What graphic card (for UT2004)?

[Stormrider]

I have an Athlon 64 3200 with 1gb and a 6600GT. I'd like to update my graphic card for UT2004. I prefer to forget about UT2007, because I demand at least 80 or 100 fps in my games, so I'll wait 4 or 5 years before I decided to go for that game. My UT2004 works fine now, but some maps which are graphically intensive makes the performance drop below acceptable levels. What card do you think would be enough for me? I don't want to spend a lot of money. I don't know if a 7600 would be enough or I should go for the 7900. I think I prefer to stay with Nvidia because my 6600gt works fine with all games and I've had no problems at all. I usually play games at 1024x768, with no antialiasing and all details to the max. Apart from UT2004, the only games I'm interested in are rFactor, GTR2, Counter Strike Source, Outrun 2 and the upcoming Virtua Tennis 3.

[sure]

There is an ut2004 forum.
If you search you prolly find your answer there.

[Stormrider]

Oops, sorry, I clicked the wrong link.

[a2k4]

i run it on a 7300LE and get 75-90fps

[Henrik]

I have an Athlon 64 3200 with 1gb and a 6600GT. I'd like to update my graphic card for UT2004. I prefer to forget about UT2007, because I demand at least 80 or 100 fps in my games, so I'll wait 4 or 5 years before I decided to go for that game. My UT2004 works fine now, but some maps which are graphically intensive makes the performance drop below acceptable levels. What card do you think would be enough for me? I don't want to spend a lot of money. I don't know if a 7600 would be enough or I should go for the 7900. I think I prefer to stay with Nvidia because my 6600gt works fine with all games and I've had no problems at all. I usually play games at 1024x768, with no antialiasing and all details to the max. Apart from UT2004, the only games I'm interested in are rFactor, GTR2, Counter Strike Source, Outrun 2 and the upcoming Virtua Tennis 3.

Your rig should be MORE than capable of running any map in UT2004 maxed out. I have similar specs except my gfx card is a 5900XT. I would simply recommend a couple of things.. Running UT2004 smoothly also depends on several other factors such as.. are you running it off your fastest HD? a 10,000 or even 7200 RPM drive would make a big difference. Are you running XP lean and clean? You should have maybe 20-25 processes running, none of them using a significant amount of bandwidth or CPU. AA+AF will bring your framerates to a crawl, and they aren't necessary.. Finally.. is your PC adequately cooled? I think with all these things checked you would be able to run UT2004 perfectly at full settings.

[Moloko]

7600gt will play at those resolutions fine, but a better buy would be a ATI 1900xt gpu card with 256mb ddr3 for just a little more or for a bit more still a 7950 card , you'd be better holding off altogether really until the new dx10 cards come out over the next 2-3 months as the price always drops futher on the older cards plus there will suely be a mid range dx10 card to look at as a option .

[Lee_Shagwell]

I have a 7800gtx, i run it at 1152 x 864 with every detail setting on max + nvidia anti aliasing etc etc, the only time i've ever noticed a slight drop in frame rate was in a ONS map called honourablewaytodie (or something like that).

It had lots of water effect. The map featured loads of chinese huts with highly detailed textures all round. There was various particle effects about too. Basically when ever the water was in view, the frame rate would drop.

This is really strange because I've never seen the frame rate drop in UT2004 before.

I'd say it dropped to about 20fps.

Other than this one map I have to say performance in UT2004 has been absolutely amazing. at least 60fps. Beleive me, I've been playing UT2004 religiously since it first came out.

UT2004 is an amazingly scalable game. Before I brought my new PC I used to play ut2004 on a p3 1ghz with a geforce 2mx card!! It was highly playable on that if I had all the detail settings to low and a screen res of 800 x 600

Basically what I'm trying to say is you don't need to upgrade your card, wait until your ready to move to UT2007 and then upgrade. I don't think anybody knows how demanding UE3 is going to be yet. I'm still hoping it'll run alright on my card.