Best card to use with old CPU ?

[dak]

Hi,

I would like to know what is the best card to use with a PII 333Mhz with 480 of RAM.
I have a Creative Banshee (3DFX chipset) but Celestia is totally unusable ... :/
My goal is to try to run it on my 333Mhz but I don't know if it's possible even with the best card :)

Thanks.

[jim]

Hi dak,

I think a second-hand Geforce2 (not MX) would be a good choice. You will get all the cool grafic effects (bumpmapping, specular reflection, atmospheric haze and 8K DDS textures) for a low price.

Bye Jens

[dak]

Hi jim,

Thank for your reply, but, will Celestia be usable ? With my actual configuration, it's so slow that
moving through galaxies or Space is something that I must not think about :)

Bye

[selden]

Dak,

Part of the slowness is because your graphics card does not have much memory (I seem to recall that the 3dfx cards could only handle 256x256 textures) and also that many of the OpenGL features are done by software and not by the graphics card. If you get a modern card, then it can use large textures and its hardware will do most of the 3D manipulations. Loading the textures may take a while, but then things will go more quickly.

For what it's worth, I got an Nvidia Ti4200 for my 500 MHz Pentium 3 and it works very well. It really depends on how much money you're willing to spend without upgrading everything.