Radeon 9700 Pro???

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T

T Low

Hi all,
I have not been keeping up with video cards for quite sometime now.
Currently, I am using a 8500LE and wondering is it worth upgrading to an
used 9700 Pro or better off getting one of those newer ATI cards like the
9600XT? BTW, I am not in a hurry to upgrade and do not wish to throw too
much money on video card either. Please advise. Thank you.

Regards,
Tony
 
T Low said:
Hi all,
I have not been keeping up with video cards for quite sometime now.
Currently, I am using a 8500LE and wondering is it worth upgrading to an
used 9700 Pro or better off getting one of those newer ATI cards like the
9600XT? BTW, I am not in a hurry to upgrade and do not wish to throw too
much money on video card either. Please advise. Thank you.
Click to expand...

Well, the 9700 Pro is an excellent card but no longer in production.
Presumably you have a line on one off Ebay or somewhere. Within 5-7% of the
performance of the 9800 Pro. I upgraded from a full 8500 128Mb to a 9800 Pro
and I can tell you that the difference is vast. Games like Thief3 that were
a slide show at 800x600 with low details now run lightning fast at 1280x1024
with full details. The 9700 Pro is a much superior card to the 9600XT.
Double the pipelines and double the memory bandwidth.
 
T

I'm in the same boat, I'd like to move up from a Ti4200 and I've had my eye
on the 9700pro AIW. www.futureshop.ca has them for $250cdn which seems
pretty reasonable.

I'm still hesitating because I don't like upgrading unless I'm sure to get
at least a 2x performance increase. IMO, there few things worse then
spending several hundred $$ and only seeing an improvement in 3DMarks, not
when I'm playin my current game (currently FarCry)

C>
 
My 2 year old 9700 Pro (not o/c) is still playing all the new games (Doom
3/Farcry/Il2-Ace) at high quality settings with no problems e.g. 36.6 fps in
Doom 3. I have poor eyesight so play at max 1024x768x32 or even 800x600x32
for some e.g. to spot the 'dots' in IL2 :). The graphics and speed at these
resolutions are great, you don't need the latest graphic cards yet unless
you want to play at much higher resolutions.

Here is a 1024x768x32 screenie from IL2 with settings maxed out ('perfect'
in game, 'perfect' water, 6xAA, 16xAF), BUT to play smoothly I must reduce
AA to 4 and AF to 8 or I get a huge drop in fps near the ground and in
dogfights.
(Forgive quality loss due to .JPG conversion.)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v169/Doug_Dread/Tirpitz.jpg

I'm not sure there will be a 2x speed improvement over a Ti4200 but pretty
sure there will be a significant quality improvement due to newer technology
and better graphics handling. Makes games super-pretty! :)

See also Tom's Hardware guide at:
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031229/index.html

Hope this helps.
Doug
 
OK, yeah, generally 2x faster than GF Ti4200 but over 4x faster if you turn
up the quality! (Ref: Tom's)
 
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