I mainly use my system for games and find when I run Quake 3, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, etc… the frames occasionally freeze up for a second or two during the game. I have been told the graphics card has reached its full potential, and cannot handle any more data at this point. The card is a Palit GeForce2 400 MX. Should I upgrade to one of the GeForce3 Ti500 cards I keep hearing good things about, or is there a ‘less expensive’ alternative I could take to improve frame rates? The system is a Pentium 4 on a Intel 845WN motherboard with 256Mb of RAM running Windows XP.

The GeForce3 Ti500 card is quite a nice performer but is prohibitively expensive. You would probably be looking at around $800 - $900, however, you get what you pay for with video cards. Looking at the February 2002 Edition of PC User, the Leadtek Winfast Ti500 has frame rates in excess of 130 fps (tested using Return to Castle Wolfenstein at 1280 x 1024 32-bit colour). However, be quite careful because different brands of cards (eg. nVidia, Leadtek, Hercules, etc…) will all have different frame rates despite running the same processor. I am running an nVidia GeForce3 Ti200 on my home machine and I get almost flawless graphics in Flight Simulator 2000 (only the occasional inconsistency). However, you may figure that if you were going to buy a Ti200 why not go the extra couple of hundred and buy a Ti500. However, before you go out and buy a new video card, there are a few things you could try to get better frame rates. You are running a P4 with 256 MB RAM which is an excellent configuration. To give your game more memory, try closing other non-essential applications before running the games. Also, if you are running some games off CD, reinstall them, so they run off the hard drive (as in most cases, hard drive speeds are higher than CD read speeds). Another suggestion, which you probably won’t like, is to decrease your resolution and/or colour depth, this should increase your frame rate. However, if you do decide to go for a new video card, shop around and research the frame rates for different brands of cards before buying. Also, I strongly suggest that you buy the card from an outlet which offers a warranty, as you don’t want to buy an expensive card only to find that it doesn’t work!