Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: freespacegundam on February 22, 2006, 03:50:33 pm
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I recently, and finally I might add, obtained my own computer to enjoy all the goodies that FSOpen has to offer. Sadly, to my dismay, my 128MB ATI Radeon 9000 just doesn't cut the mustard with many of the more visually intensive features. The computer has almost a gig of RAM, which helps some, but I experience significant slowdown in two situations: One being nebula missions with active lightning, which irks me to no end since those are some of my favorite missions. Two being if too many ships are on screen at once firing all guns blazing. Strangely enough the card has no issues with FEAR, which I find odd because it seems to be more of a graphics hog.
I beseech any who would grant me the knowledge, where might I obtain a graphics card suitable to give FS2 the love it really needs? I don't need the latests and greatest, but something good enough to do the job and not raid my wallet too badly.
Any help is appreciated.
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What's your price range? Do you need an AGP or PCIE card?
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I'd prefer AGP, but PCIE isn't out of the question. The bad part is I need something in the $70-$100 range, maybe a little higher.
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Your best bet for under $100 and AGP would be a used 9800 pro. You can't get those new anymore, but they are common on ebay.
If you can stretch it by a little, either of these will be pretty good for the money once the rebate is factored in:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814135186
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130220
The Aopen one is a little cheaper while EVGA is a more well known company.
If a PCIE card will work for you, this one is cheaper than either of those and somewhat faster:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814127176
Any of these cards would be at least four times as fast as a 9000.
[edit] fixed the first link
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Turns out I actually misread the box, the graphics card I currenty have is a 9800 Pro. The problem is that its 128 MB, I'm hoping to get at least 256 to improve performance.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130262 Would there be anything wrong with this one? Its just in my price range, maybe a little over with the shipping, but its more what I'm looking for.
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Whaddya mean it's not good enough? I'm running a modified 9800 Pro 128 that's been fitted with an XT BIOS, and I'm able to run just about everything just fine. I've ran through the new Derelict with the New Lucy, and I've experienced minor slowdowns, but nothing like a year ago when I attempted to run Inferno. Most of the time I play, my FPS is rock-solid 120FPS, and my memory usage is well within limits, never hitting below 30 FPS and I never run out of memory, according to the in-game memory usage counter.
What exactly is it doing? Is it just slow, or is it doing something specific? Also, are you running the adveffects VP? If so, you'll probably need something really really powerful in order to play FSO with this VP, as I've seen systems running nVidia 6xxx cards choke using it.
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I'm running with a 9600XT with 128MB, and I can fly most missions without any real slowdowns... granted, I've got a whole gig of RAM, but I used to play with 512MB.
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I'm running with a 9600XT with 128MB, and I can fly most missions without any real slowdowns... granted, I've got a whole gig of RAM, but I used to play with 512MB.
GeForce FX 5200 128, runs fine with every scp feature turned on, and actually runs DooM 3 and Quake 4, HL2 runs excellently. Of course I have a gig of RAM as well.
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Post the rest of the system specs you have. There's ovbiously something here that's insufficient, and it's NOT the videocard....
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Well here's the rough skinny on what's in this beast.
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
Pentium 2.8 Ghz
896 MB DDR RAM.
The strange thing is that it just slows down or skips a little bit during FSOPEN if alot is going on, or if the nebula missions are in progress it begins to skip real bad. I know I should probably have a gig of RAM to help in that department, but I can't see it making that huge a difference. I am planning to upgrade to a gig, but the odd thing is that back with my old computer I had an NVIDIA 256MB graphics card with only 512MB of memory and it handled things just fine. And before anyone says anything I can't trade the two cards, the Radeon won't work properly in the other comp as it needs another power connection which won't reach with the cords inside the old comp unless I get nasty with the cords, and since it isn't my computer I'm a bit wary to do that.
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Why not buy a 3$ power splitter cord from Newegg, or even your local computer shop which will probably give you the extra reach you need? You don't need to go modifying cables to use the external power cable on the card. Trust me, I know exactly what you're talking about and yes, it's a pain in the ass, but you can get a splitter that'll reach.
