Which gfx card is better for visual display on ff11

[gotan25x]

Geforce 4 4200 Ti 64mb or a ATI Radeon 9500 128mb, i was gonna get a Geforce 4 4200 Ti with 128mb but for some reason the stores buy me stopped selling it so its come down to these 2, which one would have better gfx on ff11? :(

[Xenoimpact]

I have a ATI Radeon 9500 Pro 128 mb card. i was thinking of getting the Geforce 4 TI4200 card but decided not to. The graphics would be better with the 128 mb and it has DX 9 compatible. I bought the card over the TI4200 because on tests, the card beat the Geforce 4 in every test. Go with the ATI Radeon 9500 Pro, you'll love it!:)

[lili]

Any NVIDIA card will have a slight advantage due to the partnership between square and nvidia. While both RADEON and Geforce series cards currently have their plus minus sides, the geforce has the extra instructions that FFXI supports for better compatibility, but either way you can't lose.

[gotan25x]

does anyone know wht those plus and minus's r?

[Huck]

I do think that the Geforce4 ti4200 128 MB card would do better than the Radeon 9500.
But if you're choosing between the 64 MB and that, definately take that.

I know the Radeon All-In-Wonder 9700 pro is the "best"... i think that's the one (Xenoimpact) You're thinking of with the tests

[Mua'dib]

I got your answer, I must have seen every screenshot ever posted in this forum :).

Most people here have a Geforce4. The most amazing screenshots I have seen were taken with a ATI Radeon 9700. The 9500 is identical but with less pipelines, which of course don't mean less visual quality just less performance.

So go for the Radeon 9500, you won't regret it. The 9500 performance is mush better than at GF4, and for the same price. Try to get the red sapphire 9500, it can be softmodded to a 9700 and overclocked to a pro :). Many people have done this already, it's so easy!

[Casval]

The Radeon 9500 128mb card will outperform a GeForce 4 TI4200 64mb card for a number of reasons, but here's an outline:

The Radeon 9500/9700 series uses the ATI R300 gpu, the 9500 is somewhat slowed by the fact that it only has 4 out of 8 texture pipelines possible on a R300 chip, but the bottom line is that it uses the same technology as a top of the line Radeon 9700 Pro

The GeForce4 TI4200 uses the NV25 core and is a very high performer (I use one myself) but it is simply older technology compared to a R300, as mentioned, the main difference is in the support for DirectX 9 for the R300 and only DirectX 8.1 for the NV25

the more real-world and noticable difference though, is that the R300 core handles Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering much better than a NV25 core video card, these are very important to the visual quality of any game

when you start to look at relatively high end video cards in this price range, you're basically looking at exactly how high you can crank up the quality settings (thus the title of your post) so the higher levels of AA and AF that are available (and actually playable) on the Radeon 9500 will give you better quality than a GeForce4 TI4200

reviews are somewhat misleading because in benchmark testing that does not involve high quality settings (such as the aforementioned AA and AF) the Geforce4 TI4200 will be faster than a Radeon 9500, this will not be the case in an actual game with high quality settings

in the end, either card will run FFXI without problems, and if cost is an issue, the GeForce4 TI4200 will work just fine, you'd probably be using AA and AF settings of Quincunx and 4x, respectively, on the GeForce4, and 4x and 8x, respectively, on a Radeon 9500

the difference would probably be noticable if you were really looking for it, but otherwise both will produce a very high quality image that should make you very happy

as far as the argument that Square coding ffxi specifically for nVidia cards, this is simply not the case, Square has made their game in accordance to Microsoft's DirectX standards and will be equally playable on an ATI or nVidia card, there is, however a noticable difference in Drivers that each manufacturer supplies

this Driver issue mostly comes into play when upgrading video cards across platforms, whether that may mean using an ATI card in a Linux operating system (generally not a good idea) or upgrading from a ATI video card to a nVidia video card on the same computer without properly uninstalling the old drivers (reformatting your hard drive and reinstalling your operating system would be the best option if upgrading between the two manufacturers)

the modification of a Radeon 9500 described by Mua'dib involves acquiring an early production model Radeon 9500 which was built on a Radeon 9700 printed circuit board, the odds are one in a million of acquiring such a video card in the current market, since people were buying $150 video cards and getting $350 performance, those sold out rather quickly (and were phased out of production by the manufacturers almost as quickly)

finally, as mentioned by Xenoimpact, moving a step up to a Radeon 9500 Pro 128mb (~$180) would produce a decent speed upgrade, because the 9500 Pro has the full 8 texture pipelines that a Radeon 9700 has (the difference between the 9500 Pro and 9700 is basically in the bus width of the memory, a somewhat different story altogether)

that should just about cover it :) this got kind of long :sweat:

[zerofailure]

Well currently the 9700 radeon is the thing to get, but if u wanna go a step above get the Nvidias Geforce FX, but among the horizon the radeon 9800 is coming out in a couple months and that will be the top dawg...

[Faylore]

I'm sure most of you have seen this, from the benchmark guide sticky in the MFAQ section on the site, but here it is again. Not sure how accurate this is, but should give you a little overlay of what things will do what, on normal display for graphics.

--------------------
Video Card: The following chart shows how different video cards perform in FFXI (I think you need a video card with about a 36%). Click here to download the FFXI Benchmark to see if your computer is good enough to play it (you need a score of at least a 1500 to be able to play FFXI).

ATI RADEON 9700/PRO ----------------- 97.64%
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 -------------- 86.22%
NVIDIA Quadro4 Series ---------------- 85.56%
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400 -------------- 84.65%
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 -------------- 80.91%
ATI RADEON 8500/LE ------------------- 72.52%
NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 --------------- 70.74%
NVIDIA GeForce3 ---------------------- 65.62%
Matrox Parhelia ----------------------- 65.46%
ATI Mobility M9 ----------------------- 61.92%
NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 --------------- 61.71%
ATI RADEON 9000 ---------------------- 60.35%
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 460 --------------- 52.64%
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 --------------- 49.83%
NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go --------------- 49.63%
NVIDIA GeForce2 Ultra ---------------- 44.41%
ATI RADEON 7500 --------------------- 44.23%
NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS/Pro/Ti ----------- 40.24%
NVIDIA GeForce4 420 Go --------------- 39.97%
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 420 --------------- 38.45%
NVIDIA Quadro2/Pro ------------------- 36.38%
ATI RADEON DDR ----------------------- 33.63%
NVIDIA GeForce DDR ------------------- 30.36%
ATI RADEON SDR ----------------------- 27.65%
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX/MX 400 ----------- 27.19%
NVIDIA GeForce Quadro ---------------- 23.18%
NVIDIA GeForce SDR ------------------- 22.83%
STMicro KYRO II ---------------------- 20.54%
ATI Mobility RADEON ------------------ 18.04%
NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 Ultra --------------- 17.84%
ATI RADEON VE ----------------------- 17.58%
STMicro KYRO ------------------------- 17.19%
NVIDIA RIVA TNT2/Pro ----------------- 15.45%
SiS 315 ------------------------------ 14.76%
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 100/200 ---------- 14.63%
Intel i830 ---------------------------- 12.84%
Generic VGA -------------------------- 12.60%
Matrox G400 -------------------------- 11.85%
NVIDIA TNT2 m64 ---------------------- 8.95%
ATI RAGE 128 PRO --------------------- 8.93%
NVIDIA Vanta ------------------------- 8.18%
S3 ProSavage ------------------------- 4.31%
----------------------


And there you are.