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So, I'm building my sister a PC. I haven't really looked at video cards in a few years now, since the Fermi's first came out and I got a 470GTX. I don't know ATI's naming convention at all. So...

I'm wondering if anyone could tell me what the lowest-end video cards that, ideally, they personally have used or seen run Space Marine at high quality with all the graphical bling turned on. That being said, she has an older monitor which probably can't do a resolution over 1280x1024 or thereabouts so this shouldn't be too tough.

Processor will probably be a Pentium G620 on a H61 mobo, although I haven't yet bought either of these. I already have an spare 8600 GTS but I think that might be pushing it.

Well, my computer is pretty old (over a year old). This is what is in my system. I can run this game at max @ 8:5 resolution (1440x900):

ASUS M4A87TD EVO
AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2GHz Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core Processor
ATI Radeon 4890 (almost impossible to get now, bought before ATI/AMD merger)
4gigs of DDR3 1066
Sound Card

So should be able to find any type of video card made even in the past year and it should run it fine. I would suggest buying AMD cards that are at the end of a video card series as they tend to be faster in processing due to the manufacturer increasing the video card's clock and memory speeds with better default cooling but they tend to be more. I am unsure of the Nvidia cards that will be comparable to the AMD cards but still follow the idea.

Just an FYI sort of thing, I have started to notice that software engineerers are becoming hard pressed to push hardware hard enough lately in video games. It might just be the type of games that I play but none of them have warrented me in upgrading my system at all and it is over a year old. Usually, if a new game was coming out and your system is older than a year, usually an upgrade is needed to play the game at a high setting. But I guess it make sense with Moore's Law.

I've felt the same way rfor the past half decade.

My Radeon 5860 HD (I think,, somewhere about there anyway) wasn't only mid-upper back then and it's still holding up good now.

Inno 3D Nvidia 9500 would work really well i think, it's what my friend has on his 3 year old PC

Turns out 8600 GTS runs it quite nicely. That was a pleasant surprise.