Advice for a graphics card please
 

Hi, would appreciate some ideas for a graphics card to run things like Quake4 and Doom without having to spend 100's of pounds, Novatech seem to have a good selection but some idea of the kind of spec I should be looking at would be appreciated. I am running a pentium dual core (3.00ghz) processor:ok:

All comments gratefully received (even the rude ones!)

Wiggly

What Card are you currently running? I have a Nvidia 256mb 7600GS and find it to be a good card with a reasonable price tag. The best thing to do is shop around and read a lot or reviews http://xtreview.com/review140.htm .
Cheers

I recently (Nov '06) got a Sapphire ATI Radion X1900 XT 512Mb for just over 200 GBP and as of late last year it was supposed to have the best performance/price ratio on the market. Has no problems running half-life 2 with high graphics settings but I guess there is something more recent out by now. I use it with a dual core 1.9 GHz. Hope that helps.

I second the 7600, great graphics card, i have the GO Version in my laptop, and could never ever go back to having a worse graphics card.

FSX and the older ones work great, pretty much put the sliders up top and still have a very playable frame-rate.

Seems to help with everyday stuff too, my system has never crashed since unless you class a little driver error it had with XP which is now patched. Works with Vista flawless and i have noticed not difference from XP to Vista with it, 3DMark reports a little lower mark with Vista than XP but its so marginal its not worth worrying about.

I have had ATI, and would recommend NVIDIA over them any day, plus the card works with DARWIN(OSX10) and drivers are out there for Linux/Solaris and the likes.

If you go to the NVIDIA Support site, there is a place where you can select your graphics card, then a game and it will report the FPS and a few other details, very worth while...