Heh. The moral of this story (i.e. thread) is "it depends". I am also about to upgrade my video card, and am agonizing (REALLY REALLY AGONIZING!!!) over which card to buy. Right now, I am leaning towards V5, but primarily because most of the games I play/am planning to play are Unreal-engine based, and the GF2 from the benchmarks I have seen (here and on review sites) isn't that much faster than my G400Max in UT. I get between 35~40 fps at 800x600x32 high detail tex/models/volumetric lighting/etc on. Mind you the GF2 utterly destroys my G400Max in pretty much everything else (i.e. Q3). I also upgrade about twice a year (that will probably drop to once a year now that I have a few more expenses) so when/if other features (read: T&L) become widely supported it should be about time for me to get a GF3/V6/Whatever-the-heck. Thanks for the info, though, guys. This has been one of the more friendly/informative threads of GF2 vs V5. Most of those threads I have seen devolve into die-hard NVidia fans vs die-hard 3dfx fans warring. To me, its not about which company is better, its about which product is better suited to me (and those aren't always the same thing). I am the kind of consumer companys HATE!
Oh, just one more thing to throw out, aside from Unreal-engine performance, the other factor weighing against the GF2 with me is that I have heard so many people complain about having HELL trying to get the drivers installed and working (blue screens of death, lock ups, failures to boot, etc). I realize this may not be typical, but it does worry me a bit. For those of you that own GF2s, if you could maybe help me (and others with the same fear) out by telling a little about your installation experience and your system specs (what constitutes a GF2-friendly PC?).
Me:
K7-700
Epox 7KXA (Via kx133) mobo
128 megs PC133 RAM
SBLive Value
Matrox G400Max
Win98se/Win2k dual boot (mostly run 98).
[This message has been edited by The Toastman (edited 06-20-2000).]
[This message has been edited by The Toastman (edited 06-20-2000).]