Ok, I'm finally going to throw a new video card on my 2007ish computer. It's a Dell Dimension 3100 w/ onboard video. It only has a few PCI slots and one PCI-express 1x slot. So, I want to buy from a local store here in dallas. They have the following cards I've compared. In your opinions, wich one would be better for morrowind? The PCI, although old technology, seems to have better features. I'm thinking on the EVGA one...

ooops... fixed the broken link.

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0305903

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0345872

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0298083

Sorry, fixed links.

Or maybe someone could recommend a different card? It must be PCI or PCIe 1x. Will cards built for DirectX 10 and shader model 4 work with morrowind?

You should, generally, avoid straight PCI cards. They're expensive, slow and poorly supported. PCIe 1 is a better slot, although not good.


Yes, Morrowind requires DX 8 and SM 1.1, at minimum.

Microcenter is generally a good store, I get most of my stuff from them. I'm not familiar with nVidia cards, but you want to go with a mid-range card from a good manufacturer. I've heard of EVGA before, not sure how good they are though.

PCIe x1 is 250MB/s (PCIe v1.1 standard)
PCI is 133MB/s (32-bit at 33MHz)

Morrowind only requires that the graphics card have a DirectX 8.1 compatible driver. It doesn't require that the graphics chipset support DirectX 8.1 features such as Pixel Shader 1.4 or any Pixel Shaders for that matter.

***

The only problem on recommending a graphics card if you PSU, which is 250W. My recommendation if the PSU holds up are:

Geforce 9500GT or Radeon 4350

Thanks for the replies! Well, I had the day off today so the first thing I did this morning was head over to Microcenter and I got the best PCI card they had, which was the EVGA Geforce 8400 GS 512 DDR2, and I got a Coolermaster 450 PSU to go with it. I just installed it a few min ago and ran Morrowind, tweaked MGE's settings to max, and YEA!!!! Looks and runs soooo much better. I know it's not the best card, but a major upgrade to the Intel onboard video! I was running around in Balmora with Balmora Expansion, at 1280x1024, and got around 30 fps! Before I was getting an average of 10!

Now i'm going to see about using some of those wonderful shaders available for MGE. Any recommendations?

trueBloom g6-i6? [/shameless self-ad]

Polik GroNak's GIMP bloom is popular, and some of the stock (DX9) blooms are still in use.

For SSAO, Knu released a correct fancy (slow) one, I released a quickie (much faster) one that does what I like.

Same with depth of field, I think, though I'd recommend using my (or anyone else's) tweak of Knu's DoF. Just get one with hand-saver code in it.

I don't recommend using HDR, but that's a matter of taste. You can check out the various saturation/desaturation/sketch/pastel shaders that are hanging around, or feel free to post requests or ask about tweaks (if you're going to request a shader, don't do it in the MGE thread, make a REQ thread please).