Good Graphic Card?

I bought about 5 video cards trying to upgrade my old computer with the AGP graphics port. My advice, don't try to upgrade an old computer. Take all that money you are going to spend on upgrade parts and put that into a new computer. Go to somebody who really knows computers and have them build you a good gaming computer. That's what I did. My lowest frame rate on Millennium Force AyTrane was around 55 sitting on the brake looking at the station. Most of the rest of the ride was maxed out at 100 fps.

And coasteragent99 brought up a very good point. A 32 bit Operating System won't recognize more than about 4 Gigs of RAM. Windows 7 comes with both 32 bit and 64 bit OS discs. You can get VISTA 64 bit or maybe XP in a 64 bit version off E-bay. Make sure it's not a pirated version. You want the real deal.

I'm assuming you have an old computer with an AGP video slot. The new motherboards have PCI Express video slots which blow the old AGP slots out of the water, so to speak. The fastest AGP video card can't even compare with a good PCI Express video card.

So keep your old PC for it's older games and go out and buy yourself a new computer. Don't waste any more money on that RELIC!

College students, be sure to look around for MS software discounts to avoid spending $100 on the OS. Definitely got a good place for the money to go.

AGP cards are now far overpriced for mediocre cards. Plus the AGP cards that were actually decent (i.e. Geforce 6600GT, 6800, or Radeon X000 and X1000 series) are nowhere to be found outside of eBay. Even if you upgrade an AGP card, chances are the CPU will be stuck, outdated. A new system is the way to go.

I'm getting 20fps on MF at lowest, running at native resolution (1366x768 and 1680x1050 for my 22" monitor) and with everything at fair settings. Setting the LoD low makes things look too ugly and does not do anything to the poorly optimized 3ds that's in most coasters.

My new computer I'm building should take out NL1 framerate issues though. Nowadays, graphics cards are the most common bottleneck for NL as it is not a CPU demanding application. RCT3 as well as many newer games however, do need a decent CPU. Good CPU's also help a ton for everyday tasks such as web browsing. My laptop with the Athlon X2 can run much more flash videos than my old system could, though I also got Flash 10.1 recently which helps much more. (Since it tasks the video card with handling those things that it should be doing in the first place.)