Yes, more framebuffer on the card will smooth things out, but I honestly think your install may be damaged, or you're using the AdvEffects VP and not knowing it or something. If FEAR runs fine with a 9800 Pro (and Yes, I DO know how that runs as well, same card, same game, runs good) and FSO does not... perhaps it's in software. Maybe you should do a fresh install of FS2, then apply the patch, then run whichever version of FSO you'd like, with the necessary VP's. I've had unexplanable slowdowns, crashes, and the like, and what I've done to fix the problem is just move my mods somewhere else on my drive, uninstall FS2, axe registry entries, reinstall and put my mods back in, and it plays much smoother after that.
Here's one other suggestion. Turn on the Show Statistics and Show Memory Usage in the launcher. Watch your memory usage. If your available memory keeps falling to 0, and it skips like mad, I would say it's something in software, for I've had that exact problem for the longest time untill I switched over to OpenGL mode. When I started using OGL, things were a LOT better, and OGL has come a long way in a year's worth of updates from the FSO crew.
I'm not trying to talk you out of buying a card, well.. maybe I am, but I say don't waste money on AGP if you're planning on upgrading your system. If you're going to upgrade your motherboard, get into PCI-X and THEN go nuts with the videocard you need. There's lots of people with cards just like you that can play FSO just fine. If you're perfectly happy with keeping your system forever, and dont care about upgrading to PCI-X, then I'd say get something BETTER than the LE card. I'd reccomend the 6800OC that BFG makes, even though it's $100 more expensive, it's worth the extra bucks. Either that or wait a little longer till the 7800 cards drop below 250, then they'll definetly be worth the purchase. Some are already down to 300 right now.
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Well the main reason I haven't gone to buy a power splitter is I'm too afraid of messing things up, but if its as easy as you say I may just give it a try.
The problem with a fresh install of FS2 atm is my damaged 3rd cd, which means a lengthy pain in the ass install for me. I have been using the AdvEffects VP, but its never really given me this sort of problem before, which makes me wonder. I'm using the latest FSOPEN build, 3.6.8, and its been good to me so far. Nonetheless, there is wisdom in your words, and a fresh install might do me some good.
I have one last question, does AdvEffects normally cause errors after a while? Lately I've noticed a lot more ctds, but only every second or so mission I play.
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Turns out I actually misread the box, the graphics card I currenty have is a 9800 Pro. The problem is that its 128 MB, I'm hoping to get at least 256 to improve performance.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130262 Would there be anything wrong with this one? Its just in my price range, maybe a little over with the shipping, but its more what I'm looking for.
If you already have a 9800 pro, there is really nothing under $150 that would be a substantial upgrade over it, especially on AGP. The cheapest things worth considering are the $180 6800GS or X800GTO2 or the $250 7800GT, all on PCIE. That 6600LE sucks; it's way overpriced and about half as fast as what you already have.
Are you using D3D mode? That could be causing those sudden framerate drops, especially with the 3D shockwave. Try reinstalling your video card drivers as well. I think a 9800 pro should be more than sufficient for FS2 unless you want to use high resolutions or heavy levels of AA.
Unless FS2 is somehow dramatically different from just about every other game out there, the amount of onboard memory should hardly matter compared to the other specs of the card. I never found the adveffects to be that heavy on hardware. The models VP actually brought down the framerate a lot for me on my old 6800GT, although that was with D3D and OGL handles those a lot better.
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Turns out I actually misread the box, the graphics card I currenty have is a 9800 Pro. The problem is that its 128 MB, I'm hoping to get at least 256 to improve performance.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130262 Would there be anything wrong with this one? Its just in my price range, maybe a little over with the shipping, but its more what I'm looking for.
If you already have a 9800 pro, there is really nothing under $150 that would be a substantial upgrade over it, especially on AGP. The cheapest things worth considering are the $180 6800GS or X800GTO2 or the $250 7800GT, all on PCIE. That 6600LE sucks; it's way overpriced and about half as fast as what you already have.
Are you using D3D mode? That could be causing those sudden framerate drops, especially with the 3D shockwave. Try reinstalling your video card drivers as well. I think a 9800 pro should be more than sufficient for FS2 unless you want to use high resolutions or heavy levels of AA.
Unless FS2 is somehow dramatically different from just about every other game out there, the amount of onboard memory should hardly matter compared to the other specs of the card. I never found the adveffects to be that heavy on hardware. The models VP actually brought down the framerate a lot for me on my old 6800GT, although that was with D3D and OGL handles those a lot better.
