Simviation Forums

Hi,

me again,

My GeForce Nvidia 5200 is struggling a bit, can you all plague me with recommendations for a new card noting that I'm a real tightwad.  ;)

And don't forget the good points and bad points.  ;D

Cheers
Phil

Hmmm... would be helpfull to post the description of your current machine.
Anyway, if it's for playing FSX, I would suggest you to update to the latest possible card.
To give you an idea, my 6800 GT is not powerfull enough, but I can play with the tweaks described in the FAQ.

amazing value for money

http://overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.p ... =GX-137-SP  ( all my games maxed out with this one)

http://overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.p ... =GX-030-GW

thats about it for AGP anything lower is never worth it.

Ok, if you are upgrading for FSX it may be hard but I suggest you save cash and hold off tilll April- May timeframe. Why? Because Vista will be out along with DX10, now im no genious but my understanding was FSX was coded with DX10 in mind. So theoretically we should see a big performance increase from just having DX10 installed to render the graphics. Remember DX10 has better handling of files so your CPU is not doing so much work. I have only played the FSX demo but I have a 7800GTX, AMD64 3700 SD, and 1 gig for OCZ ram, I am confident with 2 gigs of ram and a fast Dual core cpu my video card could handle FSX just fine especially with dx10 installed. So don't play a guessing game wait till April when we see DX10, and true DX10 video cards to see what we are lookin at. I did however read in tomshardware that the 8800GTX was so fast that most(all) CPUs were to slow to provide enough data to overload the card. Now if you are in a cash pinch and need a cheaper card for sure wait untill we see a true dx10 card out because my money is on that dx10 will give the best performance increase to the game and it helps to have a dx10 native card. I see your system is AGP, oops didnt think so anyway I don't know your CPU or ram but if I were you I would stick with your current system albeit maybe painful and save your money for a system that at least supports PCI-E. Spending your money on an AGP card is nearly pointless.

Sounds like sound advice, I've just upgraded my motherboard and CPU to P4 3.4 Ghz, and kept the old graphics card and 512 MB 400 Mhz memory, hoping it would be adequate, but the planes graphics sometimes just go solid white, and things like the aircraft wings are like, flaps hovering on top, spoilers 3 feet below etc. :-/

Cheers all for advice.