I'm thinking about upgrading my video card. I use my pc for poser and other 3d apps and for watching videos. Because money is a consideration I can't just buy the biggest and best. What features you recommend as minimum and what do you recommend as preferable?

Thanks for any suggestions.

It depends a lot on what 3d apps you use. Poser itself uses OPENGL but not other card features.

I added a nvidia 6200 card to my system for better graphics and it was not very expensive. I had nvidia geforce 4 on the motherboard.

You can easily spend $130 shipped for a great card now a days, and buy.com and newegg have after holidays sales going on right now.

I'm running ati 4850, and a ati 4870 in my other system here.

depends on the program. I use an Nvidia card, which works fine with Poser and Wings, but ATI I've had trouble with (at least the older ATI cards...;)

It's hard to go wrong nowadays with video cards...

Either nvidia or ati is fine.. just check the warranty periods.. some cards give you 90 days, some give you a year, and some give you 5 years.

2 years is probably fine on a card.. also you can buy different brand versions of ati cards... in some cases, these are slightly faster then the "name brand". In my cases, HIS ati cards offered a better price, slightly better performance, and a better cooling system.

How much do you want to spend anyways ? For 3d apps, the single best card you can get is probably the nVIDIA GTX 275 that costs $200-$250 depending on brand. If you want something cheaper then a GTX 260 will also do ok for $150-$200. Cheaper still you can maybe find older cards like the 9800GT or 8800GT. Avoid models like the GTX 285, GTX 250, 8600, 9400 etc as they are bad value for money.

Personally i've had bad experience with ATI so i wont suggest those, but they also have comparable cards in the same price range.

Also note that all decent modern cards require beefy power supplies to run so you may have to upgrade that as well. A 650w+ PSU from a good brand like Corsair/Antec/Coolermaster etc will be what you want to get.

EVGA is a superb brand for NVidia, they tend to trade higher quality for the board itself for packaged crap that you'll screw around with for a few hours (like a game you wouldn't have otherwise bought).

The other 3d apps I'm using are wings and 3dsmax. I was kinda wondering about things like memory and speed. I'm not sure my price range yet. We have to get some new kitchen chairs and the what every christmas money I have left will go to that. So it's possible this purchase might get put off a while too.

For Poser I would say Nvidia. I have 3 different older Nvidia cards and 2 ATI. But I still use ATI as I also have Vue and Nvidia really suck in that program when you have tried ATI. Just my experience.

I'm using lightwave, vue8, zbrush, and poser pro/p8/p8 pro.

Zero video card issues, and excellent performance on all of them.

Occasionally you hear about a specific driver release having problems with some application or another with both nvidia and ati, but usually the next driver corrects things.

Under Poser you dont need a high-end video card, i've a 9500 GT and it work very fine and it's not very expensive !

You don't need high end top of the line, but you do want all the memory that poser can use for the best previews.

Thing is, good cards have dropped so much in price, not having a decent card is almost a crime.

You can get a ati hd4850, which was the best card buy under $300 last year for $100 shipped right now.. and its fast enough to even run most games with everything on, and in hd res.

And if you buy something older, odds are it won't be supported by windows 7. (My ati x1950 pro which is 2 years old is not supported with new drivers in windows 7, believe it or not!)

I think in the ati series anything less then the HD series has no more driver support.

 When I switched to new hardware some weeks ago, I got an HD 4770, which were well below €100 then - and it works great so far. I had NVIDIA earlier, and had no problems with it either.