This is true. The 9800Pro is still a decent card even with todays latest and greatest games. I know this because I have the one down...the 9700Pro. Its long in the tooth now but its not bad. I was looking about at a replacement card if it fails (I've been having some problems) and there is really nothing at all. Not in that pricerange...and that was my pricerange. The closest you could get is a X1300 from Saphire using an AGP bridge on the card itself. Just recently announced...
AGP is effectively dead mind you..
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A $3 power splitter basically has a male end, which you plug on the existing end of a female 4 pin Molex connector, and it splits it into two females. Usually, you'd use these to split ends to run fans, low power devices, etc, but in this case, it actually extends the length of the plug you're using, so you don't need to use a power splitter. No cutting, no muss, no fuss. It may not be much, but it might give you the extra few inches you need. If you're worried about the other end though, you don't need to plug it in to anything. You could even put a piece of tape around the end to remind yourself to "dont plug this into anything" If you're powering the videocard with that specific rail from the PSU, make sure that you have little or no other devices hooked on it, as to even out the load on your PSU. Here's what I'm talking about.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16812101203
Well, unless you absolutely need the eye-candy, AdvEffects VP is not needed. I personally play without it because it looks good enough with the regular stuff, it's not worth the slowdowns I've seen here and there with it. If you are using it, rename it to something else and try again.
Also, try OpenGL, as suggested by me and CP5670.
BTW, icefire, what are these magical AGP Bridges you mentioned?
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It's a chip they put onto the PCB that converts the PCIe signal to AGP. They had them earlier on, as well, but those converted from AGP to PCIe (see: NV45, a.k.a. the original PCIe variants of the the 6800 series)
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At this point I wouldn't recommend buying any AGP card that's more than about $150 to anyone. You're better off saving up some more and getting a PCIE card and motherboard (there some great cheap ones), given how much better the PCIE prices are at this point. There was one very good deal on AGP recently, the $200 X850XTs that Microcenter was selling last month, but they sold out of those a while ago and won't be getting any new stock. The recently released 7800GS is a pointless card for the price and the AGP 6800GTs go for extremely high prices on ebay, which is in stark contrast to the rapidly falling 7800GT and X1800XT prices on PCIE.
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Heh. Glad I got my AGP 6800GT last summer. Prevents the temptation of upgrading while in college.
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Turns out I actually misread the box, the graphics card I currenty have is a 9800 Pro. The problem is that its 128 MB, I'm hoping to get at least 256 to improve performance.
The amount of RAM on the card makes approximately zero difference. 128MB is adequate for most games these days. It should definitely be enough to run FSOpen; it surely doesn't use that much texture RAM.
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I wouldn't go that far.. I have 2GB of ram and a Radeon 9800 and right now I'm finding I have to tune down my graphics for games like Need For Speed Most Wanted and FEAR to be able to play them at a smooth rate.
Unfortunately I don't have the cash to make the leap to PCIE so I'm stuck with it for the moment.
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Unless you have the 7800 with 512 MB onboard framebuffer, every card is gonna struggle with FEAR. Framebuffer DOES matter, but for FSO in particular, 128 should be plenty. Having more onboard memory Does make a difference for the newest of the new, and Doom 3 if you want to count it. 128mb WAS adequate, that is if you're running Crytek's engine, the Vengeance Engine, Unreal's 2004 engine... but if you want to crank up the details in a more modern engine such as Doom 3, FEAR, or Quake 4, you're going to need more framebuffer to get around the little jerks and skips that you'll get with a 128mb card. The larger the textures are, the more memory you're going to need to store those textures without slowdown and constant paging from hard disk to RAM to framebuffer. This was clearly evident with DX:IW and JohnP's high-res texture packages. The stock textures were way low-res and ran OK when it was released. Putting JohnP's textures in which may have been twice the size and resolution of the stock textures, caused major performance hits, because there just wasnt enough room for the textures on the card. Games today are needing more and more framebuffer in order to keep the quality of graphics high. Expect to see this more and more in the future.
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Does OpenGL have problems with newer versions of FSOPEN? I tried it out last night and it worked fine except that the engines of certain fighters became blocks, as well as the energy bolts from my weapons.
