A suitable upgrade from 8800GT?

[dswo]

Last night I went through the links that Moe posted about getting rid of shudders in FSX. So far so good, and thank you to Moe and NickN (whose materials Moe was linking to).

Playing with bufferpools again... I've tried high settings and gotten weird airplanes for my trouble. From what I've read, I need a video card with more RAM. Currently I have Nvidia 8800GT with 512mb. I bought this when it came out, after waiting almost a year for something like it to come out. Since then, there have been a lot of new numbers, but since FSX is the only game I play, I need some specialized advice.

How much would it cost to get a higher-RAM card with as-good or -better performance than my current 8800GT? I'm looking for something in the $100-150 range -- which may not be realistic. But at some point I'm going to be building a new box with a faster CPU, and I don't want to spend more than that for a stopgap.

[Bjoern]

The 88GT is still one hell of a good card, so it's really hard to find a suitable replacement in your budget range, especially with 1GB VRam.

The only solution I can suggest is checking EBay for some used 8800GTX or 8800Ultras, which are still top notch in FSX and have ~900Mb of VRam. Those shouldn't cost you more than $150, but since they're quite old, they most likely won't be covered by warranty anymore.

Still a perfect stopgap in my eyes. Just keep an eye on your PSU, since the 8800 series draws more power than an average particle collider. :d

[kilo delta]

I'll second the 8800GTX/Ultra recommendation. They are more than powerful for FSX....with 768MB of ram. I've an 8800GTX and an 8800 Ultra card in a couple of my systems and they run FSX at resolutions of 1920x1080 and up without issue.

[stansdds]

The bufferpools thing did not help me, but I am able to lock my fps at 24 and pretty well keep it there except in high traffic density areas (I set my air traffic pretty high and this will kill fps). I'm not getting stutters, but I also keep my card set at 4x multi-sampling AA (8xS knocks off a frame or two, but just doesn't seem to be as stable on my system) and 16x AF on a factory overclocked 8800GT, 512MB RAM. I use nHancer and the WHQL 181.20 driver.

[datter]

The 88GT is still one hell of a good card, so it's really hard to find a suitable replacement in your budget range, especially with 1GB VRam.

...

Still a perfect stopgap in my eyes. Just keep an eye on your PSU, since the 8800 series draws more power than an average particle collider. :d

I'm running two 8800GT's in SLI on an overclocked quad. Nothing has melted. Yet. :)

[Bjoern]

I'm running two 8800GT's in SLI on an overclocked quad. Nothing has melted. Yet. :)

Correction for my post above: G80 chips only (GTS 640 and GTX/Ultra), since they're 90nm. The G92s in the 8800GT and GTS 512 are 65nm, so way more efficient.

[dswo]

Thanks for the help, comrades. I guess I'll just enjoy what I already have.