hi everyone. i'm getting a new graphics card later this week and i need your opinions. now, bear in mind i'm a college student in the philippines and i can't really get my hands on workstation cards like the quadro series since a) i don't have the cash, b) they need to stock up on them via special order here, thus raising costs, and c) if they do get them via special order, they tend to add on to the price for profit, thus putting workstation cards wayyy beyond my reach at this point.

that said, i'm looking into two graphics cards: a Sapphire Radeon 9800 Atlantis Pro 128MB, and an ASUS V9560 Video Suite GeForce FX 5600 256MB. the latter is cheaper, for some reason. anyway, given that these can emulate Quadro or FireGL with SoftQuadro and SoftFireGL, which is a better buy? i'm working with Maya 5.0 on a P4 1.8 GHz, 256MB RAM.

they also have a Sapphire ATI Radeon 9600XT Atlantis 256MB, with bigger memory but a lower end model compared to the 9800. dunno if that makes a huge difference. it costs a lot less than the 9800 Atlantis Pro though.

help please. i used a GeForce2 MX400 with maya 4.5 but all of a sudden, i got fatal errors, unreferenced memory errors, illegal operations, and other errors even after reinstalling windows so many times. funny that i used to even render maya movies on there. so i decided to upgrade to 5.0. works fine but it shuts down automatically when i render a scene or batch render. my guess is because of my hardware. hence, i decided to upgrade.

for those who are really nice and would like to view all of the possible video card upgrades i can make and give a suggestion based on the full list, here's the link to the store i visit: https://villman.com/products/product_...sp?catid=vcard .

thanks everyone!