New graphics Card?

[heartagram916]

Hello,

I anm fairly new to this forum and I really hope someone will be able to help me out with this question I have.

Currently I am running an ATI Radeon 9500 pro graphics card yes it is out of date. Well i got two new game: Age of Empires 3 and Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends. Well I ran into the problem that in direct x 9.0c the option for AGP Texture Acceleration is not working so I figured I would step up and buy a new graphics card. Can someone please comfirm that if AGP texture acceleration doesn't install the graphics card is the problem?

Also for the graphics card I was looking into the ati x1600. Is this a good choice? If so I don't know which card to pick I need an AGP card though. my options:
1. Sapphire Radeon x1600 pro 512 mb GDDR3 AGP
2. Sapphire Radeon x1600 pro 256 mb GDDR3 AGP

There is more these are just what I am looking out. Now I need your help. Is there another card I should look at that would be around the same price (about $145) or can anyone help me deicde what card I should pick up? Anything will be an improvement from my 9500 pro but I need something that will hold up for a bit to.

-Heartagram Thanx in advance for the help!

[Bluefish]

Hi heartagram916!
Welcome to PC Helpforum!

Although this is not my best area: I think this is a good card. I don't know what's the difference in price, but I think you won't have much advantage of having 512MB instead of 256MB.

Blue

[heartagram916]

Bluefish so are you saying that I might as well just go with the 256 mb instead of the 512mb if so may I ask why you suggest this I thought 512 would be good to go with because with technology it would hold up longer are we thinking different?

-Heartagram

[Bluefish]

Well 512MB is more useful for the future, that's for sure, but, in the future you'll need 512MB cards, but also cards that are developed further than this one, it needs newer OpenGL for example. The thing is that the only advantage in the future is the memory size, but you'll also need other things in future.

[heartagram916]

Blue fish what do you think about this card I'm liking this card more and I don't want to stick with ATI much longer

XFX nVidia GeForce 6800XTreme 256MB DDR3 2DVI/TV-out AGP Video Card

http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?p=XFX-68XT25&c=pw

[GaRHaR]

The ATI x1600 is a good entry level graphics card. It has the ATI label, which means it will be a stunningly colourful experience. The difference between 512mb and 256mb is the size and amount of textures you can hold in memory on the card. If it's a new game, it will have higher quality textures reserved for 512mb cards and it will look more detailed. But you need to remember that this is an entry level card and might not be able to perform as well if it has larger textures.


The nVidia 6800 is a good card as well. It was the high end nVidia card for a while, until the 7800 came out. But you have to keep in mind, that the x1600 came out around the same time as the 7800 (a bit after), so it may very well be based on newer technology. (I haven't read any reviews on this).

Out of these 2 cards, I would choose the ATI, purely because of the quality of image you would recieve.

Have a read of this website, it will give you more then enough information about the x1600

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/06/...eon_x1600_pro/