Card Recomendations?

[Clipse]

i`m going to be building a machine to run on my IN72 thru DVI. I`ll be playing a mix of games but mostly EA Sports titles but will go into some of the other well played games on the site. Now i`m not a need to best or second best but what would everyone recommended even its its 1-2 generations behind that will run a lot out there nice for around 100-150$? I`ll upgrade in 2 years if that helps it will do me till then....Do the 7600 series do they trick? ATI? ANy manufactures to stay away from>

[HeadRusch]

The In72 is a 854x480 native projector. The 7600's should do nicely if you're on a budget, particularly the 7600GT.

With an 854x480 native screen you'll probably be fine with any old video card, but you'll want to render the games internally at a higher rez, they may look better even displayed at 480p.

[Clipse]

How much of a benefit to go to a 7900?

[jwatte]

On 480 lines, there's not a whole extra benefit with a 7900. The 7600 and 7900 have the same features; the 7900 can just fill a lot more pixels per seconds. But, given that you don't have that many pixels, the gain in frame rate is often minimal, especially with vsync (which should be on for most TV gaming IMO)

The 7600 comes in a "GS" version, which is lower voltage and can be passively cooled. If you are into home theater system quietness, that's a major benefit. I would get something like:
Asus 7600 GS 256 MB (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814121008) at $103 it's a pretty good deal. You probably don't need to go 512 MB, which would add another $25 or so.

Oh, yeah: I'm not paid by nVIDIA or NewEgg; I work with computer graphics and have good relations with both nVIDIA and ATI, so I'm trying to make this an unbiased recommendation.

[HeadRusch]

I would make this one suggestion:

Even though the resolution of your projector is low, you should not necessarily buy a card that will just match up with it....you'll want to buy a level or two above, here's why:

480p projectors are in the %500 range......pretty soon they wont even make em any more. 720p will be the minimum, and with those projectors already selling new for $850 or so, its conceivable to think you might be upgrading your PJ before long.

You don't want to have to upgrade to a stronger videocard to drive 720p. Granted its not a huge jump...854x480 to 1280x720, but if you buy a bare bones card now it might struggle with 720p.

The Second benefit is that if you internally render the game at a higher resolution, there is more information that gets passed to your 480p device...and the game could conceivably look sharper, better, etc.

Its the reason why High Def content looks better than DVD content on the same 480p projector, even though no more resolution is..well.."resolved". Its still the same 480 lines, but the picture inevitably looks better. So you might be setting up your games to output at 720p (or heck, even 1080p) and then passing that to your 480p display....you may see a difference.

Right now, assuming you have a PCI Express motherboard, this card will handle any game you throw at it, even at 720p. 1080p may be a stretch in modern games, but maybe not with Madden.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814141041

After rebate it puts it in the $150 range.

Also, those Sports games dont always run very efficiently on the PC platform, so having the extra horsepower that a more powerful video card will bring to the table can work to your advantage. There are also comparible solutions from ATI...just pick a card in the pricerange you want and do a Google search on it with BENCHMARKS in the search, and you'll see plenty of comparisions of performance between cards.

Good Luck.