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Your 9800 Pro is more than enough for FSOpen. I have a 9800 pro and I can play FSOpen just fine even with 6xAA and 16xAF forced in the CCC. The thing I wonder is, what speed is your DDR ram. Is it PC2100, PC2700, PC3200, etc? Is it dual channel or single channel?
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I've got a GeForce 5700LE 256MB that runs FS_Open seamlessly (though this is without adv_effects)
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Ugh, now things are just getting ugly. I've been playing through the main FS2 campaign again, and I'm on the mission at the Knossos where the NTF are trying to enter the portal. Everything runs fine and dandy for a while, then suddenly I get an error message and it closes out. I'm running it in D3D8, which was what I normally ran it on, with launcher 5.3, FSOPEN version 3.6.8.
In answer to your question, I believe the RAM is only Single Data Rate, I'll have to check on the speed.
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3.6.8? :wtf: That isn't going to be out for a while. Do you mean the 3.6.8 media VPs?
Try using OGL with the latest 2/20 build in the CVS thread, which seems to work pretty well aside from a few minor issues. ATI cards have to use OGL to get specular mapping anyway.
Does OpenGL have problems with newer versions of FSOPEN? I tried it out last night and it worked fine except that the engines of certain fighters became blocks, as well as the energy bolts from my weapons.
It's actually D3D that has a few problems with newer versions. OGL is generally preferable with these. By "blocks" do you mean the white squares? I think that bug was fixed quite a while ago.
I wouldn't worry about having too little memory on video cards simply because all the cards that can actually use the extra memory come with it, but there are lots of bogus low end cards out there that have a ton of memory (and a very high price) to fool ignorant buyers.
Heh. Glad I got my AGP 6800GT last summer. Prevents the temptation of upgrading while in college.
Actually if you have an A64, you may want to try putting the card on ebay. There are plenty of suckers there who will pay a lot of money for it. If it goes for as much as mine did last month ($320), you would have enough to buy both an EVGA 516 (souped up 7800GT) and an A64 PCIE motherboard to go with it.
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I'm trying to prevent temptation here, CP. Pointing out that stuff doesn't contribute to my goal.
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Ugh, now things are just getting ugly. I've been playing through the main FS2 campaign again, and I'm on the mission at the Knossos where the NTF are trying to enter the portal. Everything runs fine and dandy for a while, then suddenly I get an error message and it closes out. I'm running it in D3D8, which was what I normally ran it on, with launcher 5.3, FSOPEN version 3.6.8.
In answer to your question, I believe the RAM is only Single Data Rate, I'll have to check on the speed.
I would suggest using OpenGL mode. I find it to run much better than D3D.
The single channel ram might be your main culprit as it is creating a bottleneck.
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3.6.8? :wtf: That isn't going to be out for a while. Do you mean the 3.6.8 media VPs?
Try using OGL with the latest 2/20 build in the CVS thread, which seems to work pretty well aside from a few minor issues. ATI cards have to use OGL to get specular mapping anyway.
Does OpenGL have problems with newer versions of FSOPEN? I tried it out last night and it worked fine except that the engines of certain fighters became blocks, as well as the energy bolts from my weapons.
It's actually D3D that has a few problems with newer versions. OGL is generally preferable with these. By "blocks" do you mean the white squares? I think that bug was fixed quite a while ago.
OpenGL causes the white squares for me, D3D seems to have no problem with this new version. I did a fresh install, and that seemed to fix most of the problems, but OpenGL does not like this version for some reason. And actually I am using the 2/20 build, it just comes up as 3.6.8 so I goofed. I am using the media VPs though. I still have some sticking issues, but nothing too serious.
Is the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro supposed to be able to handle OpenGL? That's what I have, but it doesn't work right, at least as far as FSOpen is concerned. This is all making me wonder if I shouldn't just buy more RAM and make it a gig, or replace the RAM I have now with dual channel, that might solve some of the problems.
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The 9800pro is fine in OpenGL for me. I am using the latest (6.2) CCC drivers. I am also using goober's 02/20/06 release with the delta 3.6.8 media vp's.
