what are some good nvidia cards?

[Jerry_111]

I haven't been keeping up with Nvidia lately and was thinking of getting a new videocard. Do you experts have some recommendations?

 

[Escaep]

SLI 9800 GX2's. :afro:

If you mean affordable then the 8800GTS (G92) or the 8800GT.

 

[Asus]

Or even the 9600GT.
If you are leaning on more the budget side then 8800gt or 9600gt. If you run higher resolutions for a bigger LCD (22"-24"?) then

If you mean affordable then the 8800GTS (G92) or the 8800GT.

You can get close to the same frame rate with the 8800gts as to a 8800GTX or 9800GTX. Not too far behind anyway.

 

[Druckles]

I like how this thread instantly assumes that nVidia are the only developers of graphics cards.

I'd advise you also look at ATi as well. They offer better price, arguably better picture, and they're equally matched to nVidia, despite what people tell you. When I purchased my graphics card, it was surprising how many people were so excruciatingly biased towards nVidia. I would have thought it would have been the other way around -- ATi being the "underdogs", thus having a greater "fanboy" base, thus more bias towards it, but apparently not.

Unless you have something against ATi?

 

[Asus]

For the last few years the 8800 cards have been basically on par with ATI cards regarding image quality. The only thing that stands out at all is AA with Source games on Nvidia cards causing noticeable white lines in some locations. But the fault is with Valve's choice and not Nvidia error and few people seem to care about it anyway.

And for performance, performance/$ Nvidia seems to have it. (based on COD4, ETQW, HL2: EP2, Crysis, UT3)
HD3870 and 3850 are 4th and 5th on the value chart there and Best Buy does have an awesome sale on the HD3870 in this weeks retail ad.

 

[NeptuneUK]

I'm thinking of giving one of the high end ATI cards a shot when I make my next build later in the summer.
Apart from what the Nvidia fanbase say, I have heard good things about the latest range.

 

[Druckles]

performance/$ Nvidia seems to have it.

There has to be something wrong with those results. At those settings they give for Episode Two, I get about 30/35 fps with a less powerful setup on my 3870

Similarly, what I found irritating about most reviews including this one is the lack of coverage of anything except fps. There are other factors people should be considering outside pure speed. Things such as power consumption, image quality and heat simply aren't discussed! That's why I found PRAD monitor reviews so refreshing.

 

[Asus]

There has to be something wrong with those results. At those settings they give for Episode Two, I get about 30/35 fps with a less powerful setup on my 3870

The review used ATI 8.2 cat. for drivers. Ran VISTA. Also no one knows what scene they used to benchmark. That can make a BIG difference. Different shader effects and amounts are used in different scenes. Or maybe they did make a mistake somewhere for the HL2 benchmark. Are you going to ignore the other benchmarks?
In THIS review they ran the 8.3 cats for the Dimond HD 3870 1gb card they benchmarked. Similar FPS. Same system it looks like (Core 2 Extreme X6800 2.93GHz with 4GB ram).
Here is a review with HL2 EP2 BUT using no AA/AF. 3870 is pretty similar frame rate to the 8800GT
BUT go to another review with AA/AF enabled and we see the same large difference between the cards.

Similarly, what I found irritating about most reviews including this one is the lack of coverage of anything except fps. There are other factors people should be considering outside pure speed. Things such as power consumption, image quality and heat simply aren't discussed! That's why I found PRAD monitor reviews so refreshing.

Different reviews focus on different things so you look at different ones. TRs probably benefit people who use high res LCD screens or HDTVs the most. Running at the resolution also happens to pull out more differences between the cards and is why some jump from the 8800gt to a more expensive card.

IQ between them in AC "Other than the above mentioned things, all the post processing effects and pixel shader qualities look exactly the same between NVIDIA and AMD hardware."

UT3 IQ
"We wanted to find out of ATI or NVIDIA had the edge in UT3 due to some hardware-specific rendering technique. Readers will recall that in the GeForce 7 and Radeon X1K days, ATI had markedly superior Anisotropic Texture Filtering which gave them an advantage in image quality with AF enabled. That issue disappeared with the introduction of the GeForce 8 series."

"In the end, there is no persistent difference between UT3 as rendered on an ATI Radeon HD 3K series video card and as rendered on an NVIDIA GeForce 8 series video card. Whatever differences the two manufacturers had in the past are no longer relevant."

 

[CyberPitz]

My x1800xt did me just fine, and cost me $130 1.5 years ago. It was able to run CoD4 on max settings.

By now, it's gotta be 100 or under.

I'm currently sleeping with the 8800GT.

 

[DEATH eVADER]

go for either the 8600-8800 to 9600-9800 series cards. also make sure you have at least 512mb for future proofing purposes. You can run most games comfortably at max settings (with exception to AA, I usually have this at x2)

 

[Adabiviak]

Might I recommend something from the 7xxx series? I have a 7800GTX and it plays Crisis at medium settings fine. I played Prey at 1920x1200 with all the settings on high with few dips to 30fps (from 60). The reason I say this is because they're probably rather cheap and are the last ones from nVidia that I know of that have video-in. This last is the main reason I haven't upgraded to an 8000 series card, but I'm envisioning newer video games requiring more guts in the video card. Bioshock, for example, must be played on 1600x1200, lest it really start to lag, but it's a gorgeous show.