Well, only ati partners make agp variants of they’re most recent cards, specifically: Asus, Saphire, PowerColor and HIS. There are probably others but these are some of the major ati partners that still make agp variants so any card from them would be ok. As for card names, i’d go for a Radeon 3450 or it you want something a bit more strong/expensive then go for a Radeon 3650 though i don’t know how much this would help in photoshop. These cards have full support for OpenGL 3.0 and yes, that includes OpenGL 2.0 as well
If you’re looking for nvidia cards you’ll have to look for some older generations, as they stopped making agp cards back in 2006 which means that you’ll be hard pressed to find new agp cards from nvidia. Those that are on newegg are way to old and weak and i wouldn’t recommend them to anyone(that means fx5200 and 6200)
Thank you Zeno for your quick reply. It is appreciated!
I’m glad to have read your posted based on the fact that I had an Nvidia 6200 in my hot little hands today! I decided not to buy it based on available video memory, 256MB. From what I’ve gathered so far from Adobe, 516 MB seems to allow more OpenGL 2 functionality to Photoshop CS4.
My own investigations seem to agree with your statement regarding AGP availability for ATI and ATI Partner video cards. The same is true of NVidia AGP video cards being harder to find. And thanks to your reply, I now know why!
Regarding ATI Partner Video Cards, I’ve noticed that there can be quite a difference in Price Point for the same ATI technology card.
Generally, or if you have specific examples, what causes differing ATI Partners to price their product(s) at differing Price Points?
How about Nvidia Partners? Why the price differences?
Again, I thank you for your input. I shall look into both the ATI Video Cards that you’ve suggested.
There are a couple of things that affect the price like: cooling, cards that don’t have any fans on them are more expensive but are also dead quiet; promotions are also a possibility, maybe there’s a promotion for one of the cards; the memory on the cards is something often overlooked by casual buyers, GDDR2/DDR2 is cheaper and slower than GDDR3.
By the way, there is one weird misconception when buying video cards, which is: a smaller fan makes less noise because it’s smaller. This is totally wrong, the small fans are the noisiest because they need to spin much faster than a bigger fan to achieve the same airflow, they’re the so called whiny fans. On the other hand, when buying low end cards small fans are all you’ll get because the cards themselves don’t need much cooling but still, if you have to chose between two identical cards with different cooling go for the one with the bigger fan(or for the one with no fan at all but those are more expensive)
For memory, 512mb is a good number for Photoshop as it helps when/if you go multi-monitor but i wouldn’t go overboard, 1gb is way too much for these cards, they wouldn’t know what to do with so much memory
And like i said, stay away from fx5200/fx5500 and 6200 cards like the plague, those were considered very weak even back in 2003/2004 when they came out. The only reason they still sell them is because most people don’t know better. Of course, same goes for ati radeon 9250/9550 but those aren’t as widespread.
As for video RAM:
I have a 256 MB card, and I get occasional "flashing tiles" under heavy load when zoomed in at odd percentages. The flashing stops immediately if I go to an even percentage such as 200% or 300%. I don’t worry about it, but I’m fairly convinced that more VRAM would help.
Unless of course the card is overheating (I changed fan because it was too noisy). I’m trying to fit a temperature sensor in there.
Lack of memory would never do things like that. If there isn’t enough video memory then it would use system memory, if not enough of that, it would use the hdd(and slow down considerably). Flashing tiles/textures are rendering errors, usually fixed by applying the latest patch for the application in question or latest driver for the video card(usually because it’s not 100% guaranteed that they fixed it in those). I for one have a 256mb video card and never had any such problems and i doubt that i would get those errors even if i installed my old Radeon 9500pro with 64mb vram
Overheating cards exhibit two major symptoms: a slow down of the card: it reduces it’s clock speeds so that it produces less heat or/and artifacting: random colored blocks of pixels flashing over most of the screen similar to a simple rendering error but this type of artifacting happens constantly while the card is overheated so it wouldn’t disappear just because you changed the zoom percentage, plus photoshop doesn’t use that much GPU power so it’s highly unlikely that it’s overheating just by zooming in and out
Hmmm…interesting. Thanks for the info. Actually I knew the part about using system memory, it just didn’t click in my mind.
It’s more of a minor annoyance than a real problem, but I’ll try updating the driver (they should start sending out T-shirts saying "I updated my driver today" in front and "WHERE’S THE PARTY?" on the back XD )
Just as a quick follow-up, I ended up purchasing a Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 Card with 512 MB Memory with an APG 8X bus designed by ATI.
Now I’m able to enjoy the benefits of using OpenGL 2.0 with Photoshop CS4!
One slight problem with the card: I’m getting some RF Interference that causes a mild screeching noise that requires unplugging the speaker wires from the computer. Using volume MUTE has NO effect.
Thanks for all your help gentlemen, it IS appreciated!
Regards,
Jim
