   What about radeon 9250 128mb?
  Hi, I didn't plan to update my pc because currently I don't have much money, but I just saw that in the shop the radeon 9250 128Mb only costs 40€. Currently I own an old geForce 3, an Athlon 2.6Ghz and 512Mb of RAM. My question is: would this radeon greatly improve the graphical side of my pc? in other words, how would run games as doom3, halflife 2, far cry and AoE3 compared to the geforce 3? Would it worth the effort? What about upcoming games?Would you suggest something different at the same price (not higher, this would be only a minor update, should I decide to buy it)?Thank youEDIT: May I be able to spend up to 60€, what options should I look at?   
  It's not worth the effort -- the 92xx series of cards either don't support programmable shaders or support them very poorly. I think the Radeon 9600 series and above is fairly cheap these days. I'd go with those first, or alternatively one of the "cheaper" NVidia boards (just stay away from MSI).   ;  The 9200 is a Direct3D 8.1 card. I guess the same applies to the 9250.   ;  Thank you. Yes, just after having written the post I thought about shaders as well. In addition polygons/sec and pixels/sec is far far less than the 9600, according to the ati camparison tool, and that makes me think that it was not really a great card.I think that I wont update, or I will look for something else.Thank you again   ;  I've been looking at budget cards too and the 9250 seems to be the worst of the newer breed. It does support shader 2.0 but otherwise I doubt it's any better than your GF3. In fact it seems the Geforce 5200 is better. I've just ordered a 128Mb Geforce 6200 which supports shader 3.0. It's a bit more expensive (£50 in the UK inc p&p) but also more powerful.On the other hand, a Geforce3 you could probably sell on eBay for a reasonable amount and that money plus only a little more would let you get an ATI 9600 which is a pretty good card, or maybe a 256Mb GF6200.   ;  Thank you. I spent some time trying to find a reliable benchmark, but I'm still a bit confused. Suppose that I can pay up to 90€, what would be the best choice? The 9600 seems pretty good, but it lacks ps 3.0 (would it be so important?). You talked about the 6200. What is the price range? Have you some comparison test between the two?   ;  I assume you're on AGP, not PCI-express. They had a review on Tom's Hardware (can't remember the link I'm afraid) which basically said it would run DoomIII or FarCry or HL2 adequately. That's about as good as you can hope for I guess!For $90 you should be able to get at least the 256Mb version, but unless you actually need shader 3.0 (most games that use shader 3 will probably assume your CPU and GPU are stunningly fast anyway) then maybe the 9600 is a better card for playing games? Based on when I was looking around you might even get a 9800 on your budget.Oh and This site has some data on performance.   ;  Yes, after a long search I found a site where they compared many different models on 7 games + 3dmark 2005. I compared the results of the Radeon 9600 and the geForce 6200 and the ati won on all the tests but the doom3 one (quite expectable).Anyway, I will wait till after christmas, and then I will decide (I don't know how much money my brother will put int this :-)Thank you again   ;  Care to post a link to that site?   ; I found a benchmark of many cards. I didn't look at all tests, just one for every game.