Quake3World

I currently have an ATI X1950 Pro 256 MB (AGP 8x) that I bought back in January. It runs most games at decent framerates such as ETQW, Crysis, Bioshock and CoD4. The framerates aren't great but I have the settings at medium to low so the games run smoothly (Bioshock is set to high and it runs great with only a few choppy areas)

I'm curious if I should bother spending $250 on an ATI Radeon HD 3850 (512 MB) card. Is the performance that much better than the X1950 Pro? I realize the increased V-RAM is an immediate help but is the GPU that much better?

Just upgrade to the ATI Super XXX 95xFF UltraFIRE with 4gb of TDR ram and you'll be fine.

I'm sorry but could you type that in English?

I've done a comparison that I've found online for the HD 3850 and a screenie of my card.



It looks like the HD 3850 is twice as powerful but the testing results on alot of reviews don't show much of a real-world performance upgrade.

WTF? Does the image show or do you just see text that says "Image"?

Link to image: http://img107.imageshack.us/my.php?imag ... sonnj8.jpg

You may find this useful.

You can choose from a load of benchmarks.

i think you should bother spending your money on a new mobo with PCI Express and get a proper gfx

I understand now.

AGP... jesus christ man if you're going to spend 250 smackers, upgrade the board, chip and ram.

Yeah...great idea...if I'm gonna spend 250 smackers I should spend more.

It's just... the 1950 is a great card and if it was supported by a modern motherboard and chip you wouldn't be needing to upgrade right now.

Why throw more bad money after something you didn't get your moneys worth because of the other components in your PC? Bite the bullet and upgrade the rig properly, and you won't suffer dissapointing performance from what is essentially bandage covering your outdated system.

This is a rant, but its analogous to the kids that go out and strap performance parts to their Saxo. Bring the entire base up to a standard rather than these half-in-half-out incremental upgrades, you'll be way happier with the results (I George Zimmer it)

This shouldn't need to be said, but apparently it does...

You're considering doing a "performance upgrade" to an AGP system... for current games.

Since we're in danger of getting the 'answer the damn question' thing going on I'll just do it. The 3850 is a vastly superior chipset. Your bottleneck will be the AGP bus and the rest of your system. But it is a vastly better card and you may see a 30% performance increase or so, maybe more at higher resolutions.

Foo wrote:Perfect answer

Cool.

Well...the reason I bought the X1950 Pro was simply to play the games I'd bought through Steam. My old card was good but lacking Shader 3.0 support. So after getting the 256 MB X1950 (same V-RAM as my old card) I expected better overall performance (rather than just the extra eye-candy effects) but I've found that it wasn't much, much better...just a little better.

The HD 3850 seems to have the performance difference I was looking for between my original card and is a reason to upgrade.

I promise this will be the last parts upgrade to my old machine.

creep wrote:This shouldn't need to be said, but apparently it does...

You're considering doing a "performance upgrade" to an AGP system... for current games.

Oh please. We're not gonna get into an "AGP must die" discussion, are we?

seremtan wrote:i think you should bother spending your money on a new mobo with PCI Express and get a proper gfx

Agreed. AGP is completely inferior to the newer PCI-E 2.0 buses.

Not at all... I just think if you have a pretty new card already stuck in an AGP slot you should probably call it good. Spend $250 now for a slight boost on a dying board, or save $250 toward a proper upgrade. Seems a no brainer.

I grabbed a 7800GTS for a little ofver $150 if memory serves... Works ok for ET:QW which is about as modern as I'm going to get.

the 4870 is about 250. I'll keep shilling for ATI here.

GONNAFISTYA wrote:
Oh please. We're not gonna get into an "AGP must die" discussion, are we?

Yes...it looks like we are gonna have that discussion.

For those telling me to ignore my perfectly good machine and buy PCI-e (in a thread about AGP) I'd recommend doing research on inferred obsolescence or planned obsolescence (systemic).

Yes I know AGP isn't as fast, but I am not interested in a PCI-e card.

Have you checked out Tomshardware's VGA charts?

i'm sure he'll have those cards on, and you can check them out...
also, he has AGP Buyers guide's as well..

it may be something to look into.

Yeah...Phoenix supplied a great link. After checking it out and a few other reviews it gave me alot of good info.

pffft, this guy...