I will buy a new video card but I’m not sure about which one to choose. I’m looking for a good cost benefit and I think a “GeForce 8600 GT with 512MB” or a “ATI Radeon HD 3450” are in the range of price I can pay and are good to run games. I want to know whether these cards can run games of Blender’s gameengine with good effects of GLSL Shaders.
i’d take the nvidia one
I have the NVIDIA 8600 GTS. It is very good. Got great scores on the apricot tests. I don’t play other games, so I can’t really say if it would pass “the crysis test”, but I’m confident it would work.
There are certain reasons why not to choose an ATI card for use with blender. I also use a computer where it has some 512 mb ATI card, and it has always worked perfectly for me, but many people have had issues with blender and ATI.
I have an NVIDIA 8600 GT in my desktop, and it runs things great.
I also have an nVidia 8600GTS, and it works perfectly for me.
I have a nividea 8200 that was bundled with a new motherboard, and it works good,
although I had red flickering until I adjusted the settings in the control panel.
Nvidia + Intell Dude! The best combo for Blender always!
Ati + Blender + Linux = pain in the @#%!
And don’t forget to check if there is a good support for your new hardware under Linux before buing it… 
Wow, look at that. I have an 8600 GTS too. With a 3.2 Ghz Dual Core 2 gigs of RAM, I cna run Crysis at a decent 23 fps on some medium some high settings. Curse you, Crysis…
8800GT is awesome =)
especially for none serious gamers, because you’ll be good for like 5 years or more rock solid with one of those - provided u don’t need the latest graphics settings, like I said i think 8800 GT will have u virtually future proofed for quite some while under my before stated conditions
but 8600GT is good too, not as future proof though
I have one nvidia 9600GT , I choose this one because nvidia(for linux) and low power req (only 400w) and less of 100euro , and goes like two 8600GT. In performance/price its one of the best. i recomends you 8600GT or GTS if u dont wish afford more. Its sufficient for take GLSL effects.
I’d advise you ignore everyone telling you to buy nVidia because it’s better for linux. Truth is the better opensource drivers for ATi are coming, but not really for nVidia.
And that makes a big difference in how well it works with the OS, believe me. Also proprietary ATi drivers aren’t anything like as bad as they used to be.
Short-term nvidia does work better with GLSL (because everyone writes their shaders for nVidia cards), but longer term if you’re on linux you’ll get more benefits out of the ATi cards probably by halfway through next year. On pure clocking though, you’re probably better off with the nVidia.
I don’t mean to shoot down fudje’s point, but everybody should always do this, no matter what OS they’re using. Generally, I find that if their isn’t a way which I can accomplish something without special software, it’s probably the wrong device. Like a camera; you should be able to just plug it in (or take out the sd/cf card) and drag+drop using the your normal file explorer.
Look up a 9600GSO. Factory overclocked, and at an amazing price. That’s what I’m getting in January.
If you have lots of $, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 200.
It costs several hundreds, around 300-400 U$
thats a negative point imho
8800gt… are very decent performing cards… the cost has dropped rapidly because of the 9800’s and the 280’s… it also depends at what res you plan on running… eg. 8800 can run at the same speed as 9800 at lower resolutions eg. 1024 x 768 etc…
But the high end cards are designed to run large resolutions at fast speeds… basically if you don’t have a widescreen or anything bigger than a 19inch… a 8800gt performs well… I know I have one… I can play crysis quite decenlty on the second highest setting… It can be a waste of money to buy some expensive card that only peforms well at high resolutions when you are going to be using it with a normal 19 inch Lcd.
I also was thinking in buy a 9600 GT, but it’s so much expensive. Here is costs around R$ 430 (US$ 188,76). 9500 GT costs R$ 245,00 (US$ 107,55). It’s a great difference of price. There is a great difference between this cards?
I’m planning to buy a 22" lcd monitor…
save only a few more dollars and go for 8800GT and up. If you have an SLI motherboard you can probably do 2 8800GT’s for under $700.00 if you went to newegg.
There is quite a difference between a 8600 and 8800 preformance wise.
I would not even waste my time with ATI. Linux is starting to become really cool… if you go ATI your linux experiance will really not be a good one.
2 8800GT’s = $300
but in all honestly you only need one.
The only game requiring two is Crysis for maximum settings and even 2 8800GT’s is not enough for smoooooooooooth frame rates :no: -------> So unless you must max out all of Crysis settings, 8800GT is great. OR for like 5% extra performance pay $10 more and get a 8800GTS
I was just looking on newegg and the prices of some of the 9800 GT cards are cheaper than the 8800 GT cards. the 9800s are better right?