Best Bang for your Buck Graphics Card ?

What's the best card for the money atm?

Would be the FX5200 256 meg? Or still the G4 ti4200? What about ATI?

I prever a ATI card, i read some articles about it on a dutch site where it was tested with half life 2 and performance was almost 2 times faster then nvidia cards! ATI is getting better and better these days!

I had a fx5200 256 but I wasn't satisfied so I got a fx5600 ultra 128 instead..works great...would like to get my hands on a 5900 but I can't afford it just now...

dont know how thw ATI cards work tese days but if diz says they work they probably do...

i also read a think about half life 2 but there was something with valve and nvidea that was a conflict between them

Half life 2 isn't optimised for any of those 2 brands.. and with the optimisation the ATI is still 80% faster then the NVIDIA. ATI scores high in the 3DMark2003 tests, and NVidia cheats a lot with that test

hahha ati also cheat on 3DMark2003 never trusht that prog

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1863
that's about half life 2 and ati vs nvidia.

personally I would prefer ATI at the moment. the Radeon 9800 Pro 256 rocks everybody's boots off. with 256 mb memory on it it works like a charm on any game or util u wish to spin on your pc. for most games that 256 is ludacris. you don't need it. you could settle for the 128 card aswell tho some games will be taking advantage of the extra memory.
ATI seems to score better in just about any test performed. their chipset is simply more advanced tho things could change when the NV4x chipset from NVIDIA will be released. don't expect that chipset any time soon though. could take several months and in the meantime, ATI is working on a new chipset aswell, tho I wonder how fast they think they need to go.
It's like with CPU's. at the moment you won't see a lot of difference between a P4 3.2 ghz and a P4 2.5 ghz or something. CPU speed is no longer the bottleneck. same will go for graphics cards soon if you ask me. not sheer power but extra features and price will be more and more important, and, to some extend, new and improved features.

currently bottlenecks are more and more at datatransfer from memory to CPU and from HDD to CPU if you ask me. both CPU aswell as graphics cards are getting very sophisticated. ahwell... let's just see what the future brings

back on topic: go for an ATI Radeon 9800 or 9600, take the Pro version and you're set for the future. check the link I placed above and see what those cards do in a DX9 game. but also, check what they usually do in benchmarks, they simply rock. NVIDIA has been resting on their laurels for far too long, neglecting to listen to the gaming community and delivering a chipset which simply sucks. a GF Ti4600 will do nicely if you don't require the max, but I would never go for a GF ti5xxx card if I were you.

Said best bang for the buck so basically lower budget cards guys :p

Talking like between the

Ati 9600's
G4 4200 or 4800 (for some reason on pricewatch the 4800 is lower priced then the 4600)
Fx5200-5600's

All of those cards are at the most 130$ish listed on www.pricewatch.com
Was thinking of getting a newer card to replace my G3 Ti200 since it will be a lowered end card for HL2 and such coming out.

You can't wait a while before buying a new card. My next grafics card will be a ATI Radeon 9800 pro, but have to wait with that untill the prices get little bit lower.

he prolly means you CAN wait a while before buying a new card. prices will be sure to drop as they always do when new cards become available.
cards for around $130... I'd go with ATI. NVIDIA hasn't backed anything well in their oven lately, while ATI sure made some nice cakes overthere.
don't get me wrong, I'm not an ATI fan or NVIDIA hater, I have a GF3 Ti500 and wasn't fond of ATI before at all, but they've done a good job on cleaning up their biggest problem (bad drivers) and the new cards they got simply do great.
go with ATI 9600 (a pro if you can!).

asus geforce fx 5950 ultra. kicks ass.

ATI is pretty much the only vcard Ill use. the only problem I have had with em is playing NWN. all I had to do to fix it was roll back the driver.

half life 2 isnt out yet right? I heard somebody stole some code from them so they had to delay the presentation to the market

A salute 2 my ATI RADEON SAPHIRE 9800 PRO 128 mb.
THis rocks like hell, can run higest resoulution in any game.
It's so good, it's almost making coffe too, lol lol lol

I recommend Ati cards too. But if you are going to buy budgetcard i recommend that fx5200. It has a support for directx 9.0 and it's quite profitable also (about 80- 100€ here in finland). At least Gainward has a model of that fx5200 which has passive cooling,(doesn't have a cooling fan, only a heatsink) so it's quite silent too. But it's not for the newest and fastest running games like driving games or shoot'em up's. But price/quality rate is good.

In about 200€ - 200€+ category, i'd recommend passive cooling model of 9600XT or all in wonder 9800SE.

Really good bang for buck: Geforce 3 (no Ti) or ATI Radeon 8500. They beat out all budget cards and no more than USD$50.

I have Geforce 3 running on my work computer and Radeon 8500 running at home (for dual monitors). I play all kinds of games at 1024x768 like Halo, CS, Freelancer and NWN.

Hercules Radeon 9800 XT

Try a 2nd hand Nvidia based Ti4600. Great value 2nd hand!

I would have to warn against any nVidia cards at the moment. Sure they are cheaper, and look like good deals but they won't last long. The issue is the fact their implementation with the API known as DirectX 9 (DX9) is poor at best. nVidia has decided to ignore the consortiums agreements and specifications and this is the result. However as a programmer I would have to say DX9 is the worst API since DX8. It's horribly slow, it hogs way too much of a GPU's resources and has more issues with incompatibility than any other API out there.

The current reigning champion is the Radeon 9800 XT (the Mac version is refered to as the Radeon 9800 Special Mac Edition). But this up coming spring are the new cards built upon new architectures that should basically blow all of these cards out of the water. Now the main contender for best performance of an API is OpenGL which is about 210% faster in performance and can do pretty much everything DX9 can.

Just look at the differences between PC Halo and Mac Halo. PC Halo struggles with all its settings turned to high and at 1024x768 around 40 to 45 frames per second. PC Halo of course uses DX9. The Mac version of Halo pushes 60 to 70 fps at the same settings and it isn't even optimized for the G5. Mac Halo of course uses OpenGL. On a side note, Halo was supposed to be a Mac game originally when it was announced at MacWorld '99. Damn Microsoft bought Bungie, and turned it into an Xbox game only.

I'd have to advise waiting until the new cards are out and the Radeons (about 9700) are dropped in price.

Here is some interesting reading about the performance of the cards now: http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031229/index.html

ATI 9600 Pro 128 MB works fine for me...