Ok, with Halo, Half Life 2 and Doom 3 coming out at some point soon (hopefully) I think I'm going to need a new video card. Any one have any ideas what I should get? I've always went with Nvidia but with those benchmarks that Valve released I'm not so sure. And am I going to break the bank with this. It's a shame having to get a video card to play video games that cost more then a game console does.

Here are a couple recent threads:
here

here

At the moment: ATI

An ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB version is going to run you a tad over $300 now, buying online. The Radeon 9600 Pro is even cheeper, though it will probably not last as long. I personally now go for the big jumps from time to time instead of doing rapid upgrades that aren't the best in their class at the time. This allows me to enjoy high quality gaming for a decent amount of time, and not deal with changes to my computer as often. Sure, high end video cards are more expensive then consoles, but they are also usually more complex. Plus video cards don't have game sales to fall back on to lower prices.

While the Radeon 9800 Pro is not going to be better then the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra in Doom 3, it will probably be better with most other games. Reason being, it seems ATI followed the standards a bit better then NVidia this round, thus games without hundreds of man hours behind their optimization for one particular card* will do better on the DX9 supporting Radeon boards.

* John Carmack has spent quite a bit of time creating a specific rendering path for the NV3x cards in the Doom 3 engine. On the ATI front, their higher end cards do just fine with the standard Open GL paths programmed into Doom 3, so no specific R300 path exists, and the peformance difference probably would not be worth the time.

Do you think it makes more sense to wait it out at this point? To be honest I already have Halo, so that's not that big of a deal. I think Half Life 2 is the most important one on my list. You know, as a college student I have to be careful where my money is spent Speaking of college it's fun to talk to people back home on the east coast. It's always sunny out here in the desert (Tempe).

Being that there is no immediate need for this card since the games in question are out, you can probably wait it out.

The benefit of buying now would be the ability to run any existing game better. I guess this point will depend on how much you play existing games.

Second thought on the matter, how fast is your current processor? These new video cards are pretty dependant on faster processors to help them go. Anything less then a P4 or Athlon XP, and the video card alone won't make for a very decent upgrade.

Another thing to keep in mind is that for stuff like Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, you might want to upgrade the mobo, CPU, and RAM as well. Many people are buying entirely new systems this year just for playing HL2 and Doom 3.

Then I'm definitely going to have to wait. I can't afford a new system just for two games. I really don't play pc games that much anymore. I might upgrade my system a little at a time starting now. I'll have to see.

What's your current system? It might be fine for the newest crop of games.

Can I ask if mine will play the current crop of games?

P4 2.4Ghz
512MB RAM
GeForce Mx420 64MB

Is over a year old with no upgrades so I'll be amazed if it does.

From what I've heard, the system is fine, the MX will play the games but you won't get all of the available graphic details.

My system is also a year old, and still does fine with what I throw at it. I have a 2.26 P4, so processor wise you are fine.

Video wise, if you can't get the new games to run well, look to replace that.