Should I get a new video card?

[jnc007]

Its x-mas and I have money that could go towards bills but instead I'm considering a video card upgrade. My hardware is listed but simply I have a geforce2 mx 400 with 64 megs. Not wanting to spend more than 150 at the outside including tax and not wanting to get to best buy an say, "well, card x is only 15 dollars more" and end up sending 165, what am I looking at? Realisticllly, by up grading to the new nvidia geforce 4's, what am I getting, It'll obvisouly run a bit faster, sure, fine, but what will I see? visually what am I getting? oh yeah, .....I play primarily bf 1942 and wolfestein, and I now have 512 megs of ram.

[morriswindgate]

Pay your bills! But if you cannot resist the upgrade urge, the Gainward GFORCE 4 TI4200 is in your price range.

[mike breck]

Apart from a obvious speed boost you will be gain features like pixel and vertex shaders necessary to fulfil the DX 8.1 spec , which you don't have at the moment.

This is going to become more important over the next year after the release of Doom 3 and the subsequent license of the Doom 3 engine for other games.

So DON'T get a Geoforce 4 MX 440 8x card which doesn't have these features. A good price compromise would be a Geoforce 4 Ti 4200.

I'll be upgrading my Geoforce 2 MX very shortly and will probably go for the Abit Siluro GF4 Ti 4200 OTES.

Out of the box, it's performance is the same as a Ti 4400 and it can easily be overclocked (and stable) to 300/600MHz - which is is nearly the same as a Ti 4600.

That should keep you gaming for a year or two.

HTH