please help me....(video card)

Burninate88 · Post by **Burninate88** » Wed Jun 14, 2006 3:19 pm

Okay, I'm in a tight bind.....I need a good graphices card for $100 or less. The catch: I only have a PCI slot. NO PCI-e, NO AGP!!!! I mainly need a card with HW T&L capibilities, also with pixel/vertex shading 2.0 or whatever.....the best card I've found is the ATI Radeon 9250 256mb PCI....but I don't know if it has HW T&L......help??? I don't know if this changes anything, but the current game I'm playing is WOW....oh and I have a Pentium 4, 256 MB RAM (upgrading soon, as in when I get a new graphics card), 2.79 GHz CPU speed, 43.2 GB Free Disk SPace, and thats about it.....any help is greatly appreciated....thanks!!

DesR85 · Post by **DesR85** » Wed Jun 14, 2006 10:22 pm

Sorry to break it to you but you've got to upgrade your motherboard to either one that has an AGP slot or a PCI Express slot (Choose the latter. Much more reliable and will offer further upgrade paths). That's because most T&L type cards are AGP or PCI-E based.

For the price of a $100, I think you might be able to afford a Geforce 5 or 6 series card. Just look up some sites like [url="http://www.newegg.com/"]Newegg[/url] for example to check them out.

Rookierookie · Post by **Rookierookie** » Thu Jun 15, 2006 10:17 pm

[QUOTE=DesR85]Sorry to break it to you but you've got to upgrade your motherboard to either one that has an AGP slot or a PCI Express slot (Choose the latter. Much more reliable and will offer further upgrade paths). That's because most T&L type cards are AGP or PCI-E based.

For the price of a $100, I think you might be able to afford a Geforce 5 or 6 series card. Just look up some sites like [url="http://www.newegg.com/"]Newegg[/url] for example to check them out.[/QUOTE]
What are you trying to say? Hardware T&L is DirectX 7 level, even the Geforce 4 MX supports it, so there is no reason why a Radeon 9250 should fail to support it.

DesR85 · Post by **DesR85** » Thu Jun 15, 2006 11:56 pm

I know that an Nvidia Geforce 4 MX has T&L capabilities. Same goes to the ATI Radeon 9250 or 9000 series for that matter. But, since that guy wants a card that has pixel shader 2.0 and supports Hardware T&L, that ATI Radeon 9250 won't make the cut. That ATI Radeon 9250's pixel shader is up till 1.5 only. Geforce 4 MX is somewhere at 1.0. I have a hunch its somewhere around that because a friend of mine tried running Fable: The Lost Chapters with a Geforce 4 MX and he couldn't even play it. Says it needs a pixel shader of 1.5 and above to run it.

So what I'm trying to say is that he needs to upgrade his motherboard to that with either an AGP or PCI-E slot in order to get himself a graphics card that supports both pixel shader 2.0 and have Hardware T&L. As far as I know, those types of graphics cards are in found along the AGP line and the PCI-E line.

Rookierookie · Post by **Rookierookie** » Fri Jun 16, 2006 12:32 pm

[QUOTE=DesR85]I know that an Nvidia Geforce 4 MX has T&L capabilities. Same goes to the ATI Radeon 9250 or 9000 series for that matter. But, since that guy wants a card that has pixel shader 2.0 and supports Hardware T&L, that ATI Radeon 9250 won't make the cut. That ATI Radeon 9250's pixel shader is up till 1.5 only. Geforce 4 MX is somewhere at 1.0. I have a hunch its somewhere around that because a friend of mine tried running Fable: The Lost Chapters with a Geforce 4 MX and he couldn't even play it. Says it needs a pixel shader of 1.5 and above to run it.

So what I'm trying to say is that he needs to upgrade his motherboard to that with either an AGP or PCI-E slot in order to get himself a graphics card that supports both pixel shader 2.0 and have Hardware T&L. As far as I know, those types of graphics cards are in found along the AGP line and the PCI-E line.[/QUOTE]
I believe the MX doesn't even have pixel shader capabilities...or maybe I'm wrong.

Well, there are Geforce 5700LEs for PCI, those do support DirectX 9.0 and PS 2.0. However, it might be trouble trying to find one, and DirectX 9 performance of the Geforce FX series, is, well...

DesR85 · Post by **DesR85** » Sun Jun 18, 2006 9:40 am

[QUOTE=Rookierookie]
Well, there are Geforce 5700LEs for PCI, those do support DirectX 9.0 and PS 2.0. However, it might be trouble trying to find one, and DirectX 9 performance of the Geforce FX series, is, well...[/QUOTE]

....pathetic. I know. The Geforce FX series is one of Nvidia's blunders that gave ATI an edge in the graphics card department. I got a PCI-E version of the Geforce FX5700 and its called the Geforce PCX5750. Performed similar to its AGP counterpart and it stinks. Upgraded to the Geforce 6200 and it performed a lot better than that pathetic Geforce PCX5750.:laugh: