Has anyone done a review yet about WHY to upgrade?

To not have to play anything below 1600x1200 4aa16af now, thats the benefit of a X800 card over the last gen. And at those settings the X800 is/was well worth the money and upgrade as your gaming experience is improved. Its the graphical equivalent of mono/stereo speakers to surround sound - more immersive.

You do have to have a monitor that can handle that res but if you have a $500 card you should be easily able to afford a decent 19" monitor capable of 1600x1200 and above.

 

Upping the resolution used to be the whole point of new cards! I remember when we got a GeForce and bumped Quake III up to 1024x768, or the time I could finally get Unreal up for 800x600 to 1024x768... *drool*

The resolution and AA/AF numbers being higher are the best thing any new card can bring to the table. New features are nice, but resolution, AA and AF don't rely on any developer support, they just work.

Oh, and there' the "Almost Temporal" AA which sounds rather nice. Double AA for no speed hit sounds good to me, and the worst that can happen is that the FPS aren't high enough and you still get the good quality AA you based the setting on. Win-win.

 

To answer your original question, dig, Ace's Hardware usually does their video card reviews in a "what effect would this upgrade have?" format across a fair selection of games. Unfortunately, the guys there don't have the contacts/resources that the big sites or specialty sites (like B3D) have. It may be a bit before they can get such a review out.

 

i'll upgrade my video card for Far Cry, HL2, Doom 3 and any future monsters.

RainZ

 

To be honest, the only reason Im upgrading is because of Farcry. I like the game very much, but I cant play at my usual settings, without slow down. I like to use 1280x1024 (my LCD res) with all settings in game set to the highest, max quality on drivers, and usually 4xAA/8xAF. Even with a 4gig P4, 1gig DDR 520@1:1, and a 9800XT@480/420, I got down into the 20's with the same at times. Usually in the 40-50's.. but I cant handle 20's.

 

I think any review that includes a 9800XT or 5950U shows why you'd want to upgrade to a X800, no? Here's a brief forum review that shows a pretty dramatic increase in moving from a 9700P to a X800P on an A64 3400+--on Far Cry and Splinter Cell, at least, two titles which seem to demand more from a GPU than most.

 

Thx Pete

RainZ

 

I think a lot more people have A64's, than you think. Sure, not as much so as the Bartons, yet. They are very popular for gamers, and if you are buying a new AMD setup, its really the only choice. Unless you just dont have the cash, or plan to overclock a -M like crazy. Their lower models are not that expensive. It will be my next setup, just waiting on the 939 change.

 

dw, I'm sure you've seen it, but 3DC's benchmarks are done on a P4 2.53GHz FSB533 AGP4x system, probably somewhat similar to yours, and not as "cutting edge" as A64s and FSB800 P4s.

But you can see that user review I linked is basically CPU-limited at the "lower" resolutions, but the X800 still shows a big framerate increase over the 9700P. He went from 30fps @ 8x6 to 50fps @ 16x12 (!) in FC, and 50fps @ 8x6 to 60fps @ 16x12 in SC. At the very least, you'll pretty much remove the video card as a limiting factor in your system, freeing you up to pine for a faster CPU.

 

Well there's no point in upgrading to a next-gen graphics card if it's just going to be bottlenecked by the CPU/motherboard/RAM. Especially if you can't transfer the card to your new PEG system in 12 months time.

 

At least your good friend Hi Res, AA, and AF will be available to console you. Just try not to shed too many tears into that high-quality water.

 

EXACTLY. Never upgrade something as critical as a vid card when an architecture change is on the horizon like this. See how the dust settles. . .


'course, I have a 9800XT. If I still had my GF3, I'd be thinking hard about the X800. . .

 

Here are some benches showing the difference in several apps. between my old 9800 Pro and the X800 Pro @ 580/580. If it looks familiar it's because I posted it on a couple other forums this weekend..

Painkiller (average fps/maximum fps)
9800: 1024x768 No AA/AF - 259/655
X800: 1024x768 No AA/AF - 299/660
9800: 1024x768 4xAA/8xAF - 132/651
X800: 1024x768 4xAA/8xAF - 263/658
9800: 1024x768 6xAA/16xAF - 130/494
X800: 1024x768 6xAA/16xAF - 225/658
9800: 1280x1024 No AA/AF - 173/534
X800: 1280x1024 No AA/AF - 272/655
9800: 1280x1024 4xAA/8xAF - 93/484
X800: 1280x1024 4xAA/8xAF - 207/649
9800: 1280x1024 6xAA/16xAF - 54/276
X800: 1280x1024 6xAA/16xAF - 172/654
At max settings the X800 is more than 3X as fast!

Quake 3 (average fps)
9800: 1024x768 No AA/AF - 283
X800: 1024x768 No AA/AF - 282
9800: 1024x768 4xAA/8xAF - 241
X800: 1024x768 4xAA/8xAF - 278
9800: 1024x768 6xAA/16xAF - 197
X800: 1024x768 6xAA/16xAF - 278
9800: 1280x1024 No AA/AF - 265
X800: 1280x1024 No AA/AF - 277
9800: 1280x1024 4xAA/8xAF - 167
X800: 1280x1024 4xAA/8xAF - 268
9800: 1280x1024 6xAA/16xAF - 130
X800: 1280x1024 6xAA/16xAF - 248
Even at the maximum settings and maximum rez on my monitor, the card is not stressed at all.

Code Creatures (average fps/millions of polygons)
9800: 1280x1024 No AA - 38.6/14.6
X800: 1280x1024 No AA - 68.2/24.6
9800: 1280x1024 2x AA - 33.4/12.8
X800: 1280x1024 2x AA - 59.2/22.6
9800: 1280x1024 4x AA - 22.0/9.5
X800: 1280x1024 4x AA - 47.3/19.8
I set the AA thru the app. here so I didn't use AF. At max settings, more than double the performance here.

3D Mark '01 (high quality in the control panel)
9800 Pro - 18,387
X800 Pro - 20,955
3D Mark '03 (high quality in the control panel)
9800 Pro - 5905
X800 Pro - 10869

Now I am going to show you the 3D Mark scores that you should be shown. Unfortunately I'm limited to 1024x768 as I didn't purchase '03.

3D Mark '03 @ 6xAA/16xAF - 9800 Pro
Score - 2106
GT1 (Wings of Fury) - 89.3
GT2 (Battle of Proxycon) - 8.8
GT3 (Troll's Lair) - 8.7
GT4 (Mother Nature) - 18.6
Fillrate (Single-Texturing) - 1258.3
Fillrate (Multi-Texturing) - 2863
Vertex Shader - 17.4
Pixel Shader 2.0 - 30.3
Ragtroll - 4.7

3D Mark '03 @ 6xAA/16xAF - X800 Pro
Score - 4926
GT1 (Wings of Fury) - 178.0
GT2 (Battle of Proxycon) - 22.0
GT3 (Troll's Lair) - 20.8
GT4 (Mother Nature) - 47.4
Fillrate (Single-Texturing) - 2073.7
Fillrate (Multi-Texturing) - 6269.4
Vertex Shader - 37.1
Pixel Shader 2.0 - 68.6
Ragtroll - 11.8

 

Press tilde for console then type \r_displayinfo 1 to turn on and change to 0 to turn off.

 

the nvidia cards have bettr af quality than the x800 because they dont use cheats

 

Wow, what an excellent first post. You'll do fine here!