biggest bang for buck

the benchmarks I have seen show the 9600xt smacking the ti4200
(in the tune of doubling the frame rate) when ansiotropic and
antialisaing are enabled. It is also soundly beaten when running
without these enhancements...its also dx9
that is why the ti is going to my second comp and the 9600xt in my
main one - once I buy it that is...

ps. I refuse to pay over $ 300 for a video card - even though 500 is
nothing to me - its such a cash grab...


A 9600 is not going to be a major improvement over a Ti4200. I'm an ATI
bigot from way back but truth is truth--the Geforce 4 was a very, very
good design and ATI's midrange, if it beats it at all, does it by only a
slight margin.

No need
not to futureproof even a budget system.

Why "future proof" now? He's got an adequate board at the moment--when
the future comes then future proof--it will be a lot cheaper then.

The reason I say a gigabyte
radeon 9600pro is that they have put the full 8 rendering pipelines
(most only have 4 - this is what holds it back compared to 9500).

That's quite a trick since the RV350 chip only has the silicon for four
pipelines.

Stick your card on ebay and get some cashback too.

in the uk they are available from

http://www.overclock.co.uk/customer/...cat=378&page=1

If I were building a new budget system I'd have one of these

chris




--

On Sun, 16 Nov 2003 00:16:10 -0500, rabid
wrote:

the benchmarks I have seen show the 9600xt smacking the ti4200
(in the tune of doubling the frame rate) when ansiotropic and
antialisaing are enabled. It is also soundly beaten when running
without these enhancements...its also dx9
that is why the ti is going to my second comp and the 9600xt in my
main one - once I buy it that is...

ps. I refuse to pay over $ 300 for a video card - even though 500 is
nothing to me - its such a cash grab...

I've also been considering 9600 cards for a good while. Despite my
software providers' very negative attitude towards ATI (OpenG). I
suspect ATI's latest generation might not be as bad, and I'm kinda
keen to put it to test.
The 9600xt actually closes a good bit of the gap up to 9800 and FX5900
and I'm quite impressed by that.

Anisotropic filtering is a special case with ATI. First time I
realized ATI didn't actually give 8xAF (rather like 2x mostly) I
figured they were cheating on benchmarks. But that's not it. They are
using a technique they call 'adaptive'. Which means the driver and
card are choosing what amount of filtering to do to achieve good
quality and good framerate. I assume this is individual for each
texturemapped vertex. Depending on their angle and distance, you can
get away with less, without compromising quality.

This have two consequences: First of all, you can't really brake
framerate much with AF, on ATI. The card will just dispense with AF
and keep framerate up. Meaning comparative benchmarks, trying to
achieve that, will be misleading.
Secondly, ATI hardware doesn't really do AF as fast as benchmarks make
it seem. Rather, they do less AF than benchmarks stipulate.
Doesn't mean much for the user. The quality is there, mostly. And I
think it's very clever.

I also expect nVidia to follow suit, if they haven't already.

Anyway, nVidia may not be as outdone as is mostly assumed. Anandtech
ignored the popular benchmarks and played a bunch of games instead on
9800 and FX5900. I recommend the article at their website.
More relevant for you and me, who don't buy highend, nVidia are also
"replacing" FX5600 with FX5700.

Further, nVidia have addressed some FX problems with gamerenders in
their release 50 drivers. They seem to have done their FX cards more
for CineFX than DX9, and gradually their drivers are coming to terms
with this. Apparently, code caused shaders to run twice as slow. New
drivers boost performance considerably.


ancra

On Wed, 12 Nov 2003 16:40:00 +0800, "eng"
wrote:


current motherboard is Asus P4S533, highest clock speed processor is P4 2.8
FSB533 if I'm not mistaken. This board supports FSB664 (166). I wonder how
much further I can o/c my current P4 1.6A. DDR333 RAM is cheap, P4 2.8 ain't
cheap.

I agree my current GF4 Ti4200 is a great card but the mirrors don't reflect
in max payne2! I posted this earlier & someone said something about this
card not supporting pixel shader 1.4

i want my FPShooter games to look & run good at 1280x1024

Looking for new videocard myself (DX9), my impressions sofar is that
best value performance is ATI 9600 family. Ranging from modest third
party cards to powerhouse 9600XT, they all do well for the money in
the tests I've seen. With reservations for nVidias new FX5700 (FX5600
replacement, due to lacklustre performance) the 9600 line looks like
the heritor to GF4 Ti market to me.

What I don't understand, with your budget and use, is why you're
mucking about with Intel in the first place? (Though, I'm as guilty
myself, two P4s under the belt before I saw the light ).

Of course a 2.8P4@533 is about the same as nForce2 mobo and Barton
2500+, so you're in a spot.
You can always move a new videocard to a new machine, so I'm kinda
suggesting you to hang on to that 1.6A as long as possible. I think
you'll buy more DX9 eyecandy than performance though, with new
graphics. But maybe you can live with that for a while?



ancra