What Graphics Card would you guys reccomend for someone on a budget. I usually play on the PS2 ver. but want to get it for PC as welleverything else is up to par except my vid card. It doesnt need to be the best graphics but nothing crappy plz. Thanx in advance guys.

Ok i have read the above post and seems like Nvidia's 7.189 drivers dont work too well. I get lag from Monk's Boost too. And my main is a mnk.

So i checked my 5900 driver cd and it has the version 56.63 drivers. Are these the old compatible drivers you guys are talking about?

BTW, my system is a P4 3Ghz, 512 ram,
FX5900XT 128MB.

Personally I would recommend http://www.omegadrivers.net/

I had problems with my Radeon 9600 and started using the drivers from there and now works beautifully. ATI is notorious for having crappy drivers.

I've been looking for a topic about this on here for awhile now. I just wanted to let everyone else know what I went through just to get FFXI to run on my Dell D600 with a Radeon 9000 chipset.

I've tried the Catalyst drivers...all versions up till a couple of months ago. I've tried all of Dell's drivers from the dell support site. All of them gave me the same problem. My symptoms were as follows: At the initial FFXI screen (where you see the 3d background of the dunes and all that jazz), the FFXI Title logo would flash in and out, or just show a white square where the logo should be.

Once I finally logged into the game (if it let me at all) all of the text areas on the screen, (chat window primarily), would be garbled and distorted.

After playing for a few minutes, the game would crash and drop me back to windows without even an error message.

I fought this issue for months! However...any of those of you who've had the same problem...I've found a solution. Apparently, Microsoft actually released a fix for that very driver. Head to WindowsUpdate.com and make sure your system is fully updated. Now, search for the Optional Windows updates that don't get automatically installed. Within that list, you should notice a driver update for the ATI Radeon Mobility 9000. The file I installed was released in January 2005.

This cleared up ALL of the problems I mentioned above. However, recently, I've ran into a new problem. One where the game won't actually load at all. It makes it to the part where I select my character, and hit enter. But I never actually get logged into that character. The game crashes with some error related to FFXIMain.dll.

I'm not sure the issues are related...but I hope this info helps someone else actually get their D600 FFXI worthy :)

The FX version despite being cheaper isnt really good for any games what so ever its more of a utility card for those of us that make thier own models, Same goes for the MX however the MX can do a few more things than the FX and is well more suited for those that make thier own 3d movies.
For good graphics cards your going have to shovel out more for the regular series, it would be safe to get a 6800 now that nvidia is holding back on developments beyond the usual 6mo releases so it may be a year before we see the 7000/7000GT cards. The dual video card setup i also woulndt recommend until it has proven itself to be a main stay as of now its still very iffy.

I got a 6600 on a 3 gigahertz P4 (dont you dare tell me athalons are better for what i do, I know p4 suck *** for gaming but when it comes to number crunching of applications athalon is eating p4 dust all the way.) I have yet installed the latest drivers, currently its 71.89.
I have only one bug and that in ragamount pass where plenty of the rocks there are mistextured. So far it only lags on the bard songs too oddly. This was usually fixed by cranking the settings below the max chosable res, not above it for those of you who mess with the reg edit.

Edited, Thu May 19 19:11:56 2005

I use a eVGA 6800 ultra 265mb 8x AGP on a Soyo Dragon KT600 ultra motherboard..
The video card comes with 40something series drivers.. I skipped all that and loaded the "71.89 - eVGA.com Suggested Download " drivers and have not had any problems since I upgraded my power supply to accomodate the two dedicated molex connectors for this power hungry ******* of a GPU... (thats another story). I now have all features and options maxed and have as of yet experienced no issues whatsoever... just to let you all know my experiences.. and before any statements are made.. The card was bought for my work... not my gaming habits.. though it helps ^^

yeah if you have a GF FX dont use the newer drivers with this game it will lock up and you cant see mobs and ppl most of the time. I had to downgrade to 56

yeah it kinda sucks, i updated my video dirver to the latest (71.89 for the FX series, i have a 5200). preformance went way down in this game, i was getting crazy artifacting and overall glitchy crap. i need to change tham back but i also play WoW, Doom3, nned to be getting some more stuff for a LAN party i will be attending, so i kinda need to use the new drivers >_< i need to use 61.77 for WoW, it seems to work best with that. bummer.

btw GodSixSixSix, the fact that your card was manufactured by Sapphire should have absolutely NOTHING to do with your problems. The GPU is the same one on all ATI manufactured cards, the only thing that is different is that Sapphire either manufactured the pcb or farmed that out and it probably uses cheaper memory. the speed could be a bit slower or just a less expensive brand name. overall the performance might be slightly slightly lower, as in barely noticeable. big problems like you speak of are not due to the brand of your card ^_^ could be drivers like the rest of us or poor installation like someone else suggested, make sure the little off-white foot in the AGP slot is snapped down, but my guess is driver issues.

do the radeon saffire graphics card work cus final fantasy's colour messes up sometimes and i want to know if its the card or something else

Wow I thought it was just me. A couple of weeks back I updated the drivers for my FX5200 to the newest version and I was getting super glitchy performance. Bad enough that I was keeping me from targeting correctly and moving around. I think they're up to version 71 or so. I ended up reloading the drivers that came with my card and that fixed it up. Glad they're communicating with Nvidia and the other manufacturers. Now I can download this version. Looking forward to any improvement.

I wonder if this means no more earth crystals trying to eat me when I synth. hmmm.

*Many friends and myself have had occasional distortations with the earth crystal animation whenever synthing usually resulting in the animation enveloping the character.*