What are my best options? Time was I kept an idle eye on developments. These days I only know that the new geforce card is supposed to be amazing ... I can't even remember the name of the cursed thing.
ATI or nVidia, I don't care. Performance, cost, and quietness are the important things.
Frog upgrade philosophy: Get something nice and muscley so I won't have to change it for another three or so years. I want to be playing games at 1280X1024 with settings to max for a long time before having to start inching down. Means I might pay a bit more for a powerful card, but it also means I don't have to buy and go through the hassle of changing it as often.
I don't play FPS any more, but some of the strategy games I like can be intensive; Caesar IV looks like it will be very demanding if you want all the eyecandy on. If M2TW turns out to be something I want, then I want to be playing it with the settings maxed; I'd always had to play RTW on medium and put up with it being stroppy in large battles and city assaults.
I don't want a repeat of what happened with my current card - the lack on on-board RAM held it back long before anything else. So nothing which is going to wobble because of one uneven aspect, or which isn't decently future proofed.
Current specs:
P4 3.0
2GB DDR RAM
Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB, lightly cooked after a power surge a year ago.
A recent motherboard ... about a year old, with PCI express, AGP, yadda yadda.
Budgets ... meh, I recently got offered a promotion at work, so I'll have more money. At worst I'll just have to wait another month before buying. That said, I don't want to buy one only to have to drop to half price the week after. So if that's likely to happen, warn me and I'll wait.
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