Having just bought Doom 3 and being upset after discovering my PC isn't up to the job (I was kidding myself thinking it would be ok on a 64MB graphics card! ), I have decided to trawl eBay for a 128 or 256MB card.

Many of the newer cards are AGP 8x, but my PC is 4x - will an 8x card run on my Dell ok? Or do I need to stick to 4?

I think iD software should get a kickback from all the new graphics cards being sold!

Hehe true. iD are evil

8x cards will step down to 4x just fine. Below that, and power issues might come into play with what voltages the slot provides.

What price range are you looking at? Don't just go off of how much memory a card has, as there are 128 cards that will probably run the game worse then whatever your existing card is.

Radeon 9500 and above is a good choice, as is the NVidia lines above say the 5600ish cards.

It's a shame both companies believe in paper launches again. NVidia announced a good midrange card, the 6600, but it's really hard to tell when you might actually see one in reality. On the high end, I have yet to personally see an x800 or 6800 anything in retail stores in a top 100 market city.

Thanks for that info. I'm not too sure what my budget is to be honest. Maybe £80 or so. At the moment I have an Nvidia GeForce MX420 which has served me just fine until now (had the PC for 2 years). I'm actually surprised at just how poorly Doom 3 runs even on the lowest quality settings. I have 512MB RAM and a P4 2.4GHz processor so I'm hoping I don't need to start upgrading that.

I'll probably stick with what I know - which is the Nvidia cards. What about an NVidia GeForce FX 5500 (256MB)?

The problem I have with the low range NVidia cards in the 5000 family is they advertise the same features as the bigger brothers (5950 and such). So a game will use those features, but slow down horribly due to it. A friend of mine bought a 5200 for a system to run Everquest, and it ran worse since Everquest tried to use newer direct x 9 features on the board. He replaced it with a Radeon 9200 and saw a preformance jump, because the 9200 didn't support those features.

That was why I said 5600 and above on the NVidia side. The ATI cards like the 9000-9200 will run Doom 3, but still pretty poorly. 9500 and above on ATIs side start having the features and power Doom 3 craves.

I've recently been tempted to buy a Sapphire 256MB Radeon 9550 for $87. Anyone got an opinion on this?

ID do get a kick-back. At least from NV.

Tom, X800 cards *are* available (have been for months). They're just hard to get because they're all pre-sold. They're being bought faster than they can be produced. Ordering one somewhere would probably be the best way to get one. It's hard enough to get one internally for development purposes.

Bruno

Anyone got an opinion on this?

I do. When I first built my current machine I used a Sapphire built Radeon 9500. Not exactly the same card, I know. But it's behavior is enough to make me state that I will never use another Sapphire card again. The effect is described easiest as being the wavy effect used for the "dream" scenes in Wayne's World and other films. I was able to reproduce it using multiple monitors, resolutions, and refresh rates.

I have nothing against ATI cards at all. But after that experience I decided against ever buying Sapphire again. I replaced it with a Gigabyte made GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, and have been very happy since.

I'm aware they are available from some places. I just find it odd that I bought my 9700 Pro and got one of the first shipments, then saw it on store shelves here a month later. The xX00 and 6x00 solutions came out in the spring, and the shelves here still seem to proclaim the 9800 XT or 5950 the best you can buy. Now I know it's not as critical that high end gaming cards make their way into the mass market stores, but it still does help the impulse buyers to have them there. Prime example, my friend bought a 9600 XT over ordering a 9800 Pro online for the same price because he had to have the card that day. Another impule buying friend bought a 20GB iPod, as he couldn't find a Karma in the local stores.

The whole PCIe bit has be a but puzzled too. Sure, for the high end cards it makes sense with that market. But why are the midrange cards, like the x700 and 6600 launching PCIe first? I know several people at work not willing to pay $400 (or close to $700 for a PCIe x800 XT), so they want the midrange solution. They also don't want to upgrade to a PCIe motherboard yet, so they are stuck waiting.

This whole generation seems to be a mess of confusing benchmarks, and in some cases, lack of gains for spending $400 or more. So, I'm holding off even longer to build a new system then I thought. The other end of my decision to wait is the lackluster jump in CPU speeds over what I bought two years ago. I do keep my ears open though for an announcement from Shuttle about a PCIe enabled AMD Athlon 64 solution. Popular rumor has it that ATI might ship the first PCIe chipset, beating the Nforce 4. That could be an interesting turn in that market battle.

I'm considering a Creative Nvidia GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 256MB

This ok?

I haven't found any negative reviews online, and a few that are positive. I guess you got a bad one.

that's the 128 "XT" version, not the 256 "Ultra" version.

DOH!
I misread 256bit into 256M, oh well.
It would seem my so called sweet spot has a long way to run for the 5900Ultra All the ones I have seen are in the $400 range with 5950U for a bit less.