Glide never stuck as an API and it's equally as sad that nVidia
has done nothing with the 3dfx technology that they aquired.
i acquired a 8500 LE with 128 ddr memory. i have messed with
the open gl and direct 3d settings and can't find the best settings. any
suggestions. i have a athlon 1.47 cpu, 256 megs of ram. i like my eye
candy, but don't like slide shows
Click to expand...

This all depends on what games you play. You have basically the same system
I have (I'm guessing your cpu is an AtlhonXP 1700?) - only I'm running an
8500 64ddr card.

For the most part, I tend to keep AA off altogether because it slows down
whatever I am playing ... not to slideshow state, but games like Max Payne
and Sacrifice ten to be very chuggy during heavy action with AA turned on to
even 2x .. and my beloved Quake 3 (I play the Excessive mod) slows down
considerably when the online action gets nasty ... Aniso Filtering, on the
other hand, works well across the board. I only notice slowdowns when it is
set to the full 16x. I keep my AF set to 6x and can pull off a steady 120fps
in Q3 with all the eye candy turned (resolution 1024x768) on and when
playing Q3Excessive online my onscreen fps counter never drops below 80 (I
keep the resolution online set to 640x480 and the only eye candy I turn off
is the blood - hard to aim through - the ejecting shells and the rocket
smoke.). My only complaint with AF is that my crosshair gets a little blurry
(but that's not really enough for me to say it sucks because AF makes the
rest of the game look stunning).

All in all you got yourself a good, inexpensive card that will last for a
little while yet. All the hype about the next gen cards is just that at the
present moment: hype. Personally I cannot justify running out and spending
anywhere from $250 - $600 cdn for a card that supports games that are not
even out yet. All this boo-hooing about how well Doom 3 or HL2 will play is
bull. Obviously no one remembers when Q3 first came out - I know I was happy
to get 25fps out of my Voodoo 3 card. They will play well I think - the game
developers understand that not all of us can or want to pay so much for a
video card and they take that into consideration when dealing with graphics
settings. And do 3dMark scores **really** matter? Benchmarks are nothing but
tools for the computer mags (online and off) and vid card companies that
allow them to wow us with impressive numbers... and by the time you buy the
shiny new "in-thing" within 4 months the companies have put out another
shiny new card.

Good choice with the 8500 - regardless of what people will say.

-= r4ncid =-
 
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