If you play at 1920*1200 with AA and stuff then I think a Geforce GTS 250 with 1GB memory would be optimal but other G92 cards such as the 8800 GTS 512 and 9800 GTX should also work well. The 9800 GX2 probably creates a bit extra overhead which isnt optimal with a single core K8 CPU.

If you want something older than G92 then perhaps a 7900 GTX could be a good option.

I recently rediscovered the X800 Series in both PCIe and AGP versions.

I really like having the smartshader feature again:

It comes with a lot of great Post Processing Effects! Black and White, inverted, Sketch, ASCII etc.

As for a nVidia recommandation I would go for the 7800GTX. It should be more than enough for that CPU 😁

Arctic wrote:

I recently rediscovered the X800 Series in both PCIe and AGP versions. […]
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I recently rediscovered the X800 Series in both PCIe and AGP versions.

I really like having the smartshader feature again:

It comes with a lot of great Post Processing Effects! Black and White, inverted, Sketch, ASCII etc.

As for a nVidia recommandation I would go for the 7800GTX. It should be more than enough for that CPU 😁

This is just looks like watching nagravision broadcast without the decoder...🤣

7800 GTX is enough then. Let me check what is available locally. Thanks a lot! 😀

Skyscraper wrote:

If you play at 1920*1200 with AA and stuff then I think a Geforce GTS 250 with 1GB memory would be optimal but other G92 cards such as the 8800 GTS 512 and 9800 GTX should also work well. The 9800 GX2 probably creates a bit extra overhead which isnt optimal with a single core K8 CPU.

If you want something older than G92 then perhaps a 7900 GTX could be a good option.

I started looking for a 9800 GTX, but none available (locally). As I understand, 7900 would be enough, 8800 would be ok, and 9800 would be a nice overkill?

For 9800 class, only the one I mentioned is available. I'll check 8800 and 7900 options then. Thanks a lot! 😀

I wouldn't go for any NV hardware that's older than G80 because that older hardware has quite inferior texture filtering and anti-aliasing quality. ATI's R5xx hardware is better too. R400 is as well but might not be fast enough for ya.

I picked up a 1GB HD 2900 XT a few months back for an Athlon 64 X2 setup. I've always been curious about that failure, with its ~120GB/s memory bandwidth , dual PCI-e power needs (even an 8-pin!), but performance similar to X1950XTX.... 🤣

swaaye wrote:

I wouldn't go for any NV hardware that's older than G80 because that older hardware has quite inferior texture filtering and anti-aliasing quality. ATI's R5xx hardware is better too.

+1 if filtering/AF/etc is very important to you. The one advantage G7x do have against R5x and later DX10 parts is they tend to be fairly low power consumption, so if you want a cool/quiet machine with minimal work, it's a quick'and'easy option. G9x tends to be pretty good power-wise too (especially if you aren't getting top-of-the-end models), as well as Radeon HD 3000 series. Avoid the G8x GeForce 8 and Radeon 2900s if you want a quiet/efficient box, but if that doesn't matter to you, 2900s tend to be pretty cheap on ebay, and are robust performers.

As far as untangling the whole "nVidia mess" from that era - GeForce 8 and 9 are really fairly similar. The 9800GTX is G92 based, which is the same chip used in 8800GTS, GTS 250, etc. I would definitely go with G92 over G80 unless you just like G80 for some reason. It has better video processing, is more efficient, and so on. The 9800GX2 would be a very nice choice if you want to run with high levels of AA all the time (thanks to SLI-AA), but I agree with Skyscraper that in "absolute" terms the 9800GX2 will be bottlenecked on the 754. For $50 it's not at all bad though (you could do a lot worse for $50).

Another card I would absolutely encourage you to look at, is the GeForce 8600. That's the first card where nVidia implemented "complete" video decode acceleration (the only missing feature is full VC-1 decode, which may not even matter for you - it's a big step up over the G80 8800s though), they're fairly power efficient, and in my own testing will hold their own against GeForce 7900 (not GTX probably, but GS, 7950, etc sure). They're usually pretty cheap when you find them too. I'd look at 3 models from that family - the 8600GT, 8600GTS, and the Quadro-branded FX 1700 (which has 512MB of memory).

All considered, I'd probably either grab the 9800GX2 and never worry about GPU performance again, or find an 8600, unless you have some specific card/model you've wanted to experiment with. 😀

g92 cards like the 8800gt, 8800gts 512, 9800gt(x) and gts250 are usually found very cheap (atleast here in the netherlands).

g80 cards (8800gts 640mb an 8800gtx) did have a lot of problems with solder joints and lots got ''reflowed'' with the oven trick so be careful, after a few months they usually fail again.

So Nvidia: any g92 based card, ATi: x1900xt(x), x1950xt(x),3850 and 3870 are good options.

