ATI Radeon 9250 compatible w/ GalCivII?

While it should work, it is actually a DX8 card, rather than a true DX9 card, so there is a potential for problems (plus it's pretty much the bottom of the barrel performance-wise, and not really recommended at all for anyone to buy nowadays).

Unless your machine has only standard PCI slots and no AGP or PCI-Express slots, I'd personally advise you to pick something better. If budget is a concern, you can still pick up a Radeon 9800 Pro for under $60, and even if it only had 128mb, it would be dramatically better. I used to use a 9600XT 128mb myself until just recently and it ran GC2 as flawlessly as could be.

I have a 128MB Radeon 9250 PCI card, and the game runs fine for me.

I have a 128MB Radeon 9250 PCI card, and the game runs fine for me.

The game runs fine for me too on my Geforce 7, but i bet our definitions of "fine" are much different. I run the game at max everything. Kyro is just saying that such an "upgrade" isnt wourth it because of the fact that it has no future value. If the card runs this game at min. settings, will it even run the next game at all? Then why did you "upgrade"?

I run it at default settings, and I bought it because I had a small budget and Dell 'conned' me into buying a PC with only a PCI slot to upgrade graphics with.

I run nvidia geforce 4000mx and it runs good with 512 of sdram. I got the standard pci slots and 1 agp on my compaq 5300 presario although this computer is old I upgraded it to play this game. I made sure to get dual monitor support for my monitor and made sure it was direct x-9 compatible. Sometime I plan to get a better card than i got now but this works so I am sticking with it for now.

I run nvidia geforce 4000mx... and made sure it was direct x-9 compatible.

GeForce4 MX cards are notDirectX9 compatible, not in the way the game needs (that is, hardware support of DX9 features). They actually only support DX7 in hardware, which means you likely don't even have textures on the ships in the game. But so long as you're happy with it, I suppose it doesn't hurt.

To anyone looking at a new card though, I personally would strongly advise against getting any GeForce MX, or the sub-9500 Radeons. They may be cheap, but there's no future in them. Even if they run GC2 acceptably, you're just going to have to buy another card for the next game you get.

If you want to compare cards, one of the handiest places you can look are at these two pages on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_NVIDIA_Graphics_Processing_Units
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ATI_Graphics_Processing_Units

The key feature you want to look at there for GC2 is DirectX support (needs to be 9 or better for everything to work properly). Fillrate gives you a rough gauge of the card's strength, though when comparing cards you'll want to find one with good memory bandwidth and lots of pipelines/shaders as well.

Unfortunately, I only have PCI slots on my computer, which is why I am considering the 9250. Currently, I am using onboard Intel Extreme Graphics 2, w/ a max of 64 MB shared memory. Therefore, I figured this would be an "upgrade." I would much rather have a PCI-Express card, but, alas, I don't.

Perhaps I should rephrase the question... Would this be an upgrade for me?

Thanks for the inputr. I do appreciate it.

I only have a PCI slot too..
Last year I purchased the Ati Radeon 9250 and also the Nvidia FX 5500... they were both about the same price..
I have found the FX 5500 much more reliable for gaming... it runs GC2 fine..

GeForce 7300 runs the game real fine

As with the other people i would suggest getting the newest card that your money can buy. Try some of the lesser know sites as they can be cheaper, or go for the eBay option!

Good luck and happy gaming

Drengin

Check here as well.

http://www.clubit.com/

Their prices are good, and they seem very reliable and well established.
I got my Nvidia 6800 GS from them.