What resolution are you running when using OpenGL? I use 1024x768 with 6xAA and 16xAF forced in the CCC and all is well. The game runs smooth and I have not noticed any white squares. :confused:
As for upgrading to dual channel RAM, you will need to make sure your MOBO supports it. Since I feel we have covered most bases here, maybe you have a slow HDD? :confused:
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I can't speak for my hard drive, but I'm running it in the same resolution and I get the square problems. I've tried updating the drivers numerous times, its as up to date as it can possibly be.
6xAA and 16xAF forced in the CCC and all is well. The game runs smooth and I have not noticed any white squares.
Do you mean you're running it in 1024X768x16? Forgive my ignorance but I know more about the computer than I do about graphic modes.
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I was referring to 6x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering :)
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To do a "fresh install" of FS2, move everything but
- *_fs2.vp
- *.exe
- data/players/*
- and the fred documentation (data/freddocs?)
to a different directory.
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I was referring to 6x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering :)
I see, I have begun to make said changes now, here goes.
edit: Didn't change a thing, the poor thing stutters even worse now and still has the boxes.
To do a "fresh install" of FS2, move everything but
*_fs2.vp
*.exe
data/players/*
and the fred documentation (data/freddocs?)
to a different directory.
I took the liberty of saving only my mods, special vps, and my missions by moving them to another directory. I then uninstalled and reinstalled the game, but thanks for future reference.
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Go grab Driver Cleaner from Driverheaven and reinstall your Cats. Be sure to follow the instructions included with Driver Cleaner to the letter, and you'll be able to rule out a corrupted display driver installation. Since you're not running a Pentium 2 system, the HDD and RAM speed should NOT be an issue here. Also, are you putting in specific settings in the CCC panel? If you set everything for Application Prefrence, you should be able to get around a lot of the problems. Certain engines absolutely HATE to be forced into a different mode. Battlefield 1942 is a perfect example of this, as if you forced any kind of setting in the CCC, it'd be all garbled and goofy in-game. Set everything regarding both D3D and OGL to defaults, and use the OGL rendering mode in FSO, and when you can, get Driver Cleaner and reinstall those Cats.
Another thing, are you using official cats or omegas? If you can, use official ATI drivers. Omega/Zeropoint drivers absolutely suck IMO. I used to like omegas, but I cannot reccomend them today.
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I wouldn't go that far.. I have 2GB of ram and a Radeon 9800 and right now I'm finding I have to tune down my graphics for games like Need For Speed Most Wanted and FEAR to be able to play them at a smooth rate.
But the graphics texture RAM isn't nearly as important as the rate at which the GPU can process information and the rate at which data can be shuffled around the card. The speed of the RAM and GPU is more important than the quantity of texture RAM.
The 9800 uses DDR1. Plus, it's getting old; it simply does not have the throughput of the current generation of cards. Modern graphics cards have 3 or 4 times the pixel processing speed of the 9800.
It's not the quantity of RAM, it's the speed of the GPU.
As for needing 512MB of texture RAM to play FEAR at highest detail, that's just rubbish. I've got a 256MB GF7800GTX and FEAR happily runs at maxed out settings. I don't think any games can even make use of a full 512MB of graphics RAM anyway.
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Yes, you have the 7800 series Geforce card, OVBIOUSLY it's going to be faster than the 9800 ATI card, more pipes, faster core and memory clock (by far) and such. For older cards that aren't as fast as yours, more framebuffer is needed in order to process the textures properly, otherwise it's constantly paging from system ram through the bus to the card. Newer cards today might, *MIGHT* be able to get away with less memory than older cards, due to how fast it will process whats in RAM, but at the time of release, for Doom 3, you'd need 512mb of ram to run efficiently with the cards that were available at the time, as well as the day FEAR was released. I agree with you that the faster the core processor on the card, the better the performance, but on an older card, which freespacegundam wanted, you'd need a larger framebuffer in order to get better performance on an R360 Core.
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A large framebuffer will not do anything for performance if the GPU is not fast enough to take advantage of it, except at settings where both cards are getting single digit framerates. There are several old articles out there showing this with the 9800 pro 256MB and the 512MB versions of the X800XL and 6800 ultra. As I said, when buying a new card, the last thing you need to worry about is the amount of memory. Just about anything you can buy will come with at least as much as it can use effectively.
