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General discussion

graphic card driver?

Jul 21, 2007 5:45PM PDT

i just bought a PCI nvidia geforce fx 5200 video card and i install the driver from the cd given but when i play some games i dont see much difference in graphic quality.is it better to install the latest driver from the nvidia website,im scared that it would not be compatible with the hardware i install?will there be problems if install the driver from the website

PC spec:
windows XP SP2 2.8ghz
512mb ram

Discussion is locked

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Re: graphic driver.
Jul 21, 2007 9:14PM PDT

It certainly wouldn't harm to install the latest driver for the card. And in the improbable case it does: just uninstall it and install the current one again.

Kees

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While a new driver may help
Jul 21, 2007 9:43PM PDT

What graphics card did you have before? A FX 5200 is not a step up unless you had integrated graphics before.

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Well...
Jul 21, 2007 11:24PM PDT

You're unlikely to see a difference in quality going from one video card/chipset to another because the video card doesn't have that much to do with quality. That's handled more by the game engine. The video card just makes it possible to process the higher quality image data at an acceptable performance rate.

And as others have pointed out, the FX 5200, or any PCI video card for that matter, is pretty rarely a step up from anything but integrated video chipsets. And some of the more recent integrated chipsets are probably better than the FX 5200.

If you download the nVidia driver, it should fail to install if it doesn't find a compatible video card. So, there's little to worry about.

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geforce5, nvidia biggest flop
Jul 23, 2007 4:40AM PDT

the FX 5x00 series nearly killed Nvidia, radeon are buggy pieces of junk but when the FX was the alternative then the radeon was wrongfully the leader of the pack. basically the FX series made alot of people angry and alot of them have ended up as paper weights, get an AGP radeon while u still can, it will run rings around a 5200