Updated 20060523

To clear up confusion, here are recommended video cards for Nexuiz:
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 series - awesome
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 series - awesome
NVIDIA GeForce 7600 series - awesome
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 series - awesome
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 series - good
NVIDIA GeForce 5950 series - decent
NVIDIA GeForce 5900 series - decent
NVIDIA GeForce 5800 series - decent
NVIDIA Quadro FX 1400 series - decent
ATI Radeon X1800 series - awesome
ATI Radeon X1600 series - good
ATI Radeon X850 series - good
ATI Radeon X800 series - good
ATI Radeon X700 series - decent
ATI Radeon X600 series - decent
ATI Radeon 9800 series - decent
ATI Radeon 9700 series - decent
NVIDIA GeForce Ti4200-4800 series - ok (lacks OpenGL 2.0 shaders)
ATI Radeon 8500 series - ok (lacks OpenGL 2.0 shaders)

Any other cards are probably not well suited to Nexuiz and should not be purchased with Nexuiz in mind.

Warnings about some cards that are especially bad: (DO NOT BUY THESE CARDS)
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 - slow
NVIDIA Quadro FX 540 - slow
NVIDIA GeForce 6200 - slow
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 LE - slow
ATI Radeon X300 series - slow (especially X300 SE)
ATI Radeon 9600 SE - slow
ATI Radeon 9100/9200 - slow
Mac Mini - extraordinarily slow
Intel Integrated Graphics Processor (IGP, mostly found in notebooks) - very slow (You will usually need to turn off particles)
Onboard desktop graphics in general - slow
NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX series - slow
NVIDIA GeForce 2 MX series - slow
ATI Radeon 7000 series - slow
Matrox Parhelia - assumed to be slow (untested)

Tips on making Nexuiz playable on slow cards:
1. First turn off all lighting effects in the menu, this is often enough to make the game playable on any card (including the ones listed above as 'slow').
2. For even slower cards, turn down particle quality (I do not advise turning off particles entirely as doing so can make the game more confusing to play).
3. As a last resort (on for example a Mac Mini), use r_showsurfaces 1 (available in Nexuiz 1.6 beta engines at the time of this writing), which is enough to make the game playable on pretty much anything, if a bit visually confusing.

I do not have solid information on the performance of other card brands (such as XGI, S3, 3DLabs, etc) and sadly some of these companies have recently been bought out or shut down, so I can not recommend them for support reasons, these vendors often do not support OpenGL 2.0 shaders either (with the exception of 3DLabs).

Now a couple operating-system-specific notes:
Linux users should avoid ATI cards entirely, do not expect good performance (even from an X1800) in Linux, the ATI FireGL CAD-oriented drivers for Linux (there are no Catalyst drivers for Linux) have very bad performance, just like their Windows counterparts.

My sources tell me that Mac users should prefer ATI over NVIDIA because Apple wrote the Mac ATI drivers, however also be aware that OpenGL 2.0 shaders on Mac are suffering from Apple driver bugs (affecting both ATI and NVIDIA cards), so OpenGL 2.0 shaders may need to be turned off.

Thank you LordHavoc, This information is deffently worth having

What is worse of extremely and extraordinarily slow?

tChr wrote:What is worse of extremely and extraordinarily slow?

The latter

New record.. the reply was less tha 50 seconds after the questin

Maybe also mention that for lunix use, Nvidea is to preffer over ATI

AND, on sloweer systems, prefer linux more then Windows. I got sometimes 20-30 + more FPS with the SDL version on linux then under windows.

Don't wanna be bigmouth but may I allow myself to say

the Nvidia FX5200 is not that bad as mentioned. It's the ideal card for those who have weaker/older rigs. I play on it in my lunch breaks at work and it's running not worse than my colleagues ATI X300 PCIe (and still it's fun playing with both of them even on higher resolutions).

The Nvidia Quadro Cards (all of them!!!) are no DirectX Cards at all. They are built for CAD and DTP and are completely different architecture than the Geforce ones. ATI's counterpiece is called "FireGL". Both have an extremely poor game performance.

Another thing is it looks quite funny the Nvidia GF5600 is listed as slow under "don't buy!" while the GF Ti 4200 is considered decent.

OnBoard VGAs should be listet under "You won't manage running Nexuiz".

Last but not least it should be mentioned that Nvidia users are currently better supported when running under Linux.

[LDB]C.Brutail wrote:AND, on sloweer systems, prefer linux more then Windows. I got sometimes 20-30 + more FPS with the SDL version on linux then under windows.

tsass CB! off topic !!!! This is about hardware!

