Roger wrote:

What speed increase could I expect by switching from a GF1 with 32MB DDR
RAM to a "plain" FX5700 with 128?

And would the graphics detail improve at the same resolution in current games?

TIA.

Roger.


With a good mid range to high end processor, you'll see a screaming
increase in performance. The old GF DDR was greatly hindered by it's
fillrate, and since then it's gone up to insane amounts. Nowadays the
GPU is mostly hindered by the total system throughput (i.e. the sum
total of your FSB, RAM latency, hard disk and chipset bandwidth) and not
the inherent limits of the card.

Also, graphics detail outside of anisotropic filtering and FSAA in
regular games won't improve compared to an older generation card with
the same current drivers very much (52.16, etc). For example, a GF2U
with the 52.16's looks the same in Unreal Tournament as a brand new GFX
5950U without FSAA and AF on.

The key difference has been in the ability to use better filtering and
much better FSAA methods than supersampling at very reasonable
performance hits instead of dropping your framerate in half. On current
FX cards, it's not unreasonable to run something at 1600x1200 in 32-bit
color with 4x antialiasing and expect good performance.