I'm looking for a decent video card that will be able to play LFS properly. My current setup is an integrated S3 card that really quite sucks I can just barely play LFS properly in offline mode (I get anywhere from 8 to 25 fps, but it usually hovers around 13). It's not even playable online.

I'm trying to keep the price under $50, so I certainly don't expect something that's top-of-the-line. Also, which do I need to pay more attention to, core clock frequency or VRAM frequency?

For example, I'm looking at an ATi Radeon 9200; 250MHz core, 400MHz VRAM. Would that be 'adequate' or 'more-than-enough' for this game?

maybe a 9700 pro? they should be dirt cheap now and ive got one in an old pc that runs lfs nicely with 2xaa.

What's the rest of your system like? Depending on how good it is you shouold match your card to suit. A 9700 or 9800 pro would go well with a Pentium 4 or Athlon XP.

From nvidia 4200Ti-4600Ti and from ati 9600Pro 9500Pro and 9700Pro are good ones, that might be in your price range for agp from 2nd hand.

I do have one 9550Pro lying around, this is quite so and so, but this is much slower than 9600Pro.

9500Pro is par with 9700Pro but 9600Pro is tad slower, I think it was something like this. Really can't remember how fast 4600Ti was, I think it was near 9700Pro or faster? Anyway should be quite ok with LFS.

I don't use AA or AF even I have X850XT which should be able to use them, but I just prefer performance and immediate screen drawing over pretty pics, constant 60fps that won't change no matter what, this is what I like

Like Davo said, it really depends on what the rest of your system is like.
Something like an nVidia 6200 is pretty cheap around here, about €50,- which would be around canadian $75. So that's over your budget, but would be a good card if you've got a reasonably fast system.
But considering your low FPS in offline mode, I suspect your system to be quite slow. Keep in mind that especially playing in offline mode with AI cars the speed of your CPU will be more important because it has to process complex physics calculations for all the other cars.
So I think something like a Radeon 9600-ish would be a good choice if you can still get it. The problem is that AGP cards are getting sparse. At least they are around here, except for the top of the line, very expensive AGP cards.

i would recommend the geforce xfx 6200 with 256mb RAM. nice and cheap here in england.. paid around £30 for mine!

try a ati 9600 xt! it's a good gc for a good price. you can find it easy under $50.

ive never been a fan of the ATI cards. many people who i know that have one say that the nvidia cards are better.... and from what ive seen i have to agree.

ATI have a nasty reputation for releasing buggy drivers, but other than that I can't comment on the quality of their cards.

However, here in the UK you can pick up an nvidia 6600GT for under £50 (link to Scan page) which I understand was a pretty good card in it's day.

Any Geforce 6xxx series card should run LFS quite acceptably. I have a 6600GT in my other system, that will run LFS with an 80FPS average.

The core/ram frequencies don't really mean much, there's so much variation between chip designs that you can't really use it for comparison.

A 6600 is actually overkill for LFS, your CPU will end up the bottleneck (at least in my case on my old XP2400). I now have a 6200 in that system (the 6600 died one week out of warranty) and I can tell you it's no quicker than the Radeon 9200 it replaced (for LFS). It will suffice for LFS but little else. The addition of DX9 support can't be snigged at though.
A 9100 (if you could find one, it's actually just a rebranded 8500LE) is a useful step up. The 9250 is actually slightly slower than the 9200.

Go for an ATI Radeon card definately (better suited to LFS)

On a budget 9600 Pro & 9700 Pro are more than capable & cheap off ebay

If you can stretch to the 9800 you can also play online shooters like BF2 & Medal of Honour 2 etc.

But as the others say it does depend on your CPU, if you have'nt already got a 2Ghz AMD or 3.2 Pentium think about upgrading that too.

Hope this helps

True that, my old Radeon 9600 ran LFS just fine, although that was the last ATI card I'm buying.

Firstly you need a reasonable CPU to play LFS properly. So a great graphics card with a 1Ghz cpu won't do wonders.