All these cards are overkill and will get the job done.

swaaye wrote:

I wouldn't go for any NV hardware that's older than G80 because that older hardware has quite inferior texture filtering and anti-aliasing quality. ATI's R5xx hardware is better too. R400 is as well but might not be fast enough for ya.

G70 introduced transparency AA though.
http://techreport.com/review/8466/nvidia-gefo … cs-processor/16

Thanks a lot for all the suggestions. I found a couple of 8800 and 7900s but I decided to buy 9800GX2 since considering the prices and attitudes of the sellers (i.e. responses to my messages) it was the best option. It arrived today. One of the most beaten up parts I ever put my hands on, I really wonder what was the purpose of previous owner while torturing the card that much 🤣 Fortunately it is still fully intact and working (well, booting up nicely at least).

A 9800GX2 is a bit overkill but was going to say that one couldn't go wrong with a x800 or a x1900 and the 7800gtx was also a good bet as some DX10 games will struggle on a AM1 754 build.

x1950XTX

tgod wrote:

G70 introduced transparency AA though.
http://techreport.com/review/8466/nvidia-gefo … cs-processor/16

G7x doesn't support gamma corrected MSAA, meaning it's less effective than ATI MSAA, and has a maximum of 4X MSAA whereas ATI supports 6X. G7x also has inferior texture filtering throughput compared to ATI and so has more "optimizations" to its trilinear and anisotropic filtering. This might be seen as more mip map shimmering in the case of trilinear, or less sharpness in anisotropic filtering. The control panel can be configured for "high quality" filtering but this has a performance hit.

ATI supports transparency AA back to X800 era hardware. It's called adaptive AA.

The most interesting image quality feature for NVIDIA hardware is the Quincunx mode IMO. It can look quite nice at ~1600x1200 in some cases. A fairly fast supersampling-like option that's also fast.

If you check the link I gave it says it introduced gamma correct AA as well. Its just a small mistake anyway.
It's from a review of the card that goes into detail of the AA modes.

tgod wrote:

If you check the link I gave it says it introduced gamma correct AA as well. Its just a small mistake anyway.
It's from a review of the card that goes into detail of the AA modes.

Well look at that. I guess I forgot about it and only remember it as an option on G80+.

However, the texture filtering of G7x always bothered me. I remember problems in some games when I didn't set it to "high quality", and that throws away speed.
http://techreport.com/review/11211/nvidia-gef … ics-processor/6

swaaye wrote:

G7x doesn't support gamma corrected MSAA, meaning it's less effective than ATI MSAA, and has a maximum of 4X MSAA whereas ATI supports 6X. G7x also has inferior texture filtering

GeForce (since at least FX) also support "xS" AA, which is a combined MS+SS mode (it takes 2 texture samples and 2 or 4 coverage samples, producing 6xS and 8xS modes respectively - as far as I know nVidia removed the 6xS mode at some point in drivers (the 5800 Ultra at release touted 6xS mode, but sometime between then and 71.89 it was removed)), which is something ATi cards cannot do, and IMO looks pretty good. Also, Adaptive AA is only officially supported on R500 and above. It can be hacked onto R300/400 cards, however the performance hit is said to be substantial versus GeForce 7/R500 with "proper" transparency AA support (I would guess the X800/850 probably fare best for "hacking" the feature, versus trying it on 9800XT).

As far as image quality, texture filtering, etc this early review of the GeForce 8800 has a lot of good visual examples and comparisons of GeForce 7900GTX, 8800, and Radeon X1950, beginning on page 6. Personally I don't think the differences are anything to get very excited about, but if you're more sensitive to this kind of thing, go with a GeForce 8+ or Radeon HD 2900+ (TechReport doesn't seem to have a single article that encompasses 7900/1950/2900/8800 but this 2900 article has 1950/2900/8800 compared).

The 9800GX2 should be equal-or-better to the G80 in this respect, plus it gets SLI-AA functionality, which should be nice for many older games. 😀

Adaptive AA is official for X8x0 series cards. No hacking required. ATI backported it at some point.

xS modes are interesting. 4xS is probably the sweet spot. 8xS is pretty slow on anything prior to GF 8800. Quincunx 2X has a similar effect but is much faster than any xS or 4X mode. I really like 1600x1200+ with 2x Quincunx and I feel like a broken record on this.... heh.

Going from GF7 to 8 was quite a change with unified shaders. Some games don't work properly on GF8 and later as a result. How many? No idea, but Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow is one of them.

In terms of graphics performance, there is a huge step up going from 7 to 8/9 which is needed when playing at higher resolutions and somewhat newer games.

With games from around 2007, DX10 support started to become popular and needed Vista for this.

Yeah there's no denying that DirectX 10+ cards from ATI and NV have some compatibility problems with old games. Better to stick to DirectX 9 cards, but even then you can have problems.

Yea a ton of games will work just fine on newer cards 😀