What are some of the better video cards today?

I don't know much about these sort of things, but I'm hoping to upgrade my PC at some point to run my games better. However, there seems to be so many these days, I'm not sure which would be best for my system or how many are "fully" compatible with the games I play. So which video cards are recommended for a Win XP in order to play games like WoW, The Sims 2 games, and the Battlefield 2 games smoothly? Also, are there any other upgrades I should consider? Thanks.|||I know a perfect card. I play all those games except wow and the card I am talking about can even run oblivion at high settings which is not really that amazing anymore but it requires more then those games.



The EAX1950Pro its a great card it does not support DX10 but if you use windows xp then you really do not need DX10 even more so for those games.



Plus vista still sucks. Its a card that is fairly compatibles and runs cool compared to other cards in its league. And its not too expensive.



It would be perfect for those games.



edited--- This card will run all of those games on max specs. but your PC will also need good enough ram and CPU. but if your PC is fairly new then with this card you will be laughing.



Here is an url.

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?a…



I now use a way different setup for more recent games but you will need liquid cooling and over $1000 to get the best types of setups.|||Hi have a look here. this should bring you up to speed.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/06/b…



PC Gaming requires a lot of processing power. There's always a trade off between resolution and fps (frames per second) in pc gaming. This means if you want it to look nice, your animation will slow. if you want your animation to go fast and dont have a very fast graphics processor, you will have to turn down the detail.



My recommendation as an absolute base-line starting point would be an 8800gt. I have had a couple of slower cards in the last few months but they were an absolute pain in the butt for games like oblivion and fear.



Admittedly wow and sims 2 are at the lower demand side of things but if you want to play anything relatively recent l8r on down the track it may be nice to have the hardware on board to do it.



In any case good luck and happy hunting. The site above should provide a good starting point. if you only ever want to play wow and sims2 the card above may work ok and you wont need to shell out too much cash to make a go of it (provided you have the cpu and ram currently on board)|||Lots of graphics cards are on the marked today. If you are light on the budget, a GeForce 7600GS would do fine. But I doubt it would play fair on games like FEAR. The Next Option is to go for GeForce 8600GT or 8600GTS. The next is the best; Geforce 8800Ultra (for real game lovers who wants to play games like FEAR at resolutions of 1920x1440) Hope you find your solutions