ATI REDEON 9600 PRO?

nilson · Post by **nilson** » August 31st, 2003, 11:56 pm

I want to get a good video card, but I am not going to pay more than about $160. I don't do much gaming at all, but I am trying to get a well-rounded system. I also want to free up my shared RAM.

I am looking at getting this: http://mirror.ati.com/products/radeon9600/radeon9600pro/index.html But not the pro version. Do you reccomand this? Is it good?

GNU/Ben · Post by **GNU/Ben** » September 1st, 2003, 6:18 am

ATI Radeons are generally good. I haven't tried that specific one, though,

Post by **Jeff_pony** » September 1st, 2003, 6:45 am

Its a pretty upto date card and support direct X 9, you should check that you cant get a cheaper card from nvidia though.

Have a look here for reviews:

www.tomshardware.com

wheerdam · Post by **wheerdam** » September 1st, 2003, 7:50 am

Radeon 9600 Pro is good, but installing drivers in Linux can be a pain, at least, it's not as easy as Nvidia's centralized drivers. But it's a good deal, man

grayrest · Post by **grayrest** » September 1st, 2003, 8:32 am

Consensus on the hardware sites I visit seems to be that the 9600 is $10 cheaper and 10% faster than the equivalent nvidia offering.

willll · Post by **willll** » September 1st, 2003, 8:55 am

Why on Earth do you need do you want a good video card if you're not going to play games? That seems stupid to me. You don't need a card that is fully DirectX 9 compatible to run Firebird. It seems like a huge waste of money to me.

jrobbio · Post by **jrobbio** » September 1st, 2003, 8:57 am

An overclocking friend of mine swears by the 9600 when comparing to the gforce 4 fx 5600 256ddr ram.

The ATI cards have really crisp 2d quality, which means your windows desktop would look real crisp compared to a dull looking Nvidia card.

nilson · Post by **nilson** » September 1st, 2003, 9:19 am

willll wrote:Why on Earth do you need do you want a good video card if you're not going to play games? That seems stupid to me. You don't need a card that is fully DirectX 9 compatible to run Firebird. It seems like a huge waste of money to me.

I do play games evey now and then. I have Quake III, MS Flight Sim 2000, Screamer 4x4, The Sims, and a few others, but I just don't play them that much.

I don't need a gig of ram to run FB either, but I have it

willll · Post by **willll** » September 1st, 2003, 10:29 am

nilson wrote:
willll wrote:Why on Earth do you need do you want a good video card if you're not going to play games? That seems stupid to me. You don't need a card that is fully DirectX 9 compatible to run Firebird. It seems like a huge waste of money to me.
I do play games evey now and then. I have Quake III, MS Flight Sim 2000, Screamer 4x4, The Sims, and a few others, but I just don't play them that much.

I don't need a gig of ram to run FB either, but I have it ;)

Having a lot of RAM will improve performance in any program especially if you do a lot of multi-tasking. Having a great memory card will not improve performance in most apps, and in when playing older games there will not be much difference from a $160 card and a much cheaper video card.

grayrest · Post by **grayrest** » September 1st, 2003, 11:04 am

jrobbio wrote:The ATI cards have really crisp 2d quality, which means your windows desktop would look real crisp compared to a dull looking Nvidia card.

That's a gross oversimplification. In either case it depends on the manufacturer, ATI manufactures a lot of their own video cards and they use nice caps for their output filtering (matrox are better, but the price\performance aren't there) while a lot of nvidia manufacturers choose to use cheap caps, which produce the characteristic "nvidia" blurry output. nvidia has recently put more guidelines in place and their image quality is up for newer cards from most manufacturers.

willl wrote:Having a great memory card will not improve performance in most apps, and in when playing older games there will not be much difference from a $160 card and a much cheaper video card.

Yes, but an older video card won't be able to run HL2, Deus Ex 2, and Tribes 3 (which are what I'm looking forward to) so maybe he's trying to hedge his bets? Of course, I'm waiting for these games to be released before I upgrade from my current 3 year old system.

willll · Post by **willll** » September 1st, 2003, 12:56 pm

I don't really know that much about video cards and the future of gaming, but how long would a card like a GeForce 4 MX be adequate?

Post by **Jeff_pony** » September 1st, 2003, 12:58 pm

willll wrote:I don't really know that much about video cards and the future of gaming, but how long would a card like a GeForce 4 MX be adequate?

Not very, as long as you dont want to run Doom 3 your ok

jrobbio · Post by **jrobbio** » September 1st, 2003, 1:24 pm

grayrest wrote:
jrobbio wrote:The ATI cards have really crisp 2d quality, which means your windows desktop would look real crisp compared to a dull looking Nvidia card.

That's a gross oversimplification. In either case it depends on the manufacturer, ATI manufactures a lot of their own video cards and they use nice caps for their output filtering (matrox are better, but the price\performance aren't there) while a lot of nvidia manufacturers choose to use cheap caps, which produce the characteristic "nvidia" blurry output. nvidia has recently put more guidelines in place and their image quality is up for newer cards from most manufacturers.

Yes your right it is, but one thing that ATI did that totally GOT Nvidia when it couldn't keep up with the speed a while ago was to create curved polygons by a process called Truform . Okay I appreciate this is to do with the 3d aspect of the card, but it really does make it look a lot better. Being a past Matrox user I agree that they are the best of the bunch in the 2d market, but you really don't get what you pay for in the other domains compared to ATI and NVidia.

Another thing is that you can get a Sapphiretech ATI card for a lot less than the original. I've seen it for £93, which is about $140. I've seen the pro one for $164 too.

Hooded One · Post by **Hooded One** » September 1st, 2003, 9:17 pm

willll wrote:I don't really know that much about video cards and the future of gaming, but how long would a card like a GeForce 4 MX be adequate?

The GeForce4 MX, quite frankly, sucks. In many ways it's inferior to the GeForce3 -- the main improvement is in the software end. In some cases, it's even worse than a GF2Ti. The MX 460 isn't as bad as the other MX cards, so if you have that, you're a bit better off. It still might be "adequate" for newer games coming out, but that depends a lot on your standards. You could probably get away with low-res textures and using bilinear modes instead of trilinear.

I'd suggest Nilson go with the Radeon -- they seem to be continually improving by leaps and bounds, and the R300 chips (of which the 9600 is one) work a lot better with the Catalyst 3 series of drivers than the R200 chips. The only semi-issue I had with my 8500 on Linux was making sure that direct hardware rendering was enabled.