Performance issue

I’m considering upgrading my video card in order to get better performance in Blender and some games, particularly Warcraft 3. My comp starts slowing down at around 8000 faces in Blender, and with around 10-15 units on screen in W3.

I was thinking of getting the
ATI RADEON 7000 32MB DDR 32-BIT,PCI 2X/4X MPEG-2 at $70 CAD
to replace my Voodoo2 2000 16MB SDRAM, PCI. Would this give me a significant performance boost to, say, be able to run W3 at 20-25 FPS with 20-30 units onscreen?

My vital comp specs are:
Pentium II 400 Mhz
128 MB SD RAM
Windows 98

Thanks.

Hmm, I can’t say I’ve experimented much in the graphic card realm, besides just updating once, but I’ve heard lots of driver problems with ATI cards and Blender. Also, for a comparable price, you could probably get an NVIDIA GeForce2, which has much less driver problems and has great support for OpenGL (which drives much of Blender’s interface) and DirectX as well. That’s my dos centavos on graphics cards.

I would also recommend the GeForce 2 over the Radeon 7000.

Just some inexpensive last generation parts I found on www.newegg.com:

BIOSTAR M7VKQ AMD MICRO ATX VIA KL133…$51.00
Aopen GeForce2 MX 400 64MB…$35
AMD DURON 900MHz Socket A PGA…$31
KINGSTON 256MB PC133 168-pin SDRAM…$34

Total…$151.00
(without shipping)