FEAR is simply a performance hog and doesn't run that well on anything but the X1900 cards and dual card setups. It runs decently for me at 1600x1200 (no AA and soft shadows off), but in some areas the framerate just drops like a brick for no reason.
Also, 512MB was never needed for D3's ultra quality mode, despite what id said. The 6800GTs at the time had a pretty small performance hit over high quality, although UQ looked almost identical to HQ so it wasn't really worth it.
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when buying a new card, the last thing you need to worry about is the amount of memory. Just about anything you can buy will come with at least as much as it can use effectively.
Exactly.
Also, what's with this incorrect use of the term 'framebuffer'? A very tiny amount of graphics RAM is used for storing rendered frames. Even 1600x1200 128-bit rendering only uses 30MB of memory to store one frame. That memory is mostly used as texture RAM, and AGP and PCI-E are both fast enough to upload textures in realtime[0].
Putting 512MB on an older card would have no effect. Besides the fact that the cores just couldn't handle that amount of RAM, the limiting factor simply was not the memory. Graphics memory is a cache to reduce the amount of data passed across the AGP/PCI-E bus. That bus has not really been much of a bottleneck since the advent of AGP 8x (this may have to do with the presence of 64MB+ being standard since then). Even prior, it wasn't that restrictive since the GPUs of the day were the other limiting factor.
Doesn't matter how you argue it, there is no requirement to have more than 256MB on a current-day graphics card. Maybe in a few months we'll be seeing games that do use that much memory, but not now. Two years ago there was no need for more than 128MB.
Quantity of memory simply isn't the bottleneck.
- The reason for switching from AGP to PCI-E was not upload bandwidth (AGP 8x was never really used to its full potential) but full-duplex capabilities.
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You're right, I meant memory. I was getting annoyed at the framebuffer limitations with supersampling modes while trying to get AA working in FSO and that word somehow was stuck in my head. :p :D
The X1800XT and X1900XT/XTX cards actually do benefit significantly from 512MB in a few games (Q4 and COD2), but those already come with 512MB standard and no other current cards get much of an advantage with the extra memory.
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I need a new card as well. But, if I get on social ssecurity disability I'm going to get a brand new rig.
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For some reason, my instructor for comp. architecture used "framebuffer" whenever referring to video ram in general, when we covered it one week. Maybe I didn't get it or he needs an update on his curriculum. gah. Anywho, since we ARE talking about videocards.. and performance... and we're not trying to one-up each other....
PCI-E Card - Bridge - AGP Slot. Would this be a good combination, if I were to upgrade my videocard? My current board has an AGP slot on it, and I still feel I can get quite a bit of life out of my motherboard and processor before they're in need of some sort of upgrade. I would like to get a PCI-Ex16 card, Bridge it so I can use it in my current system, and upgrade the backbone later. Are these bridges reliable enough to run the card at AGP specs? or do they severely cripple the card's performance so much that I'd be better off sticking with a pure AGP card at the moment? I really have no idea how these bridges work or anything, really havent heard of them till I read something in one of these threads recently.
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The bridges are chips that come on various AGP cards themselves, in order to convert signals from a GPU designed for PCIE into AGP ones. There isn't any performance hit from the bridge alone, but these bridged cards are considered fully AGP and when people refer to AGP cards it includes them.
As for whether you should upgrade or not, it depends on what you have now. If you can get something less than $150 that is a big upgrade then it's worth considering, but every AGP card over $150 has a PCIE equivalent that's cheaper by at least $70, enough to buy a decent PCIE motherboard.
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Ohh, how interesting... cause I was thinking it was sorta like the "slocket" adaptor, where you can stick a socketed processor onto an adaptor card and put it into a slotted processor motherboard. After reading an Anandtech article comparing the 9800 Pro (which is what I have) and the 6600GT AGP, newer games see performance gains of 20-30 % in certain situations, and the core/mem clock is nearly the same as the PCI-e variant. Although it looks tempting, I'm thinking I'm just going to be better off doing the right thing and buying a pure PCI-E videocard and pure PCI-E motherboard. I really shouldn't cut corners, which I never really have when I build my own personal systems, besides, prices are falling on PCI-E cards, while AGP cards are still a bit more expensive.