Video Card Upgrade Suggestions Please

J

JeffCGD

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I'm playing Neverwinter Nights at the moment. As you all can see from my Signature Machine Spec, my current G4 733MHz Quicksilver tower is a little underpowered graphics card wise (it's the only real weak link for this game at the moment, as my CPU has no problems with the AI or anything else), so I'm looking to upgrade the card.
Can anyone suggest which cards I should be looking at? ATI or Nvidia? I can get a 128Mb ATI Radeon 9000 Pro mac Edition for about US$140 online. Any reason I should look at anything else? If so, what? and why? (Please no card manufacturer fan flame wars - I'm looking for solid reasoning to base my decision on).
Any suggestions on online retailers would be appreciated too. I'm having a little trouble finding ones that will ship to New Zealand (where I live - and where aftermarket graphics cards are TWO to THREE times the price of US retail) AND take legit Credit Card payments (why is it SO hard to shop online some places?! - that's rhetorical).
 
you're probably not going to like what I have to say, but here it is from a 'solid reasoning' point of view:
NWN is a relatively old game on the PC side (I think the Gold version was released in June of '02, not sure about the original), and I don't know whether it's a great idea to spend upwards of $150 to make a $50 game look better on your aging G4. I'd take the money to put into a savings fund for a G5. When NWN2 finally comes to a Mac, you can bet it won't run on anything less than a dual G5...which will be old hat by then. In the meantime, I'd just turn down the graphics settings in-game to keep it from affecting your gameplay...and there's plenty of that in NWN. So what if your fireball doesn't have as many particles to view onscreen as the next fella's?
 
The upgrade of a few hundred dollars for a new video card is worth it for me, considering I've only just finished paying off the NZ$8700 that my G4 and 19" monitor cost me 3 years ago (Macs are rather expensive here in New Zealand, thanks to double dipping during importation - first they come through Apple Australia, then through Apple New Zealand, aka Renaissance Computers - and the exchange rates at the time I purchased it). I also won't be getting a new Mac for a good few years yet (Looks sideways at my rusting old car).

Thanks to ElDiabloConCaca, for the snippet of info I didn't know about there being no third party NVidia retail cards.

And as for the 'helpful' fellow who ventured,
"So what if your fireball doesn't have as many particles to view onscreen as the next fella's?"

I WANT to see the pretty fireballs! That's why I want to upgrade my card. If I DIDN'T care about how pretty it looked, I'd just go back to playing Pong.
 
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