I need advice from the brain trust here. My current video card is a X800GTO with all 16 pipes unlocked (standard is 12). This card has turned out to be a pretty good workhorse and was quite capable of playing virtually anything I threw at it. Yeah, I needed to turn down the candy on a few games but it still worked (Crysis kicked its butt). Even today it does fairly well, since I am not such a graphics snob that I need every last detail turned on.
The biggest problem I am running into is that virtually every new game coming out these days requires PS 3.0 which is not supported on this card. I have missed out on Bioshock as well as many others that have this requirement. Unfortunately this is an AGP system, and I can not really afford to upgrade CPU, motherboard, memory, etc. in addition to the vid card just to get to PCIe.
What would be the suggestion for vid card options here on the forum? Would an ATI 3850 be bottlenecked too much by the rest of my system? Should I try and find an 1950pro used somewhere or would one of the ATI 2xxx cards work well? Should I just save my pennies and stick it out until I can afford a new system? Should throw up my hands and buy a console?
For your info, the rest of my system (stats from memory):
AMD64 running at 2.3GHz
1Gb Dual Channel
X800GTO (16 pipes and oc'd)
Epox motherboard
80Gb IDE hard drive
The biggest problem I am running into is that virtually every new game coming out these days requires PS 3.0 which is not supported on this card. I have missed out on Bioshock as well as many others that have this requirement. Unfortunately this is an AGP system, and I can not really afford to upgrade CPU, motherboard, memory, etc. in addition to the vid card just to get to PCIe.
What would be the suggestion for vid card options here on the forum? Would an ATI 3850 be bottlenecked too much by the rest of my system? Should I try and find an 1950pro used somewhere or would one of the ATI 2xxx cards work well? Should I just save my pennies and stick it out until I can afford a new system? Should throw up my hands and buy a console?
For your info, the rest of my system (stats from memory):
AMD64 running at 2.3GHz
1Gb Dual Channel
X800GTO (16 pipes and oc'd)
Epox motherboard
80Gb IDE hard drive