Radeon 9600SE

For the last year I'll be using this computer (when I go to college,
I'll have to buy a new one) I want to spice it up a bit with a new card.

Unluckily, I only have 2 cards within my budget: GeforceFX5200 (60 euro's) and Radeon9600SE (80 euro's).

Now, I've heard that the Radeon series give problems with HL1, and I
still want to play HL1 (TFC !). (it was something like HL = OpenGL ...
ATI & OpenGL = borkage.)

On the other hand, I've heard that the GeforceFX5200 is a crap card.

Anyone ?

They're both higher performance then what you have at the moment I'm sure ... Personlly I'd suggest waiting until the NX are next generation of ATI cards go down and snag one of them.

(Somewhere around September, they should be reasonably priced, I would imagine.)

Other then that ... the FX5200 isn't crap, its just not an amazing improvment over the GF4 series.

It also matters on what manufacturer you get the card from ... I mean, (no offense to anyone here) But I've heard countless problems with PNY and Gainward FX cards, but not a peep about Asus, nvidia, and MSI brands. At least not activly.

Right now is one of the worst times to buy a video card, in my opinion, because the last generation wasn't too great. Unless you've got an insanly old video card, its not worth upgrading right now.

The radeon9600SE is from MSI ... and so is my motherboard and GF4 MX
... never had problems with it, good manufacturer, I suppose.

I've got a gfmx440 from msi [ i baged it fo 10 pounds :biggrin: ] and had no probs, apart from that it overheats from time to time [thats just my overclocking for yac :wink: ] and my asus a7v8x-x mobo has been fantastic, i've had no probs what so ever with it.

Now, I've heard that the Radeon series give problems with HL1, and I
still want to play HL1 (TFC !). (it was something like HL = OpenGL ...
ATI & OpenGL = borkage.)

There was problems with HL with ATI but they fixed this in the drivers. My 9100 (very slow edition of 8500) worked fine and now so does 9600XT ;D

I say don't buy anything with 'SE' in it's name, but feel free to search for '9600SE review' in google and see how the thing does with the games you want to play.

ATI doesn't perform as well as nividia at openGL (doom3), but there is no real difference in how games look afaik. Bad driver bugs are pretty much a thing of the past, the worst you will get is a misorientated texture or slightly incorrect shadow or something equally non-noticable.

From my experience the FX5200 was garbage. My GF2 beat it out harshly...the frames were roughly equal (+/-3) while older games such as HL were 15fps for the FX 100 for the GF2. Any time I've seen the FX5200 it's been junk, that card is the bottom of my list of anything these days.

the 5200 would blow away a GF4 MX ... Maybe (looks some information up)

FPS doesn't really rely on the video card ... so ... thats not a very good 'test' of quality of a card. That tests the CPU, bus, and slot speed mostly.

Also a lot of games have a base settings systems, such as timing, so different CPUs don't run the games differently, all of it effects the way it plays out in the end.

But, then again, the 5200 in most cases doesn't have a fan :smile:

Force, how much are you looking to spend ... that's a better indication of what you'll be able to get as opposed to just what you've looked at and want.

I know here, there are Radeon 9600XT pro selling for about $160. And GF FX5600XT for about $115 (Their specs are simular) (I'm sure they'd have about the same ratio in pricing outside the US too)

But something you should know, is that, most often, especially now, the rest of your computer isn't fast enough to let these cards run at full capacity.
Most often its something else with your hardware that is the dellimiting factor, while using a newer card anyway.

As for the GF4 MX ... that card is not that great of a card and the FX5200 is probably about the same grade taking that its only $15 more expensive :smile:

Jeff is right, by the way, there are always trade offs and as of now, both cards do rather well with both graphics platforms (DX and GL).
I've noticed that the GF4 I have does equally well running DX as it does GL, so ... there's really no problems anymore, I would imagine.

dont buy a card from the FX line, they are super crappy with directx9.0. I have a geforceFX5600 256mb and it cant even run halo at proper fps.

If you wanna play hl2 and doom3 (or any other nextgen game) at reasonable fps, dont buy a card from the FX line

dude ... no one can run Halo with a decent fps *cough*videocard doesn't determine fps cough ... well it does, minorly ... but it's not even 30% (roughly) of the fps saga.

Also, are you saying the FX series has lower power (overall performance) then the previous generation of GF4s (Since GF4s run those games fairly well)?

