4x or 8x graphics card

[Satch]

No 1 son is bugging me to upgrade card as his new game (Battlefield Vietnam) runs poorly with existing 64Mb Nvidea unless you turn resolution & effects right down. Same goes for just about all the newer stuff it seems

He "needs" a 256 MB 8x card (strange, that) but I am not sure if the motherboard would even support it How can you tell and, if it will only take a 4x, is it worth the bother?

(Computer has 1Gig of RAM & a 1.9 P4 processor)

 

[craigyb]

Be careful buying 8x boards. I think (and don't quote me on this) that the electrical spec changed and some 8x VGA boards won't work on the older 4x Motherboards.

Some 8x boards are backwards compatible and support both specs.

I would have thought that a full blown Geforce 4 (not MX etc) would be ok and they are usually 4x.

I Upgraded from 64mb GF2 to a 256Mb FX5600 and noticed very little difference in performance in gaming really.

Craig

 

[Satch]

Stuffed in an Nvidea 256MB 8x board and certainly ran the newer games better. Then I uprated the driver to the most recent version April 2004 (which was on the game disc) and it really took off, so one happy son!

Just now my Windows XP auto updater tried to tell me it wanted to install a "new" video card driver: October 2003!

 

[andy_k]

ignore the windoze updater, they are the latest "certified" drivers. NVidia release so many updates that Microsoft never seem to keep up. As long as you don't use the NVidia beta releases you should be OK.

I've got a 128nb GF4 ti4600 (AGPx4) and even though I push my GFX card as hard or harder than most I've seen no real need to upgrade just yet

Andy