In need of a new graphics card....

[caravel]

How did the Radeon 9800SE work out for you?

It wasn't a 9800SE, it was a 9800 non-pro. The Non Pro is in fact a pro with a lower core/memory clock. It has all 8 pipelines enabled. The 9800SE is a crippled version with only 4 pipelines.

I have a AMD 3000+ with 1Gb of RAM and a 9600 Visiontek Xtasy w/256Mb RAM AGP, which needs an upgraded video card. I can play Civ IV and MTW fine, but M2TW runs horribly.

Is that the Xtasy 9600 or the xtasy 9600XT? I don't think a 9600Pro card with 256MB was released by Visiontek, only a 128MB version?

With regard to getting MTW and RTW/M2TW running well on the same PC:

Caravel, I've found that for MTW and older Radeon cards (anything pre X1xxx series), that the Omega 2.6.53 drivers (based on Catalyst 5.7) are the most compatible. And, as you've found, don't enable AA - for some reason the game engine doesn't like it. These have worked great with soft-modded 9500 non-Pros, 9700/9800 cards, x800GTO2/x800XL/x850XT cards in my machines.

You can find the drivers in the archive here: http://www.omegadrivers.net/archive.php

Good luck!

P.S. Strongly recommend the use of Driver Cleaner Pro v1.5 (the free version) when changing drivers. It's available here: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/U...essional.shtml
http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=745
http://www.overclock.net/downloads/1...pro-1-5-a.html

So it is likely you'll be using older drivers for MTW.

I was going to bypass the 6000 series to go right to a 7000 (7600 or better) or a Radeon x1650. DO you think these will be too much card to take advantage of the AMD 3000+ processor. Would a GeForce 6000/ATI x800 series be enough to improve gameplay? Was the 9800SE enough of an improvement over the 9600?

What processor do you have? Is that an Athlon XP 3000+ or any later Athlon64 series CPU?

The 9800SE, as I've said above, only runs on 4 pipelines and is a low end budget card. It's likely to perform worse than the 9600.