I don't believe you should bother upgrading to a 9100 ready for a near
future upgrade. Either stick with the GeForce for the next couple of
months, or get a card worth keeping for a year or more. Neverwinter Nights
ran OK on my Radeon, but considerably better on a Radeon 9000 Pro, which is
a bit slower than the 9100. However, it wasn't really worth an upgrade for
NWN. Mainly I upgraded with the hope of getting GTA3 to work quickly, but
that never really materialised either. Other games such as Sim City 4 and
Age Of Mythology do run much better though.
You will see big improvments with the 9700. I'm guessing NWN has to be run
in 800x600 on the GeForce to get decent framerates (1024x768 was a bit
choppy on my original Radeon). You should easily be looking at 1280x1024
with the 9700, and also the image quality at the same resolution/settings is
arguably higher on ATi cards anyway.
The in-between option would be a Radeon 9600 non-pro. These can be picked
up for £85, and would be half way between 9100/9700 performance. This gives
you DX9 features, meaning when you do start to play newer games, performance
will not suffer as much, but at half the price of the 9700. You'll find the
card at
www.ccl-computers.co.uk
"Wayne Youngman" wrote in message
...
Hi,
I have been a NVIDIA user the past 4 years (since TNT-2Ultra) and have
followed very closely everything NVIDIA (and INTEL), however the past few
months I have been swatting up on ATI and their Radeon Family of GPU.
Most
of the stuff I have read about is the 9500/9500Pro, 9700/9700Pro and
9800Pro. After digesting this information I had my heart set on getting a
9500Pro or 9700 128Mb card, but I have noticed my suppliers in the U.K are
offering allot of good value cards based on the 9000, 9100 and 9200 GPUs,
and heck I have to admit it I am getting a bit confused. . . .
The new system I am planning to build will be based on a Barton 2500+,
NForce2 Ultra 400, and 512MB PC3500/PC3700, so now I am trying to work out
which Radeon I can pick up cheaply, Currently my top-end choice would be
a
Atlantis 9700 128MB DDR AGP 8x (£175) but the more I think about it, it
seems like this is too much money to spend especially when my supplier
also
is selling the Atlantis 9100 128MB DDR AGP 4x (£58.41), and newer cards
from ATI are just a couple of months away
Now what I am thinking is if I was to buy the 9100 (or other?) today (vs.
9700) I would be saving £116.59, that's allot! then maybe I could put this
money towards a new graphics card in 3-6 months time and pop the used
Radeon
into my old PIII system. I do play allot of games but none of them are
really FPS games. . my fave is NeverWinterNights. .My current card is an
old
GeForce256 DDR 32MB (150Mhz core/300Mhz DDR) (PIII 550E) and games still
look good to me using this, so I am sure I will see a great improvement
using one of the Radeons
Which is the better sub £100 Radeon GPU plz, 9000 - 9100 - 9200? I think
DX9, AGP x8 and more than 128MB are almost superfluous to my needs now,
DX8
and AGP 4x should be ample (I think?), Also I use a 19" Mitsubishi Diamond
Pro (CRT) and generally play games in 1024x768
I spent more time researching this graphics card stuff than any other
component in the system
Thanks for any advice u guys may have,
Wayne ][