tom's hardware has a good guide for purchasing graphics cards which you can find here .
you could use vista with that card, but you would not be able to run dx10. dx10 requires a completely new processor architecture and, at the moment, only the geforce 8800 series are dx10 capable. ATi is working on their r600 processor which will be dx10 capable, but it's been pushed back to sometime in july, i think.
i imagine the reason that card is so cheap is because it's an older processor architecture and it doesn't have very many pixel pipelines.
and just a general thought. cards with 512mb memory are not necessarily better than 256 or lower. it certainly helps at larger resolutions to have that extra memory, but card manufacturers often clock high amounts of memory much slower so that can negate the benefits of the increased memory. the card you linked to has a 128-bit bus and the memory runs at 400mhz; it'll be better than what you have, but spending a bit more could help immensely.
don't take my word for it, though. i'm not super knowledgeable. that's just stuff i've picked up along the way.
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you could use vista with that card, but you would not be able to run dx10. dx10 requires a completely new processor architecture and, at the moment, only the geforce 8800 series are dx10 capable. ATi is working on their r600 processor which will be dx10 capable, but it's been pushed back to sometime in july, i think.
i imagine the reason that card is so cheap is because it's an older processor architecture and it doesn't have very many pixel pipelines.
and just a general thought. cards with 512mb memory are not necessarily better than 256 or lower. it certainly helps at larger resolutions to have that extra memory, but card manufacturers often clock high amounts of memory much slower so that can negate the benefits of the increased memory. the card you linked to has a 128-bit bus and the memory runs at 400mhz; it'll be better than what you have, but spending a bit more could help immensely.
don't take my word for it, though. i'm not super knowledgeable. that's just stuff i've picked up along the way.