I agree that the FX5600 should be further up. Nexuiz runs on my brothers one perfectly fine once realtime lights and GLSL are disabled. You can expect that for most cards of that age. I'd put it under 'playable but not fully featured', as I would with the FX5700 which isn't currently listed.

tChr wrote:Maybe also mention that for lunix use, Nvidea is to preffer over ATI

Indeed. With my 128MB ATI Radeon X300 Mobility, I get 30-60 fps in Windows with the Catalyst drivers, and in Linux with fglrx, I get 2spf-20fps and my mouse lags in the menu.
This shows the effort ATI puts into their Windows drivers as compared to their Linux drivers.

Ed wrote:I agree that the FX5600 should be further up. Nexuiz runs on my brothers one perfectly fine once realtime lights and GLSL are disabled. You can expect that for most cards of that age. I'd put it under 'playable but not fully featured', as I would with the FX5700 which isn't currently listed.

I've removed the 5600 from the bad list, but I can not recommend any card that needs realtime lights turned off, they are an intended feature!

Urmel aus dem Eis wrote:the Nvidia FX5200 is not that bad as mentioned. It's the ideal card for those who have weaker/older rigs. I play on it in my lunch breaks at work and it's running not worse than my colleagues ATI X300 PCIe (and still it's fun playing with both of them even on higher resolutions).

The 5200 is so slow that Nexuiz is barely playable with particles, let alone dlights, it is one of the worst cards I've seen in years.

Urmel aus dem Eis wrote:The Nvidia Quadro Cards (all of them!!!) are no DirectX Cards at all. They are built for CAD and DTP and are completely different architecture than the Geforce ones. ATI's counterpiece is called "FireGL". Both have an extremely poor game performance.

Ever notice that Nexuiz uses OpenGL not DirectX? This card list is aimed at OpenGL performance, not DirectX performance, I am judging the Quadros by their OpenGL performance, so what does DirectX have to do with this?

They are perfectly adequate cards for playing games, and if you did enough research you would notice that the Quadro chip codenames are identical to the consumer chips, they have only some manufacturing differences in the chips, board differences (different kind of framebuffer memory), and driver differences, they are 99% the same chips as consumer cards, and perform similarly other than driver differences favoring different application calls.

The driver differences on the Quadro cards affect hardware T&L and related features, NOT fragment shaders performance, which is the main bottleneck for Nexuiz rendering performance (especially at higher resolutions, where the pixel count goes up tremendously but polycount does not change at all).

So Quadro cards work fine for Nexuiz, if they have enough fillrate to be useful.

Whether they are worthwhile purchases for Nexuiz is another matter entirely - multi-thousand-dollar cards for playing a free game? you decide.

Urmel aus dem Eis wrote:Another thing is it looks quite funny the Nvidia GF5600 is listed as slow under "don't buy!" while the GF Ti 4200 is considered decent.

The Ti4200 has more consistent performance than the GFFX5600, it is true that the GFFX5600 is often comparable to the GFTi4200 when GLSL is turned off, but people expect a GFFX card to do GLSL shaders, so in their relevant domain of graphics features, the GFFX5600 ranks worse than the GFTI4200 due to very poor GLSL performance.

The entire GFFX line has very inconsistent performance in Nexuiz, due to their poorly designed shader architecture. (Which I am told is NOT NVIDIA's fault, Microsoft was apparently withholding DirectX9 specs from them during development of the GFFX, because of the ongoing litigation over whether or not NVIDIA was obligated to produce at-their-own-cost replacement chips for the first batch of XBox chipsets whose firmware encryption key was deciphered... So NVIDIA had to guess what feature set would be most used in DX9 without being able to read about it... they ended up with subpar DX9 pixel shader performance as a result)

Urmel aus dem Eis wrote:OnBoard VGAs should be listet under "You won't manage running Nexuiz".

I'd tend to agree on this, unfortunately there are a lot of these things in the wild and their owners are quite sad when they can't play Nexuiz, so I keep trying to find ways to make these things playable.

Urmel aus dem Eis wrote:Last but not least it should be mentioned that Nvidia users are currently better supported when running under Linux.

I really do wish ATI would put some real effort into their Linux drivers, but hey I'm still wondering when they'll make less buggy Windows drivers!

Urmel aus dem Eis wrote:

[LDB]C.Brutail wrote:AND, on sloweer systems, prefer linux more then Windows. I got sometimes 20-30 + more FPS with the SDL version on linux then under windows.

tsass CB! off topic !!!! This is about hardware!

Could make another thread for operating system discussion and compiler optimizations, but it may devolve into flame wars.

