Help my computer not suck

[DeeBye]

I recently bought Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast (great game, having lots of fun with it, would recommend again A++++), and I'm a bit miffed at how badly my computer handles it at the higher resolution and texture settings. I get nice framerate at the lowest settings, but I kinda want to experience it with all of the eye candy cranked up. As it is, I get about 40-70 fps at the lowest resolution and all the eye candy turned down. When I bump the resolution up a notch to 800x600, my fps becomes nearly unplayable (10-30).

I know that I don't have a top-of-the-line machine, but I figured it would run JKII quite nicely. I guess I was wrong.

(FYI, JKII uses a heavily modded Quake 3 engine)


Here's my computer setup (mostly pulled from SiSoft Sandra):

Processor: AMD Athlon 1700+ XP @ 1.47GHz
L2 On-board Cache : 256kB ECC Synchronous Write-Back
Mainboard : ECS K7VMM+
System BIOS : American Megatrends Inc. 07.00T
Chipset : VIA Technologies Inc VT8375 ProSavageDDR PM266/KM266 CPU to PCI Bridge
Front Side Bus Speed : 2x 133MHz (266MHz data rate)
Adapter : S3 Graphics ProSavageDDR
Hard Disk : Maxtor 2F030J0 (30GB, 7200 rpm)
CD-ROM/DVD : PHILIPS CDRW2412A (52x24x48)
Total Memory : 480MB


If you haven't spotted it by now, I am using my motherboard's onboard graphics (the S3 ProSavage), which I suspect is the source of the problem. I have two sticks of 256MB PC2100 DDRAM installed (total 512MB), but my graphics chipset uses 32MB of this. Thus, 480MB total memory.

I also happen to have on older ATI Radeon 7000 32MB PCI card hanging out in my old computer. Would installing this be an upgrade over the onboard S3 ProSavageDDR?

If not, I think I need some advice. What graphics card would best suit my system? I'm not interested in the latest-and-greatest; I just want something that will run JKII with all of the eye candy cranked. Preferably something cheap. I'm willing to buy online, but the vendor has to be able to ship to Canada.

Thanks in advance.