When it comes to DX9, yeah :smile:

no, its the architecture. The FX series are super fast wil opengl games like ut2k4 etc, but get huge fps drops with directx9 effects, like per pixel lighting etc.
As games like halo, farcry, hl and doom3 are almost fully directx9.0 based, they run slow with these cards.

Isn't Doom 3 OpenGL?

It's written in OpenGL but I think it's got DX9 effects.

Its written in both I believe.

By the way, UT2k4 is DX only, there is no OpenGL option, I don't think epic likes the opensource graphics language :smile:

I don't have an FX card or anything, but I find it hard to believe that my GF4 would run those games better then a faster FX card, taking that, for example, it runs FC beautifully.

Are you sure it wasn't another factor that was dellimiting gameplay?

Just a little note, using the pixel shader registries isn't a directX effect, its just been pre-integrated into DX APIs. Any language can utilize those registers, in fact, only Assembly and Cg can, if you want to get literal :smile:

FX cards have horrendous problems running DX9 effects, trust me.

And OpenGL was enabled in a recent UT2k4 patch. It's buggy though.

I don't trust most people, especially if its something that seems mostly based off opinion. I just find it incredibly hard to believe that an entire generation of cards has less performance value then the generation before it.

Maybe, the effects you're talking about are incredibly new, but who knows, since you're just saying "its bad" I can't verrify any of it, and I'm not buying an FX to check, so. Oh well.

the fx cards have a lot of performance, just not with directx9 :razz:
but the geforce4 series are even worse with it :biggrin:

geforce 3 cards have a lot less performance, but run directx9 pretty well from what i heard.

Dont just look at performance, but at the card's architecture.

Oh yea and btw the geforceFX5900 seems to be the only version in the fx line that doesnt have too many problems with directx9

DirectX9 effects use 24 bit precision, wheras the Geforce FX cards try
to calculate DX9 effects in 32 bit precision. There's a huge
performance drop when the FX cards try to render DX9 effects compared
to Geforce4's, where I believe the DX9 rendering is dumped to the CPU,
although I may be wrong there :smile: .

I think you are, nothing would run well if they did that, Nic.

pericolos, maybe you should actually trying all of these cards types from all the manufactuers to make a decision. I know for a fact that most GF4 run DX9 effects just fine, they're not all super pretty since its not a DX9 card, of course. But they run well, nontheless.

So, I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here.

Also, if you guys weren't well aware, DirectX is a piece of s**t. Try using it's API you'll want to blow your brains out. Not because its hard, just because its disgusting.

Also, if you guys weren't well aware, DirectX is a piece of s**t

Absolutely.

To get back ontopic Force - imo the 9600SE is a better card than the FX5200 although both are pretty slow. If you're on a really tight budget then go for the 9600SE. Or try and get hold of a second hand 9600Pro/5700u, you can get them for about 80 e's if you look around.

Theres also the Radeon 9550 which is in the same price range but i haven't seen any benchmarks for that, maybe worth checking out.

Crono, The FX cards and the R3xx+ cores have specific DX9 shader
'parts' in them. That's why they're all DX9 cards. Previous cards could
do DX9 effects but they didnt have specific parts of the core dedicated
to DX9. When Microsoft sat everyone in the graphics world down to
discuss how DX9 should be implemented, Nvidia decided not to attend.
Everyone agreed that DX9 should use 24bit precision, and so ATI and XGI
(who've now gone under I believe) used 24 bit precision in the DX9
specific cores. Nvidia used 32 bit precision in their DX9 specific core.

I think DX in general bogs things down. Back when I had my GF2mx200, I could play some games, eg. Freelancer, fairly smooth. Since I upgraded to a 9600pro, that all changed, because now it tries to do the fancy things it never tried before. Its weird, FL runs in half-speed...

I need to upgrade my CPU...

Crono, The FX cards and the R3xx+ cores have specific DX9 shader
'parts' in them. That's why they're all DX9 cards. Previous cards could
do DX9 effects but they didnt have specific parts of the core dedicated
to DX9. When Microsoft sat everyone in the graphics world down to
discuss how DX9 should be implemented, Nvidia decided not to attend.
Everyone agreed that DX9 should use 24bit precision, and so ATI and XGI
(who've now gone under I believe) used 24 bit precision in the DX9
specific cores. Nvidia used 32 bit precision in their DX9 specific core.

I know, nic. But what I was saying is that, you can't just look at that and say "FX blows". You haven't tried every make and model, so shut it.

[/not in a good mood]