LordHavoc wrote:ATI Radeon 9100/9200 - extraordinarily slow

My Radeon 9100 runs fine on GNU/Linux with the free drivers and without lighting effects. The only graphics cards with free drivers are the Radeon 8500 series (R200), which is 8500-9250.

Why haven't you open this thread 3 days ago? At wednesday i ordered a new video card and the only reason i did that, is nexuiz. Today my new videocard arrived and is just running in my pc. And now it seems that my card is the worst one to play nexuiz. It's a GeForce FX 5200.

The 5200 is so slow that Nexuiz is barely playable with particles, let alone dlights, it is one of the worst cards I've seen in years.

But the card is a little better than my old GeForce 2 MX

The performance/price is decent on the 5200 so if that was the price range you had in mind, you did as good as you could

Edit: oh and yeah! I just read that the 7600gt and gs is becoming available as AGP this summer!

Opferlamm: It seems to me You're dissapointed about the reccomendation I gave You. But You should be aware that Your CPU wasn't considered powerful even Years ago.

Buying a Nvidia 7600 or 7800 AGP You'd have to pay 7 to 10 times more than You did now, and Your PSU would be likely too weak for those boards.

Even if not Your rig would face a problem like having to eat a big slice of meat with a mouth as big as a nostril an two knitting needles to get it into it.

For Your system even the FX5200 is like a hammer, and with some skilled tweaking You're gonna tickle out a far better performance than before.

After all it's unrealistic to transform a slightly weak system into a high end gamer rig by changing the VGA. All others who are investing thousands of Euros/Dollars would be big dumbasses if that would be possible.

i don't blame you It's just that the driver don't work and i haven't played nexuiz tonight

The prize of the video card is ok and you are right with that a better card will need a new pc and won't fit in my old one.

It is just funny, that's why i posted. I'm old enough to know who blame, when it's my own decission to buy this card

LordHavoc wrote:The 5200 is so slow that Nexuiz is barely playable with particles, let alone dlights, it is one of the worst cards I've seen in years.

I don't know wich model in detail You tested, I can't reproduce Your statement. Never mind.

LordHavoc wrote:Ever notice that Nexuiz uses OpenGL not DirectX? This card list is aimed at OpenGL performance, not DirectX performance, I am judging the Quadros by their OpenGL performance, so what does DirectX have to do with this?

Yes I noticed. Not difficult to recognize that. I'm afraid I can give You no solid answer to that. Usually OpenGL is a hardware standard, and You can craziliy increase Your 3D performance on applications like AUTOCAD by using even the cheapest openGL GPUs, while they provide extremely poor performance on openGL based games. I'm working for a CAD Software developing company. We never developed any PC games, so I really don't know where the difference is.

LordHavoc wrote:I really do wish ATI would put some real effort into their Linux drivers, but hey I'm still wondering when they'll make less buggy Windows drivers!

Hehe, disliking ATI chips anyway I don't have any experiences with their driver stuff, I just see low signal quality (somehow "washy") on the screen and that's enough for me to still avoid buying them

Good post, simular one for the new crap
Ghost recon game aswell on UBIsoft's forum :-
http://forums.ubi.com/groupee/forums/a/ ... 6651020414

Nvidia FX , MX and GS are low budget designed cards ,
were GT, ULTRA or PRO is usally better

Quadro and a lot of the Matrox cards are allerated CAD opengl cards
NOT for any gaming .

I can run Nexuiz fine on one of my PC's with a GF4 mx 440 se ,
I just turn off some bling effects and run 800x600 16 bit , the other system as an ATI 9500 pro card i scored for free ...

got 2 pcs with nvidia
1 X MX 440
1 X 6100 (onboard, shared memory)

both run good (30-70 FPS)enough on 800x600, particles on(1), everything else off

i run a 5200 on Linux - ok most options in Nexuiz are turned low or off, but its playable, getting worse when theres more players on, or its certain maps. like the current 14.


cpu is athlon 2400. think that would then be the limiting factor if i upgraded the card.

kern wrote:i run a 5200 on Linux - ok most options in Nexuiz are turned low or off, but its playable, getting worse when theres more players on, or its certain maps. like the current 14.


cpu is athlon 2400. think that would then be the limiting factor if i upgraded the card.

Based on this and other input about GFFX5200 performance in Nexuiz I have increased its rating to 'slow', driver optimizations since I last used a 5200 have improved performance rather significantly, along with some engine optimizations, so it is now a playable card (it was not originally). I still can not advocate buying one as it is too slow to use dynamic lights.

