x800.

irish_stu

ok have ( agp )x800xl his iturbo,running with athlon 64 3500+ and 2 gigs of ram,how does the gfx card match up against the latest x series of ati cards in relation to the latest games,bf2,fear etc,do i still have life in the old card yet or is it time to advance, i mean bf2 plays great with all the bells and whistles turned on and fear looks good too,with so much happening with crossfire and sli,is there many games out on the shop shelves to utilise the potential of the latest cards,or does my donkey still have nuff power to compete adequately throwing out the visuals,for years i had 9600 xt,and thought it did superbly,and then i took leap and bought x800,am i mising out by not taking another leap.or the x800 will suffice for another while.

money dictates the decisions i make,..ie new mobo,gfx maybe processor.
genuine advice please

8T8

Well the X800XL is still a decent card you shouldn't need to upgrade unless you feel the need the too, if all the games you play look fine to you why bother.


However if the money is burning a hole in your pocket and you want to upgrade well here are a few reasons to talk yourself into it

1) The X800XL is a shader model 2.0 card these have been superseded by SM 3.0 cards. Games that make use of SM3.0 are increasingly common and all the new consoles are now SM 3.0 compliant which means ports from those platforms or games built for multiple platforms will make use of SM3.0 hardware so you may miss out on certain visual effects.

2) For example Ubisoft released the graphically enhanced Xbox 360 version of King Kong for the PC, it was SM 3.0 only so it wouldn’t run on any SM 2.0 card.

3) Future engines are built for SM 3.0 hardware Epic's Unreal Engine 3 and Cryteks Cry-Engine 2 are built for SM 3.0 onwards though obviously in both cases their is a fall back to SM 2.0 but again you miss out on certain visual effects.

4) NV's and ATI's GF7 & 1K series both have better image quality enhancements in the form of transparency anti-aliasing (NV/ATI) and high quality AF (ATI only).

5) You can make use of float based HDR in a game (think Farcry and others) the X800XL does not support this method of HDR (note that HDR has nothing to do with the SM revision)

6) Better shader execution power in particular ATI's X1900 series have increased the processing power on the shader side of the GPU so games that use lots of shaders like FEAR and Oblivion will run better on ATI's parts. As for NV's GF7 they take a more balanced approach with shader/texture power so it does better in other games though as games get more shader heavy ATI's X1900 series will benefit more.

Of the current generation stuff the mid-range NVIDIA 7600GT and ATI X1800GTO are both marginally faster than the X800XL so if you wanted anything faster you know its either those or something higher end that will do it.



So there you go that’s off the top of my head as to why however I will say this, should you hold on till the end of the year for an upgrade NVIDIA have hinted strongly that they want to be the first out the door with a Direct-X 10 (SM 4.0) graphics card & if all goes to plan they want it available this Christmas.

So you could skip the whole SM 3.0 thing and go straight to the next gen as for the reason as to why, well it will be faster of course with DX9 games but especially so with a DX10 game under Windows Vista, but you will also be able to do AA on any form of HDR lighting as well which is a problem with current GPU's. ATI’s 1K series support AA on HDR but only certain methods there is another that neither NV or ATI support, The Elder Scrolls:Oblivion will be the first game to debut with this form of HDR.

irish_stu

thanks 8t8,ya covered all my niggling queries and more,i wish money was burning hole in my pocket,i was unfortunate as to when i did decide to purchase new card,ati released there new range week after,good to get a decent answer and to know my card still has life left in it,least i have ghost recon to keep my eyes sweet for few weeks,cheers