Graphics Card Upgrade?

After buying my Dell Dimension 3000, and trying to play "Black and White 2" i found that i cant play it because my graphics card doesnt have a pixel shader or something. Iv been looking into buying a new graphics card but i have no idea where to begin. Im not entirely sure but i think my computer doesnt have agp, is this a problem?. Is there a strong market for PCI graphics cards.I checked on dabs.comand found a few but i dont know where to look for the pixel shader requirments. If someone could point me in the direction to get the correct card for my system.
DAvid

 

According to About.com
* No AGP/PCI-E Expansion Slot

So you are stuck with a PCI slot. PCI cards are old, and even AGP is already being replaced by PCIE.

I guess this would be on the best choices for PCI: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814131411

Stevo

 

will both of those has the pixel shader and correct spec i will need for b&w2?

 

According to their website:

Black&White 2 requires a 64MB video card with 1.1 Pixel Shader support. Supported video cards: NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti series, GeForce FX series, GeForce 6200 or greater; ATI Radeon 8500 or greater

I didnt see anything on specs about shader, but appears either the FX or the Radeon listed by Triple6 and I should work.

 

Youre Grinching it up over here too your heart is 2 sizes too small

 

whats the difference between a 128-bit and a 128 mb??? this dont make sense at all. Does higher ram built in make for better gameplay?

 

Oh man not another Dell 3000, we should put a banner up on tsg "Dont Buy a Dell 3000 for a Gaming PC" this has got to be like the 20th post I've seen like this in the last 6 months.

 

bits are bandwidth speed and mb is amount of ram, higher ram can mean better game play but so does higher bandwidth speed, you need both ideally.

 

does the pci interface limit either of these? or can i go all out and get 256 bit/mb graphics card

 

yes thats the problem pci slot is like a bottleneck, a 128bit, 256mb vram card with pci interface cannot hope to keep up with the same card in a agp8x or pcie16x interface. thats why if you knew this pc was going to be for gaming you should have made sure it had at least an agp slot, pci video card will be slow not matter what you do.

 

PCI 2.2 = 133mb/sec
AGP 1.0 = 266mb/sec
AGP 2x = 533 mb/sec
AGP 4x = 1.06gb/sec
AGP 8x = 2.1 gb/sec

just to give you a data/rate speed comparison

Now its funny doing googles on this subject I found some tests that were made back in 2001 when agp was a new technology, there was very little difference in performance between a pci card and an agp, that is misleading of course because that was before game developers started taking advantage of the agp slot speed increase, if you ran that same test today with current games no doubt your conclusions would be much differnet. I read similar articles with agp vs pcie16x, saying not much difference etc., however again as game developers put more and more into their games, more and more data has to travel through that slot, so no doubt now pcie16x slots are starting to show their advantage.

 

is there some sort of an adapter that would let me attach a pci-express slot onto my motherboard? or perhaps i should be looking to changing my current motherboard with a new one??