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Best 1GB budget card

silversurfer

silversurfer

silversurfer

Soldato
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Stanley Hotel, Colorado
I play an old game that uses a lot of textures but would really benefit from a lot of video memory.

I measured with vidmemwatch and it could use upto 1gb, I dont use a res beyond 1600x1200 but would like consistent fps so basically I want to know what card gives 8800gtx performance with 1gb memory and doesnt cost hundreds

Is there a suitable budget option, Im not sure if gtx performance can come on a budget now but it'd be nice if I was able to get a cheaper card rather then a supercard as I dont need it really, I'd be happy to downgrade the res on any newer type game and Im not fussy


Just looking for suggestions as I havent read any reviews for about a year, normally I'd try and figure out myself but Im bound to miss some vital point.


I think memory bandwidth is important, is it nvidia which has the 512 bit ?
 
only get 512bit if you go into the gtx series i think but you can get a 1gb radion 4850 for about £120
 
silversurfer said:
Best 1GB budget card?
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Heh, that's a funny question . . . bit like "What junk food is the best for you" :p

I game at 1920x1200 and have had no problems using a 512MB card. A 1GB budget card is the preserve of non technical nOObloids buying in the high street! :o

silversurfer said:
I think memory bandwidth is important, is it nvidia which has the 512 bit ?
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Texture handling and compression and GDDR speeds can work wonders here to get around the 256-bit and 512MB restriction . . .

I heard some mumours that ATI's new "Lil Dragon" may feature a 512-bit memory interface, alongside ATI excellent texture compression and uBer GDDR speeds should be good! :)

What's your budget silversurfer?

£100?
 
About that I guess but Im considering all options, I do need more then 512mb in this case though I take your point about the res I think its more about textures needed in the game and how efficient the game is made.

Rivatuner and utilities like that show the 512mb I was using wasnt enough a lot of the time so I want to try a large amount to see how much it helps, I can always send it back if I get it badly wrong I guess

Im glad to see 256bit isnt a problem but I guess I need to try this out really.
 
Card I was using was a 2900xt and I used to have a 3850 operating above 3870 clocks and realised the 2900xt was better

The game I play is a mod of bf2 which I know is tons of years old but it was stressing the 2900xt to the point where fps would be 10 sometimes, 30 (too) often but 100 mostly

This is the inefficiency of the game and dx9 I suppose so I want something that can handle 700 meg of textures in memory at once just for the one off occasions when fps is seriously being battered.
Its a unique requirement I guess, I may just give up and get a really old card and half all my graphic settings and res, wait for the next big thing maybe when 1943 comes out

3dmark06 on the 2900xt was 11k and 3850 was 10k



The 4830 was something I was just looking at
did it have excellent texture compression?
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I guess the answer would be no so I'll have to look at how that changes memory requirements, I wasnt aware that was possible tbh





trying to gauge the balance of power, etc out there
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What cpu do you have? I play bf2 aswell and allthough i play at a lower resolution my fps do not drop below 100 and max out at over 200+. Thats with my old gts640. Have you tried raising the max fps limit on bf2 game.lockFps 250. I would have thought that your current card would cope.
 
a mod of bf2
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Yea its not the original game so say karkland, take that and increase it by 10x then basically the design of bf2 means you need to load the whole map into memory because if you dont it will load it from the disk in the middle of a game, if you flying a jet it turns it into a poor game. the 10fps thing comes from smoke particles, the game emulates the smoke from a 10k lb bomb so thats a lot of pixels to animate at once i guess.
But yep 100fps mostly because its so old but crashing a jet because your graphics card didnt have enough memory ruins things a bit
 
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Just looking at a 9800 1gb and I have a nvidia motherboard which would boost it slightly I think. Any merit to getting one of those or is the lower price really not worth it
 
Its in my sig lol. The main point was that I dont need blistering performance but space for 700 meg of textures unless the idea of compression really works but Ive not seen this mentioned in reviews yet.

I know AA has vastly improved but I can take or leave that though its nice I guess. I presume dx10.1 does this much better then dx10 which all the nvidia cards are I think

AA of course normally takes up memory space, is this the recent memory saving being mentioned?
 
When you're flying around in a jet, and it goes down to 10fps, is that just a one off thing that gradually gets better the longer you're in a level, or does it constantly happen through the whole time you're playing that level?

Check your peak commit charge when you've been playing a while, if its going over 2GB, then that is the reason for the jerks and buying a new graphics card with 1Gb wont stop this from happening, as its paging to disk (BF2 modded maps need to stay under approx 2GB, as thats the limit for 32bit apps)
 
Yea Ive looked into it. TExture memory is allocated to the program size so that it appears to be larger then it is, 2gb is the limit and the bf2.exe wont breach that or come that close but the amount of texture memory attached can become massive if you view the entire level which involves loading and retaining textures, sometimes its 700meg or more in my case

10fps is the smoke thing, the fps wont go down if its a paging issue as it will just freeze up for a second
 
Certain bits of that graph thingy seem just odd.

For e.g

On what planet is a 9600 / 8800gs better than an 8800gs 320mb for example? Can't even say "at realllly high res's" as they'd both just suck :p
 
It doesnt always lag, its fine most of the time. The 2900xt is not slow at all and 512meg is a decent amount.
Its a just a pain that at the limits it was inconsistent which is not really acceptable but yea downgrading to medimum textures would probably help a lot, I might just do that instead and give up trying to run it at full tilt though with a 4 year old game its ridiculious really.

Anyway I think I missed the deadline to order before the weekend so I'll just read some more reviews
 
Hey silversurfer, I think one way or another you should get rid of the HD2900XT! :D

I owned it, was glad to get shot of it, the only good thing was it came with that Valve Black-Box voucher which was nice!

I'm gonna have a look at some modern benchmarks later and see whats under £100 and leaves the HD2900XT in the dust! :o
 
Big.Wayne said:
Hey silversurfer, I think one way or another you should get rid of the HD2900XT! :D

I owned it, was glad to get shot of it, the only good thing was it came with that Valve Black-Box voucher which was nice!

I'm gonna have a look at some modern benchmarks later and see whats under £100 and leaves the HD2900XT in the dust! :o
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+1 i need this info to, im on 1920 x 1200, sold my 4870 1gb as I didn't need that muc gruntm but my lowly 8600GT is pants on 2142.

9800GT any good? rebadged 8800GT isnt it?
 
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