Secondly, both Ati and Nvidia have had their issues but that averages out pretty well. You can find 100 guys who will say Ati sucks, and you will find 100 who say Nvidia sucks. Reality? Mostly both brands are fine..

It's true, both companies have done flops and wonders. ATI before the Radeon were nothing special, nVidia released the GeForce 5 series. ATI careds usually produce better quality outputs (although apparently nVidia have caught up now), ATI accused of buggy drivers, nVidia accused of driver cheats, both have shite driver interfaces, the list goes on.

iv got ati radeon x800 pro 256mb cost me £150 last year, might find one on ebay for alot less... mine runs from awt between 95-120 fps...

ive seen X800's for £35, so yeh, it will!

Quote from Jakg :

ive seen X800's for £35, so yeh, it will!

really :o


where. im gutted....

cant remember where, but a guy on overclock.net found a X850XT for £35 in his local PC shop.

Hey, i spent £166 on a graphics card JUST before DX10 cards came out!

never mind eh, oh well im doing a full upgrade soon anyways so this lot will be no good.....

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What's the rest of your system like?

I think the rest of my system is all good: Sempron 2800+, 1GB RAM, 80GB 7200RPM HDD, RealTek integrated audio (it's actually a really good card). It's actually pretty close specs to my parents' machine, which has a ATi Radeon 9600 (Sapphire knock-off branded), and LFS runs anywhere from 50 to 90 fps on their box.

I'm guessing now, but I think my video card's bottle-neck is probably the RAM access. It uses system RAM, so it's got to go all the way across the motherboard rather than just access RAM on the card.

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Keep in mind that especially playing in offline mode with AI cars the speed of your CPU will be more important because it has to process complex physics calculations for all the other cars.

Yeah, playing with AI is pretty bad. It drops down to 5 fps. That's not even playable. Playing online is even worse. So a 1.6 GHz Sempron chip is insufficient?

If I'm going to have to upgrade my CPU yet, too, then it's just not worth it; it's better to wait until I have to perform my next major upgrade (ie.: new PC).

If your video card is S3 that is enough of problem, it just is not enough fast chip for real 3d use.

With 9600pro your computer should be enough fast to play online.

Quote from epp_b :

I think the rest of my system is all good: Sempron 2800+, 1GB RAM, 80GB 7200RPM HDD, RealTek integrated audio

Yes, that should not be a problem to play LFS properly.

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I'm guessing now, but I think my video card's bottle-neck is probably the RAM access. It uses system RAM, so it's got to go all the way across the motherboard rather than just access RAM on the card.

It's the whole card that's just not suitable to use as a gamers card in terms of processing power and memory bandwith.

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Yeah, playing with AI is pretty bad. It drops down to 5 fps. That's not even playable. Playing online is even worse. So a 1.6 GHz Sempron chip is insufficient?

Actually I'm surprised it isn't the other way around. But your CPU should be fine to play LFS. It won't break any fps records but it should be able to actually make cars move instead of playing a slideshow.

My system is long overdue for an upgrade too, but everytime I plan to I think why would I? LFS these days is the only game I play, and it runs fine with an average framerate of about 60, 4*AA and 2*AF. On top of that I use a lot of high-res texture mods.
My system: Athlon XP 2600+, 1,5 GB RAM and nVidia Geforce 6200A 256MB. So if it runs good for me, it should for you as well.

Ofcourse if you play other, graphically more demanding games, it's a different story. Other games don't interest me as much as they used to do so I'll probably upgrade my system when S3 comes out

That should be 'ok' if its a Sempron socket A, and pretty good if its a 754 / 939 / am2 socket type! Definitely worth getting a 9600 / 9700 / 9800 pro type card. I would not get the Geforce 5xxx range as they are inferior in newer directx 8 / 9 games.

I could run LFS at 1600x1200, vscync stuck at easy 60fps (offline that was) with a 9700pro and my Sempron 3000+ (although it runs at 2.4Ghz which is 600 more than out of the box )

My old 6800GT 128MB was more than sufficient to keep the CPU (Athlon XP 3000+ @ 2.1GHz) as the bottleneck at 2048x1280 with 4xAA and 16xAF.