Sadly, during a recent move, my GeForce256 card’s video out circuity died.
But now my birthday approaches and my sweet wife has taken pity on me
and promised me a new video card. But “which one?” she asks and I do not
know what to tell her. To keep our budget healthy, I have about $100 to spend.
Looking at what is available, and staying with the GeForce line to keep my Linux
box happy, it looks like a choice between a
GeForce3 Ti200 or GeForce4 MX420
both with 64MB onboard.
It has a lot more power than the GF4 card you mentioned there (don’t let the 4 fool you - the mx series roughly compares to the GF2 in terms of horsepower). The 3Ti200 also has one of those all important vertex shaders which are going to revolutionize CG so much in the months to come (especially with OpenGL 2 on the way).
I’ve got a 3Ti200 myself, and I never looked back. My Blender scenes run so smoothly now that it’s like having a completely new PC!!! One scene of mine, on wireframe, I was getting roughly 2 fps (frames per second) with my old card (a rubbish ATI card). With this new upgrade, I can dolly across this same scene in potato viewing mode (hold down middle mouse and drag to dolly) without any drops in frames at all. Astounding.
Not to mention the game playing potential of course. The UT2003 game demo runs on mine at 800x600 with everything on max, despite the fact my processor is 400MhZ (the game says it NEEDS a 733, recommended 1gHz).
So in short, get the GF3 Ti200 . Blender is just amazing with it, and you’ve got a lot of nice technology packed into this card which is really going to come in useful as the years go by (and with Blender 3).
This is weird. I was wondering myself what kind of video card to get for my PC that is a dual boot win 2000 (for my wife :-? ) and RH 7.3 (for me ).
Although I have about 200$ burning a hole in my pocket 8) . Does everybody still recommend GF3 Ti200 or is there something else for 200$ that would be a better buy for me and would be combatible with Linux (this is a MUST). BTW My computer is somewhat older, PIII 500 MHz.
Oh and one other thing I am not a big Gamer, It would be nice but not essential the card to be able to capture video from my VCR (analog) But really I am buying a new card because my old card (and I mean old) really sucks and with me learning blender and getting into 3d graphics it just ain’t cutting it.
Thanks in advance.
Thanks for the input, I will be getting the GeForce3 card. Yippie!
Homer: I would go with a GeForce based card. I never had a problem with my
old GeForce card on my Linux box, including through several Red Hat updates.
(I would always forget to re-compile the NVidia driver though and think things
had broken after the upgrade. Silly me…)
NVidia offer good drivers with frequent upgrades and a nice 91 page manual
on configuring both XFree86 and OpenGL. One feels Nvidia is committed to
supporting the Linux OS.
Actually Kryten (after doing some quick research) I think I will get the same model you are. It seems I will get more bang for my buck with that model, besides I love to save money.
I ended up going with a VisionTek GeForce3 videocard (not the Ti200).
This is a better chip. I did some searching at www.pricegrabber.com and
found the best deal at Comp-u-plus: http://www.compuplus.com/insidepage.php3?sid=r9b62yidjda9325&id=223
I have ordered from them in the past with no problems and they are
well reviewed. Memory being equal, here is how the G3 compares with
the G3-Ti200: