Some info about current and recent Video Cards for the layman...
I make PCs as a hobby, for home, friends and for work (though I am not employed as a PC builder). I am NOT a proffessional developer/manufacturer by any means, and any error or ommission in these comments is lamentable but possible and not intentional. I have been doing it for years and have had to stay on top of many of the dizzying changes in technology. I have had to read the white papers at Dell, M$, NVidia, ATI, AMD, Intel, and elsewhere. So you don't have to (unless you like that sort of thing-not that there's anything wrong with that!), here are a few basic ways to understand what you have, want, or need in video cards... 
(A summary at the end is provided as an opinion-laden shorthand if you are not interested in the details listed here ad infinitum).
As another poster intelligently specified, I am an adherent of one of the two dominant video card producers. This is important to know about yourself if it is true since it means you 1) may have a bias severe or slight, 2) probably know more about one maker than another. I know more about and concentrate on NVidia cards, and for specific reasons, but will give some info on ATI cards as well. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable about ATI cards will post a sensible comment with greater detail on ATI chip products.
There are "generations" that can be more or less defined as "stages" in the battle for supremacy or competitiveness between NVidia and ATI. I will not try to trace the lineage of ATI cards or individual stages of where the frontline was in each of these stages between the two makers. Which generation you have or are looking to buy will give you a good indicator of what you can expect its functionality will be for M2TW. Convenienetly recent Nvidia card generations can be more or less defined by the first number in their designation or the number after the "GeForce" name. Ergo, 4's , 400's 4000's etc. are pretty much 4th generation, 5's 5000's (many with the "FX" designation in front of them) are 5th generation, 6000's are the last generation, and 7000's are the current generation (at least for a bit longer!).
If you have a 6th or 7th generation NVidia card, you probably have no worries unless it is a budget card (or in some cases a "LE" or low energy card) which may have some limited support issues for the cooler textures and shaders, limited ram or energy issues. Although Rome TW can run great with most eye candy turned on even with an "FX" or 5th gen. if you have no other bottlenecks, (5500 OC or better is reccommended), it is not clear this will be sufficient for M2TW. It does provide a cutoff of sorts, insofar as it seems to me that it is unlikely demands will be less than they were for RTW. So, less than a mid-level 5th gen definitely calls for an upgrade, and BTW, the current price for video cards will vary by the "interface type" as well as what generation and bells and whistles they have so read below... this is important also for those thinking of upgrading since you may have to change you mobo (motherboard) and pretty much everything else depending on how high you reach and what your budget is may be very important.
The loveable, friendly brown AGP 8X "state of the art" interface (the way in which your vid card fits into your mobo) is pretty much history. Mobos with AGP graphic slots and the vid cards that go into them are now going the way of the Dodo, and while temporarily cheaper, will eventually become scarce and provide the twin advantages of being both "more expensive" and "less fulfilling"!
The reason they are going away, is because a new standard called "PCI-Express" (or PCI-E) is faster and cheaper to scale up. This means vid cards can reach new heights, and be less of a bottleneck because of the way in which this new interface type widens the signal (like bandwidth does for your internet connection as a bad example...). Unfortunately it also means most new cards and eventually all new cards, will fit into these PCI-E slots and NOT into your AGP slots (they're completely incompatible... big surprise there from the office of planned obsolesence!). This is equally true of ATI and NVidia cards.
There are a number of different speeds of these PCI-E slots (not to be confused with regular PCI slots... where you put other cards like USB or modem cards...) 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x, and 16x.... There are also now boards with two 8x or 16x slots so you can run "crossfire" (ATI) or "SLI" (NVidia) video card setups which are two cards operating simultaniously. If that isn't enough craziness, NVidia has a card called the 7950GTX which is actually two "GPU's" or video chips on one card, and you can have two of THOSE things running although there are only a handful of programs that can take any kind of real advantage from all this incredible increase in video signal width and increased computing power on the vid cards. As with dual core CPUs, extra cards and/gpu's help in some tasks and programs just like a second person helps when you are trying to move your couch, but you may not need them (or indeed want them around at all) when you are doing your undies at the laundry...
Memory on video cards comes in DDR, DDR2 and DDR3 forms. DDR3 is theoretically faster, but certainly less than 256megs (of whatever kind you have) will restrict the rendering rate and cause any other advantages your card has to be diminished because of the "bottleneck" caused by the card waiting around while the dimwitted ram gets the picture ready. While this can be radically different for different programs and different systems it is highly effected by whether the software relies more on the CPU (your computer's brain- like AMD or Intel) or the GPU (your video cards vid chip-like ATI or NVidia) to handle the load of rendering etc, and what the limits are of and how you set your BIOS (that blue screen you can get to by madly pressing the F1 or Delete key as your 'puter starts up) to handle the tasks or limits or overclocking on your individual components.
Cards in the upper price ranges have 512 megs of gddram, and depending on the system and the task it definitely has an impact. I have, with difficulty, found the edge of where a single 7900GTX OC w 512 megs can function with no visible strain, at least in some programs. I don't have a large enough monitor to find the edge for two of them working in tandem for any program that I possess.
On the other hand, with prices ranging from $400 to $500 @, well, you get what you pay for...
The better your CPU, and the greater your Ram speed and quantity, in general, the better your video performance... although by how much will vary based on your settings and the way a particular software is engineered. Also to be considered is your "front side bus" (now described in terms of hyper transport speeds and soon to be based on the same physical concept that has given us the PCI-E). Not so well known is the makeup of your Ram sticks... Your system in general will run better with more ram than less, however, fewer "big" sticks, are better than more "small" sticks. Obviously the most recent drivers for your CPU, "chipset" (the chips on your mobo other than your CPU), vid card and oddly, your sound card are also adviseable.
ATI cards hands down win anti-aliasing contests in most cases that are fair fights with NVidia cards (anti-aliasing being loosely defined as the way in which your video card can and will "round sharp edges" and make a computerized picture look the way we see reality with our eyes). On the other hand, many of these differences can rarely be seen without stop-motion still comparison between frames from the different systems- the same can be said of the texturing and or shading advantages that may be gotten from NVidia cards in certain conditions and programs. In all cases I am also talking about the maximum resolutions that most people will never need or use unless they have monitors in excess of 24 inch-viewable.
I like the NVidia driver architecture better and a few other things that are strictly opinion and based on personal experience... For me, in general, NVidia cards are smaller and less hot and more reliable IN MY OPINION. Your mileage may vary and has to do with conditions, uses and systems and a number of other things... Buy an upper-end product from either maker and you will probably be quite satiesfied if it represents a significant step up from where you are.
Keep in mind that programs can be more CPU or more GPU (vid card) -intensive. If you are buying a new system, keep this in mind... and you might be buying a new system if you want an upper end card that uses the new technology based on PCI-E. As time progresses, PCI-E cards may NOT be the more expensive, so check to make sure you are buying the right kind of card! (PCI-E is NOT the same as regular PCI! Read above).
A 6th or 7th generation NVidia Card is adviseable (6000's or 7000's series). GTs, are usually faster than standard, GTXs faster still, and OCs (meaning overclocked) are faster than the stock setting of whatever gpu they are based on... , and maybe worth the price if they are waranteed by a good manufacturer like BFG or XFX and the like who specialize in these types of products. It is unknown whether an FX series (the 5000's series) will be adequate to run M2TW with anything like joy, so if you own one, or the ATI equivalent, you may need to start taking evasive action.
Any one of the following cards should easily handle M2TW at high or highest on most settings...
Fastest in the 6000's series: 6800gt... unless there is an OC version of the 6800gt. Second best 6600gtocx or similar 6600gt.
Fastest in the 7000's series: 7900gtx OC, although the 7800gtx 512 in some versions is a tough second, and there is a lot of talk about the straight 7950gt but I have no personal experience with it.
The 7950 gx2 (or the dual gpu vid card) is a one of a kind unit and is the only thing I have seen that is as large or larger physically than the 7900gtx (which is itself absolutely the hugest thing I have ever seen standing upright on my mobos...). One of these alone would probably laugh at the demands placed on it by most monitors playing M2TW.
Current price check online today shows the follwing price range:6600s can be had for as little as $100 us in the PCI E version, less in the AGP versions. 6800s are in the $130 US range. 7800s are around $2 to 300 US, with 7900s in the $400 to $500 US range. GX2's are around $600 a piece. Keep in mind almost any of these except the 6600s will probably also call for a PCI E capable board. Sorry guys, I wish they were less, trust me, they are way less than when I had to buy a bunch of them a couple of months ago. Wait another month or two and they will come down again. There are new generations coming out soon!
Al Jabberwock
Re: The "Would my PC be able to run M2TW?" thread (all such queries here pls)
Originally Posted by The Spartan
Re: The "Would my PC be able to run M2TW?" thread (all such queries here pls)
or Lucky Year
. Wait!!!
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