HD3870 or GeForce 9600

as it states, which would be a better video card? and if i go with the GeForce 9600, should i defiantly get 1gb of memory? whats the ideal memory size for the average gaming computer?

also, just a quick question. can somebody tell me the order from best to worse for the 8800 series? like theres gt,gts,gtx and such. i get confused about them.

 

I'll list the cards from slowest to fastest:

8800GT 256MB
8800GTS 320MB
HD3850 256MB
8800GTS 640MB
9600GT 512MB
HD3850 512MB
HD3870 512MB
8800GT 512MB
8800GTS 512MB
8800GTX 768MB

You should look to have at least 512MB of RAM on your graphics card, and at least 2GB of system RAM.

 

Sam, does the 8800GTS 512MB really run faster than the 8800GTS 640MB, or is that a typo?

 

no typo. the 8800GTS 640 uses the older g80 core. the 8800GTS 512 uses the newer g92 core.

 

thanks sam, that answer couldnt have been better.

 

Yup, the 512MB version is a completely new design and will beat any of the other cards barring the GTX. The older GTS is very slow by comparison, and in the 320MB form, it's very feeble at higher resolutions. When an ATI graphics card is short on memory its performance drops a bit. With an nvidia card, if you don't have enough memory you may as well give up, the performance impact is huge.

 

Thanks for clearing that up, Cee43ja1 and Sam.