Cheapest AGP gfx card to support Pixel Shaders?

[Jimbo Mahoney]

A friend has just bought Thief 3: Deadly Shadows, but it won't play on their PC (PIII 800Mhz, Geforce 4 MX I think).

I know the CPU is getting on (understatement), but what's the cheapest (2nd hand probably) AGP card to do pixel shaders, which it says it needs?

Thanks for any help!

 

[semi-pro waster]

I think the Radeon 9550 supports DX9 which has Pixel Shader 2(it does also mention Videoshader which I assume is their own name for it) and will cost you about £30 new, if you don't mind buying secondhand I'd suggest a 9700pro/9800pro which definitely support DX9 also and should cost about the same sort of money but are much more powerful.

In fact you could potentially buy a whole different secondhand PC for not much more that would support DX9 and would be faster because I'm not totally sure that a PIII 800mhz is going to be good enough for Thief 3 to play comfortably anyway.

//edit in fact I've got the game here, it says that it requires a P4 1.5ghz or XP equivalent, 256mb Ram and it supports Radeon 8500 and above or Geforce 3Ti, 4Ti, FX or above series). It says specifically on the box that it doesn't support the 4MX series, your friend should have looked at the box first I think.