Just as a follow-up, in case this may help someone, I bought an ATI Radeon 9600XT. Unfortunately, they did not have the new motherboard I wanted in stock, so I'll get it Monday (ASUS P4C800-DX 800 FSB, i875P chipset, with PC3200 memory, and a P4 2.8 800 HT)
So I installed the card on my Athlon Thunderbird 1400 to give it a try. It does perform quite well. I've tested it with America's Army 2.0.0 (the Army's FPS simulator, based on the Unreal II engine). Cranked up the details to max across the board, and increased resolution to 1600x1200. It performed quite well. On one large map which would only run at about 5 FPS with my Geforce 2/MX will all details at "UltraLow" and at 800x600, the 9600XT gave me 25-30 fps consistenly with all details and max resolution. Action was smooth as silk.
The only problem I have encountered is that in Win2K, my monitor refresh was stuck at 60 Hz, whatever settings I put in the display properties. After installing the Rage3d tweak (
www.rage3d.com) however, the problem immediately disappeared and no other problems to report.
I am axiously waiting for my new board on Monday so I can get all the juice I can out of this baby. AGP 8X (instead of 4X currently), the more powerful P4 2.8 800 HT processor and PC3200 DDR 400 RAM should make my gaming experience even better.
All in all, for CDN$300, a very good buy.
Andargor
