Cafu Engine

i need a vid card that supports all the features of ca3de... im not sure if i have agp4x or 8x... i think 8 but i will check tonight. i dont want to spend to much tho.... just some ideas would be nice

A radeon 9600 would be good, or 9800 which should have come down in price quite a lot. their reasonably priced. I hear that the geforceFX series isnt that great and should be avoided, I plan on getting a geforce 6800 GT.

i currently have a geforce4 mx 440 or something like that. DONT GET THEM!!! they are more expensive but support less features than lower priced cards!

oh and thanks scott i will look into those. a couple good sites are http://www.tigerdirect.com and http://www.newegg.com i just dont know what i really need.

ATI Radeon boards like 9600, 9800 etc. currently have rendering problems with Ca3DE, but all NVidia cards from the FX series and higher do work well (and support all Ca3DE features).
The problems with the ATI boards will be resolved in the next release, though.

what specific things do i need to look for in order to get all features?

Shadow wrote:what specific things do i need to look for in order to get all features?

Good news is that practically all new cards do support the same set of features, the cheaper ones just a little slower than the more expensive ones.
If I had to buy a new graphics card now, I would make sure that is has driver support for OpenGL 2.0. This indicates that the card is recent enough to support all existing features of Ca3DE, and will also work with future ones. All other features, vendor, speed etc. are up to everybodys personal taste.

(The OpenGL 2.0 specs are out now for a while. Don't know if vendors are actually supplying drivers for it yet.)

Carsten, NVIDIA supports OpenGL 1.5 and ATI supports OpenGL 2.0, the 2.0 spec is identical to 1.5 spec except for a few new bits:
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2004S ... 026876.htm

To ensure that you have the latest support for OpenGL and Ca3DE simply update your drivers to the latest versions:

For NVIDIA you will need the 65 series Forceware, you can download 66.81 BETA from NVIDIA's nZone :
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_downl ... 66.81.html

As for ATI, I do not own one of there cards. Searching the release notes of the latest available driver did not indicate support for OpenGL 1.5/2.0 but I think that ATI were actually the first to implement the API support for Open GL 2.0 : you should be alright using the latest 4.10 driver available from here :
http://www.ati.com/support/drivers/winx ... bmit=GO%21

I hope that this clears up some things. In addition Shadow, the Geforce 4 MX does not have any kind of shader support (only fixed function TNL rendering) which means that some features of Ca3DE might not be fully supported. If you are going for a new card then you might be better going for nVidia as there OpenGL support is a tad faster (but not by much these days). Look out for a cheap 9800 (DO NOT GET AN 'SE'. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE!!!!) or an FX5900XT if you want top of the line performance. For a bit cheaper hunt down either a 9600XT or an FX5700 Ultra. Going really cheap grab an FX5200 (ATI's low end cards don't support SM2.0, only upto 1.4 unless it's the new x300).

Hope that helps!