[Fineus]

Well it's that time again and I want to upgrade my system to a be a little more spry than it is right now. It needs a new graphics card to replace the nVidia 7600 that's in it right now.

So far I've been looking at (and impressed by)  the nVidia 8600GTS range which - being in the £120 / £160 price mark - are in the right price range for me.

But I've suddenly discovered that Radeon haven't been sitting idle recently and that the HD2600PRO range seems to be very good and about half the price.

However I've not been keeping up to date too well with how things are going, so I'm seeking advice here from people who may have. Does anyone know what the better choice would be to bring my system up to DX10 standard? If possible, I'd like it to be able to play games like Bioshock, Crysis, Call of Duty 4 and so on in pretty decent detail and at good speeds. I'm not asking for the whole works and will happily go without FSAA even these days, but my 7600 can't really cut it anymore.

Any thoughts?

[IceFire]

A Radeon HD 2600XT is about at GeForce 8600GT range.  The 8600GTS is somewhat faster than the others.  I've got a BFG GeForce 8600GTS OC2 which runs a relatively high factory overclock.  Its a very decent performer although I sort of wished i got a 8800GTS but I'm really waiting for the next gen to properly match video to CPU speeds (I've got a E6850 which is very nice).

[MetalDestroyer]

Well for those games, you must have at least a Radeon HD 2900XT or a nVidia 8800 GTS/GTX and especially for Crysis. The current Crysis Beta isn't optimize yet and I got a pretty bad framerate at full detail with my 8800 GTX, my 4 GB System Memory and my Core 2 Duo E6600 , all under Vista

However, AMD is preparing the release for their current X2950 Pro or X2900 Pro/GT. So, just wait a little.

[CP5670]

See if you can find an X1950XT. The stocks have started to dry up around here and they are becoming hard to find, but you may be able to get one for a price similar to that of the 8600GTS. It's a far superior card and sometimes close to twice as fast.

The 8600 and 2600 cards are useless for actually running in DX10, and in most games the 8800 and 2900 ones are too. The 8600GT is a good buy at the low end due to its price, but there is nothing worth considering between that and the 8800GTS 320MB. This is kind of a bad time to be buying, actually. Both Nvidia and AMD are coming out with new midrange cards in the next two months.

[DaBrain]

I'd also like to upgrade my PC with better gfx card, but CP5670 is right. The 8600 is a fine card, buttoo slow for games that realy take advantage of DX10.

So far the differnce between the DX9 and DX10 render paths were virtually zero in games. At least not woth spending more money on for them imho.

Also, a good part of my current software won't work under Vista... so unless the games go back to OpenGL. I won't see many Shader 4.0 stuff, because I won't by Vista as it is right now.

I'll wait for at least two months before I buy a new card.

[CP5670]

The entire video card market sucks these days. There are no decent midrange ($200-ish) cards available and the prices on the high end 8800s have barely changed at all since January, so it doesn't make sense to buy them given how long they have been out. I have also wanted a new card for a while now, but it seems that all the earlier rumors of an 8800U replacement coming out in November are probably wrong. There might be some GX2 type card early next year (which is worthless as far as I'm concerned, as it would run on SLI), but that's about it.

[IceFire]

Also might be worth waiting to see what happens in the next two months.  There's a Radeon HD 2900 Pro due out shortly that might be a nice compromise between DX10 performance/price.