I currently have a Radeon x300 gfx card which is pretty awful. I'm looking for a new card for around £50. Could you recommend one to me as the only one i know is the nVidia Geforce 6600 gt. thanks

i think the 6600GT is probably your best bet, a nice 256 MB pci-express one would set you back £50-£60

Im not sure of the exact difference between the 6600GT and the 6800GT but im running the 6800 version with a 3500+ amd chip and 1Ghz ram and get between 40 & 100 fps depending on traffic at 1680x1050 with AA & AF on full, hope that helps gauge what performance you should expect

actually just though ive OC'd the gfx card but shouldnt make too much difference

Quote from hardcoreobscure :

Im not sure of the exact difference between the 6600GT and the 6800GT but im running the 6800 version with a 3500+ amd chip and 1Ghz ram and get between 40 & 100 fps depending on traffic at 1680x1050 with AA & AF on full, hope that helps gauge what performance you should expect

actually just though ive OC'd the gfx card but shouldnt make too much difference

alot of difference - the 6800GT is alot quicker than a 6600GT, in fact it's only a little slower than 2 6600GT's in SLi!

How do i change AA and AF levels?

Quote from JSturdy :

How do i change AA and AF levels?

to quote myself from another thread...

Quote from Jakg :

right then, here is a guide for the 90-series drivers (the latest) when using the new control panel (which is the default anyway), right hand click on the desktop>nVidia Control Panel>3D Settings, Click "Advanced View" at the top>Manage 3D settings>Program Settings, then click "Add" and find where LFS.exe is then set "Antisotropic filtering" to 16x (yes, overkill, but when you have a pc quick enough why not), and then "Antialiasing Setting" to 8xS (NOT anything higher, as they have SLi at the start because it disables SLi performence for the sake of the image quality, which is really only useful for things like the skin viewer)

Those are the basics, and as you set it up just for LFS these settings are only done when you run LFS, so to do the same for another game you do the same, to make it the default do it in "Global Settings"

Specifically for LFS, Chris_Kerry tried some settings out for another game which he finds make it look better, here they are:

Quote :

Antialiasing settings: 8xS
Anisotropic filtering: 16x
Image settings: High quality
Color profile: Not available
Vertical sync: Manually, turned Off
Force mipmaps: None
Conformant texture clamp: On
Extension limit: Off
Trilinear optimization: Off
Anisotropic mip filter optimization: Off
Anisotropic sample optimization: Off
Gamma correct antialiasing: On
Transparency antialiasing: Supersampling
Tripple buffering: Manually, turned Off
Negative LOD bias: Clamp

This makes it look great, but another thing you can do is add custom higher res textures, skins etc, which look great and are as simple as copying a file accross, some of the best are don and kidcodeas high res skys (found here, here and here), more of the texture updates (from cars lights, brake discs, track ads, tarmac etc) can be found on the texture database