You are correct that the 2400 would be a limiting factor with a faster card, but not a significant one, especially at high resolutions, for instance my current GF6800 ULTRA AGP was originally used with an Athlon XP 2100+, which ran Nexuiz quite admirably, performance at low resolutions was subpar but very playable, it was about 5x faster than the GFFX5200 at 640x480 with all options off, and about 20x faster at 640x480 with all options on (GF6 architecture is immensely better at lighting and shadowing), when I upgraded to Athlon 64 3200+ it got faster at 640x480, but at high resolutions (1280x960, 1600x1200) it remained roughly the same as before.

I can't advocate buying AGP cards these days though, so your upgrade options may be limited, assuming you can afford an upgrade.

Good to hear it's playable

thanks LH for the limiting factor feedback.
id considered upgrading GFX but yes the reason im not upgrading,
this mobo is stuck with VGA. will wait for an upgrade on the entire front.
seems silly to upgrade the card now, to find it being the restricting factor again later.

not that im about to spend huge Fatal1ty amounts for the privilege of having a much more graphical killing zone

Charliebrownau wrote:Quadro and a lot of the Matrox cards are allerated CAD opengl cards
NOT for any gaming .

Yet still, the Quadro FX 1400 is enough for playing Nexuiz. It is nowhere near the best, but it allows realtime dynamic lights (IMPORTANT), deluxemapping and offset mapping at 1280x1024 on a reasonable framerate.

Quadro FX 450 is more in the "barely enough" range: realtime dynamic lights yes, everything else no.

You wouldn't buy these cards for playing games, they aren't made for that and are too expensive compared to their - higher clocked - consumer counterparts. But if you have a system with a Quadro FX 1400, you can play Nexuiz quite well on it.

It would be very nice, if people who uses a FX 5200 under XP will post, which driver they use. Please urmel, tell it to me

And maybe anyone got any tweaking hints for me. That would be great.

AA/AF off and vsync off have i allready done.

Urmel uses a 6600 so Im not sure he can help yoo (iirc)

LordHavoc wrote:NVIDIA GeForce 6200 - slow

Owners of older 6200 cards (if there are any on this forum ):
My Nvidia 6200 was VERY slow with Nexuiz without overclocking. With RTlights on, most maps were either unplayable or had really crappy framerates. After overclocking my card by A LOT, Nexuiz ran pretty well. I didn't killer framerates but I got decent ones (30-40 fps on most maps), and there were only 2 or 3 maps that needed to have RTLights turned off to play. My overclocked 6200 even got a higher score on the Nexuiz benchmark (using my own demo) than my friend's stock 6600. Now I hear that the new 6200's are a lot harder to overclock, so I wouldn't recommend buying a 6200 for Nexuiz anymore. But, if you have one of the older ones (especially the ones that can have extra pipelines unlocked), overclocking is a very good option to make the performance better for Nexuiz. My 6200 also had an 128-bit memory interface and 128 megabytes of memory, making it significantly faster than 6200's with a 64-bit memory interface and 64 megabytes of memory.

I now have a 6800, but I was happy with my (overclocked) 6200 and how it worked with Nexuiz.

Another thing that should be on the "slow" list, though, is the 6600LE, which is significantly slower than the 6600 and a lot slower than the 6600GT. It's essentially a 6200 that's been overclocked a little. (Yes, my overclocked 6200 is signficantly faster than the 6600LE).

tChr wrote:Urmel uses a 6600 so Im not sure he can help yoo (iirc)

Erm, I still do use a FX5200 when I play on my Gurlfriend's machine (AMD 1900+, WIN XP, sucking 256MB RAM!!!). I run it in windowed mode with 900 x 675 resolution and hardly any effects. But it's running at quite decent framerates.

A few weeks ago I had the FX5200 also running in my company rig (P4 2,6GHz/ 512mb RAM) with 1152x864 resolution.

There always was an issue with the network connection, never with the VGA. And I ruled plenty minstagib matches. I just replaced it cause I caught up a free Radeon 9800 Pro, for that I have to say I don't fight better since then


@ Opferlamm: I'm always using the recently at the nvidia.com site offered drivers.

Hi guys!

In the next days I want to buy a new VGA.
I could get a 6600GT with 128 MB and DDR3 for 130,- EUR or a 6800XT with 128 MB for 150,- EUR. The 6800 XT does not have DDR3, but my hardware-dealer says, that it is definitly the more powerful card.
Is he right? I would think, that the 6600GT is faster because of the DDR3.

Any advices?

Thx

I dunno how both cards perfom in benchmarks/games, but after having a look at the stats i would say: save the 20 bucks and get the 6600GT

@KadaverJack:
I forgot to mention, that it should be an AGP-card. But looking at the stats, it makes no big difference.

It would be helpful, if someone could say something about performance of these cards in games.