Widescreen Gaming Forum

There's a pricewar on graphics cards right now, and the Radeon 4870 can be had for around $120, the 4890 for around $160, and the Nvidia GTX275 for around $175. (Those prices are the best I have seen, after discounts and rebates, as of today. You can browse through the forums at slickdeals or FatWallet to find the latest deals.)

I'm building a gaming rig, and I already have the digital TH2Go and 3 Dell 24" (1920x1200) monitors. I'd like to be able to run older games at the full 5760x1200 of the monitors, so I would like to have the option of using SoftTH and a second cheapie video card. In other cases, I will run one of the supported 16:10 modes through the TH2Go and let the monitors scale.

I'm sure some people are in a similar boat. It is surprisingly difficult to figure out to optimize a SoftTH setup, but I gather that:
A) running video card #1 through the TH2go for dual outputs (1920x1200 x2), and
B) using the CUDA plugin to write to the 2nd video card (for monitor #3's output)

is the optimum.

So the questions are:

What is the best $200 video card for my purposes? The GTX275, because of CUDA?

And can I switch between TH2Go and SoftTH fairly easily, still running the main video card through the TH2Go in both cases?

The GTX275 is a solid card. Might look to the 1792MB memory version of the card. Some people see the 896MB memory version as a memory bottleneck. Personally I use a GTX260 896MB without much issue though.

I will be posting some benchmarks soon. I tested the 295 and both flavors of 275, from 1680x1050 all the way through 5040x1050. The 275 holds its own, even in "Ultra" settings. The higher memory value helps as well.

Any 200 series Nvidia card will perform well, that's not including the 250, which is just an older model repackaged. My GTX260 works great.

GTX260 here, works fine for 5040x1050.

It is possible to run into a memory bottleneck at 5040x1050 with these 896MB and 1GB cards; I've usually found antialiasing pushes memory usage over-the-edge in games that are already close to maxing out the card.

The 1792MB version of the GTX275 is probably the way to go.

If you're still watching this thread, I just got the GTX 275 896MB and 1792MB benchmarks posted

http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/wiki/index.php/WS_and_WTH_Benchmarking_%28GTX_275%29

If you're still watching this thread, I just got the GTX 275 896MB and 1792MB benchmarks posted

http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/wiki/index.php/WS_and_WTH_Benchmarking_%28GTX_275%29

Small typo in the conclusion "I would choose the GTX 1792MB over the GTX 295". I'm assuming you omitted 275? Good article, I'll link to it in the EVGA news sub-forum. :)

Thanks. fixed the typo.