Is the Upgrade Worth It?

I currently own a AMD 3000+ with 1Gb RAM and a Visiontek Xtasy 9600 256Mb graphics card. Civilization IV and Dark Crusade handle great on that configuration. Railroads also handles fairly well (until the memory leak rears it's head late in the game). I have noticed issues with Age of Empires III (which surprised me as the requirements are not high on that game) but I believe they may be caused by the older Catalyst drivers I am running. I upgraded the drivers but I was not entirely happy with ther results so I backed them out (I have no other issues with the other games I am playing).

I would like to try Medieval 2 Total War and Company of Heroes but I'm not sure I have enough with my current configuration to play them. I am not against an upgrade of the graphics card, but with an AGP bus, I don't want to go crazy on upgrading my card when I will probably have to replace the motherboard in a year or so with a PCI-Express board. $100 is the limit to what I want to spend to upgrade.

Does anyone have a similar configuration and does it handle CoH and M2TW OK? If not, what would be a good card to upgrade to for $100?

Any thoughts are most appreciated...

Here is the problem, If you going to upgrade your video go PCS express or dont waste your money.

Try playing on your system, if you have issue then save up and get a PCI Xpress board and a New Vcard. Otherwise you are throwing money away.

Hope this helps?

Lt1956

well the best video card for under a hundred dollars would be the Geforce 6600 GT its a ok card and it plays m2tw pretty well on low but for company of heroes im not sher how it will run. You could also go to this site and check the vga charts too see how ceratin cards perform on different games theres also a few articles on what video cards are the best for the money.:smiley:

oh sorry forgot to post the link

http://www.tomshardware.com/

Have you tried the demos? I know they aren't much of a substitute for the real games, but they'll show you what performance you could expect from the games. Of course, you've got to be logical about these things:
for example I've got a 3 year old laptop, runs M2TW demo on low graphics with some lag, but the 11GB installation was just too much for a game which would probably not be playable on medium settings.

@the op - saving up for a pci express board is really the way to go - agp is severely outdated now and investing in it isn't a smart idea