I'm wondering if there are still graphical issues with the old infinity engine games and newer Nvidia cards. I know I had trouble with my Nvidia 8800 GT. I wound up replacing that with an ATI HD5670 and BG1 running with EasyTutu works flawlessly.

The thing is I want to upgrade my video card for some other new games and I'm worried I'll break compatibility with the infinity engine games. I am running Windows 7 64 bit btw.

Shopping on NewEgg I've pretty much narrowed it down to an EVGA Nvidia 550 ti card. A comparable ATI card (6850) is considerably more expensive so I'd rather go with Nvidia.

Anyone have any recent experience with the Infinity games and a newer card, especially the 550 ti? Upon finishing BG1 I plan to play BG2, PST, IWD and IWD2 and hope they'll all work okay.

stick with the HD5670 for now. what is it showing as it's Windows Index Score?

I have the HD4870 with 1gb ddr5 and the gfx show up as 7.6 and the scale only has a top score of 7.9

aside from going for more memory on your gfx card, there isn'ta lot better than what you're using. Sure, the frame rate might not get into the 70's or whatever but your eye cant even see that fast so who cares?

I ran The Witcher 2 on full everything (except ubersampling(?)) and i was pulling a constant 30 odd frames a second (although the card did get really hot)


Yep.. in short, IMHO, you could safely wait a generation of cards before realistically needing something newer

besides, eyefinity rocks and you dun wanna get rid of it :)



-edit-

Just did a quick google search for 550ti vs HD6850. If you were to upgrade, the hd6850 is better in nearly all respects.

Specifications
Model -- GeForce GTX 550 Ti -- Radeon HD 6850
Manufacturer -- nVidia -- ATi
Year -- March 2011 -- October 2010
Code Name -- GF116 -- Barts Pro
Fab Process -- 40 nm -- 40 nm
Bus -- PCIe 2.1 x16 -- PCIe x16
Memory -- 1024 MB -- 1024 MB
Core Speed -- 900 MHz -- 775 MHz
Shader Speed -- 1800 MHz -- (N/A) MHz
Memory Speed -- 1026 MHz -- 1000 MHz
Unified Shaders -- 192 -- 960
Texture Mapping Units -- 32 -- 48
Render Output Units -- 24 -- 32
Bus Type -- GDDR5 -- GDDR5
Bus Width -- 192-bit -- 256-bit
DirectX Version -- DirectX 11 -- DirectX 11
OpenGL Version -- OpenGL 4.1 -- OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP) -- 116 watts -- 127 watts
Shader Model -- 5.0 -- 5.0
Bandwidth -- 98496 MB/sec -- 128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate -- 28800 Mtexels/sec -- 37200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate -- 21600 Mpixels/sec -- 24800 Mpixels/sec

I used the gpubench website to evaluate options and found there that the 550 ti and 6850 were within 1% of each other in overall performance score. From that I figured why pay more for ATI, etc. other than I'd like to know my infinity games will still run well.

As far as in relation to my 5670 both cards mentioned above are almost twice as fast in performance score versus mine (mid 80s % improvement) on gpubench.

So it does seem like a worthwhile upgrade for newer games although I could get away with holding off given my focus on older games for now. I'm spending more time with BG1 EasyTutu than anything else these days for example.

this topic in the nVidia forum, mentioning the problems that still persist with the nVidia-cards convinced me to go for a laptop with a Radeon HD5470 and not to aim to play new games. For a few tens of euro's more I could have bought a machine with an nVdia GT520M (but a smaller harddrive), but seeing this problems still persist, I decided on the switch to AMD.

(used nVidia up till now, but with a GeForce 7300M in Vista and a GeForce 8500GT in XP, the bug doesn't occcur, only in 8xxx + cards on Vista and 7, or so I've read)

amazon is selling the 6850 from $119 USD and up, depending on brands.

thats dirt cheap already

Cheapest I saw just now doing a Amazon.com search for Radeon 6850 was a card for 160 from a maker I wouldn't probably go with. Amazon.com search was terrible too. Using that search term got me around 35 results most of which were 5770 and other cards including Nvidia cards. lol

I could go with a Radeon 6770 for around the same $135. that a Nvidia 550 ti would cost but it's not as substantial an upgrade at about 47% faster than what I have. It's a shame the Radeon price/performance doesn't fall more closely in line with Nvidia.

For me though there is the important benefit of these older gems working. It's disappointing that Nvidia never bothered to fix these problems. A lot of people still enjoy these games.

I'm starting to think along the lines of not worrying about newer games too for now and just go for a higher end Radeon later for best of both worlds. I think my 5670 probably does pretty well up to around 2008 games or so and I have quite a lot to play that is older than that yet.

What graphical issues are you referring to? I've had no trouble when I had my 8800GT, or with the 285GTX I have now.

Flashing portraits, boxes in fog of war and cursor trails are all issues I saw first hand when playing with an 8800 GT card. These are also reported by other users here and elsewhere.

I use an 8800 GT and have only had a crash to desktop when using unsupported resolutions.