New Video Card Question
 

Greetings All,
Newegg.com had the Sapphire 9800 Pro for $199 last week so I couldn't pass that up. I should be here in a day or two. My question is this: I have a number of games installed on my system at the moment (UT2004, CS, AOEII) and I am just wondering should I uninstall my games and reinstall them with the 9800? Does this even matter or even an issue? Just wondering. Thanks

Nope, don't need to do a reinstall.

You may want to run the setup though if the game has that. It'll detect your vid card, etc...

Also, you may want to head over to the setup menu and crank up all the detail with that card :D

The only thing you need to do is fully uninstall any previous drivers you have installed for your current videocard, especially if it's an NVIDIA card. After you uninstall the current video drivers, turn off the PC, and put the new card in. Then turn the PC on and install the ATI Catalyst drivers that ya need.

-Lasereth

God Bless those crafty and witty canadians. My 9800 arrived today and I installed it (can't you tell?????). I am so excited about all of the new gaming possiblities. I can now play Lode Runner, Zork, etc. As I was installing the card it asked what settings I wanted. I have always run my resolution at 1024 x 768 but then it asked me what refresh rate I wanted. I have never really thought about this before so I didn't really know. (The lowest as 60 fps). Should I be running with something higher?

My rig:
2.6HT P4
1.25 G of 3200DDR RAM
9800 Pro (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
XP Home SP1

Thanks

Higher refresh rate is better. I have found that 60Hz gives me a headache, and I run my CRTs at 75Hz.

*edit* Explanation of refresh rate:
Refresh rate is kinda like FPS for the desktop. It is how fast the screen redraws the image. 60Hz is 60 times a second. When you look at your screen, the flickering you see is the refresh rate.

i just ordered a new video card today(mainly for dual monitor purposes, but it is a major upgrade from what i have) i am so excited... i love newegg.

Its PCI animosity.... what a waste...
Sorry.

A 5$ ebay pci card is all you need for your second monitor, with a solid fast agp card for your main display.

You should be fine just un-installing the old drivers.

I get so pissed off about past conflicts that after any major upgrade I format and re-install Windows XP.

Yea, overkill, but I can't remember the last time I've had a conflict because of a driver I never need anymore :)

I do have one recommendation for you. If you have a nice large monitor (19"+) I would recommend trying out the massive resolutions you are now able to try. Just try em out for a week, after a week of 1600x1200 I can't go back to 1024x768, let alone 1280x1024.

Just curious but do you have fluorescent lights? I heard those have a frequency of 60hz making the monitor refresh more noticable.

I run at 1280x960 @ 60hz.

Maybe I don't possess the eyes of others on this board but I just looked at a pic at normal res. of 1024x768 and 1600x1200 (I do have a Sony Trinitron 19") and I couldn't tell a difference in quality. I simply got smaller. (No, I don't have fluorescent lights). Is there a quality measure I am missing? Thanks

When you look at a low-res screen which is fairly large, such as a 19", you may notice that the edges of some icons and text are pixelated or blured. This comes from a single pixel transmitted by the vid card being shown with 3 or 4 pixels. As a result the shape of the actual pixel itself becomes visible.

When you increase the resolution of the screen you display the same information in a smaller space. If the resolution is to high then 2 or 3 pixels from the vid card are shown with 1 pixel on the monitor, this leads to blurring of the image.

The optimial resolution is where one pixel from the vid card translates to one pixel on the monitor. This is called the "Native Resolution" of the monitor.

Another benefit of a higher resolution is that you can fit more information into a smaller space. The bottom line is that higher res settings at the native resolution give the sharpest picture possible on a monitor, while allowing for a large desktop space to work with.

I just got a 9800 pro too. Before that I had an FX5600, which was fine, if a bit slow. Well, I uninstalled the drivers, got rid of all the extra utils, turned off the PC, put in the new card, installed the new drivers, rebooted... and presto, error after error. :(

For some reason Windows was not able to write it's cache to the harddisk with the radeon drivers (tried original cd version, and newest one from ati). After trying many different things, I had to resort to a full re-format + re-install to get it to work properly.

Of course, now that I have it running, it's great. I have a 3D mark ('03) score of some 5600 points, against 2700 for my old card. If I can get the thing modded with a 9800 XT firmware (and bigger cooler), this can go up another 5 or 600 points. :)

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Refresh rates: for an olde CRT monitor (ye olde big birtha), you want a refresh rate over 75 or 80 hz. For a new TFT monitor, it really doesn't matter - they typically run at 60 or 75 hz, depending on the type and brand, and there's not much you can or need to do about that.