GF4 Ti4400 to Radeon 9600 Pro

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@lias

Hi all

I have been wondering whether or not it is worth going from a GF4 Ti4400 to a
Radeon 9600 Pro. I have read lots of reviews and they generally have the same
results. That is, with no AA or AF, the GF4 would be ahead in most cases.
However once turned on, the 9600 Pro leaps ahead. Another biggie for me is DVD
playback. The quality of the GF4 is quite poor compared to my old Realmagic
Hollywood Plus card (however that is a pain in the butt to use with swapping
cables to use it) which I would like to put to sleep for good.

I would appreciate peoples' experiences if they have made a similar upgrade
(sidegrade???). Do you feel it was worth it?

Cheers
 
Hi all

I have been wondering whether or not it is worth going from a GF4 Ti4400 to a
Radeon 9600 Pro. I have read lots of reviews and they generally have the same
results. That is, with no AA or AF, the GF4 would be ahead in most cases.
However once turned on, the 9600 Pro leaps ahead. Another biggie for me is DVD
playback. The quality of the GF4 is quite poor compared to my old Realmagic
Hollywood Plus card (however that is a pain in the butt to use with swapping
cables to use it) which I would like to put to sleep for good.
Click to expand...

I've never seen a video card that plays DVDs as well as the Hollywood,
so I don't think that's a big reason to upgrade. Not sure what you mean
by swapping cables though.
 
jaeger said:
I've never seen a video card that plays DVDs as well as the Hollywood,
so I don't think that's a big reason to upgrade. Not sure what you mean
by swapping cables though.
Click to expand...

I'll explain what I mean about swapping cables.... The pass-through cable
degrades normal video quality quite significantly so I leave the monitor
connected directly to the video card in general. As well as that, I have a TV
capture card that I use quite regularly (for my X-box) and I need to connect the
line in on my sound card to it. Whilst it might sound trivial to reconnect the
cables to the H+, it's become a bit of a haystack behind my PC with cables
running everywhere.

Not only that, there seem to be a lot of movies that just don't work properly
with the H+. Whilst all DVDs in my collection work fine, it seems that every
time I grab a bunch of rentals there's something that doesn't work with it.
 
Most DirectX 8 games will see little improvement in speed, but with DirectX9
games coming there "may" be a reason to upgrade, but NOT YET.

Both cards are 128Mb and unless your after a good 3DMark2003 score it's not
worth it.

The first major games that should use the DX9 features available on the card
will be Half-Life 2 and Doom 3, wait and see until then.

I have 3 PC's at Home, a Radeon 9600tx with a P4 & a AMD2600+ with a GF4400,
both score within 20% the same at 3Dmark2001 unless CPU restricted.
 
Not only that, there seem to be a lot of movies that just don't work properly
with the H+. Whilst all DVDs in my collection work fine, it seems that every
time I grab a bunch of rentals there's something that doesn't work with it.
Click to expand...

Ah, I don't use the pass-thru, just TV out. The Hollwood blows away any
vid card in this mode, part of it is the decoder but part of it is also
that regular video cards have substandard TV Out, even ATI ones IMO.
Having used nVidia cards and ATI cards and being loyal to none, I have
to say that the best DVD on a PC monitor I've seen is using NVDVD 2.7
and a Ti4400. A monitor is just too revealing of DVD's compression,
especially on poorly transferred discs.

For games, it's largely a matter of what games you play. There's a
thread on rage3d.com's forums listing every known current driver issue,
I'd check that out and see if any of the games you like are on the list.
 
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