Radeon 9600 XT

Yesterday, I got a Radeon 9600 XT for my birthday. In the box, as well as the card was a HL2 ticket, Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, and loads of software. The card itself is wonderful, I was getting 300+ fps in HL based games :eek:

As well as all this, the control panel allows you to tweak it etc, and change OpenGl settings. There are some cool effects there, too. You can make it render anything Opengl with these different effects, like inverse colour, black and white, ascii (very painful for the eyes), and my favourite: sketch. here are some screenshots from counter-strike in sketch mode :biggrin:

www.snarkpit.com/pits/2dmin/nw_snarkpool0000.JPG

www.snarkpit.com/pits/2dmin/nw_snarkpool0001.JPG

I highly recommend the 9600 or 9700 series for great price/performance. :smile:

EDIT The effect works just as well in hammer too: www.snarkpit.com/pits/2dmin/sketchhammer.JPG

I've had the Radeon 9700 Pro for about a year now and it's a really great card, haven't had a single problem with it. I'd recommend it also if were to upgrade your card.

OMG pisses self

If i do sketch mode in ns, when i turn on the flashlight as marines i can see through walls ...

LOL!

what a scintillating remark.

2dmin said:
Yesterday, I got a Radeon 9600 XT for my birthday. In the box, as well as the card was a HL2 ticket

hahahaha you were ripped off!

STFU lambastards.

ive been sayin this for months... 9700pro is best card for your buck..

Bewbies said:
ive been sayin this for months... 9700pro is best card for your buck..

I can't quite imagine this being true for months. the market seems far to dynamic; but what do i know?

how was i ripped off, jinx?

Cassius, wtf is a lambasard? Just coz I get 300 fps and you get 30 in r_speeds of 500 ... :razz:

Bewbies, 9600 XT pwns j00 :razz:

I suppose you have a 300 Hz refresh rate to go with your 300fps? :wink:

Teeehehehehehe :biggrin:

Strange, I got no bundled software with my card. What make was yours? Mines Sapphire - apparantly the best make...

Geforce 4 Mx 460 ... :sad:

Hahahahaha -

My Geforce2MX < your Geforce4MX.

Yeah.

PS I wonder what that nifty "sketch mode" does to Tron 2?

Count youreself lucky 2dmin, I've only got a lousy GForce 2 MX400. Which lags even HL.

heh yea gollum... 300fps wont do much good if your monitor cant refresh at that same rate. however.. the game will still display above your monitor's refresh rate (as a number). hehe, i can get upwards of 350-400fps in counterstrike... and whenever i say so in game, people are like "wtf, liar"

also... anyone who has taken bio-1 knows that the human eye can only see about 75fps! so why does it really matter...? if anything, i think our crappy eyes need to upgrade to plasma!

My brothers GeForce 2TI powers my PC. But in this case I wouldnt really call it power. But at the time it was great. I have a refresh rate of 120 and I have the option to use 3D shutter glasses without having to buy the expensive software.

Havent tested frame rates in HL yet though. But it does run the Realism Update in Counter-Strike with zero lag in frame rates. At least zero lag as far as the eye is concerned.

We've had the "the human eye can only perceive (30 / 60 / blah) frames per second" discussion before. As I recall, the consensus is that this is simply not true. There are two justifications:

1. Sciency-type studies that claim to show humans can perceive up to 200fps.

2. I can directly perceive (in Quake3 at least) a severe difference in smoothness between 30, 60, 90 and 120 frame-caps.

I'm still curious how all these 1337 CS players unlimit the Half-Life framerate from 100fps....

There is no always true limit on what people can see.

HL only goes up to 100fps, that's why they call you a liar.

As Tracer said, no card is the best buy 'for months'. Ever.

:rolleyes: wrong.

in steam-based games you can get higher than 100 fps by turning on developer (developer 1) and fps_max (whatever) ... I can get up to 1000 if i turn all the settings down and look at the wall :biggrin:

anyway the point of getting 300 fps even if the eye can see up to (60, 200, wahtever) is that it leads to constant smooth playing, even in 10 smoke grenades (the 1.6 smokes are punishing for graphics cards) :biggrin:

my monitor refresh rate is 80 hz :smile:

how could a GF2mx beat a GF4mx? the GF4mx is basically a GF2TI with higher clock speed and better renderers... :rolleyes: thats better than a GF2mx :razz:

with my mx440 i got about 70 - 120 fps in hl based games...

Why buy a ?350 Graphics card when you can get some more memory for less than ?50. If your graphics card isn't to bad, then leave it alone and get some more memory. Besides, how many ppl can afford that much money for a new grahics card? I certainly can't. Besides, we seem to of had a lot of Graphics card related posts recently. Come on guys, lets have some origionality!

how could a GF2mx beat a GF4mx? the GF4mx is basically a GF2TI with higher clock speed and better renderers... :rolleyes: thats better than a GF2mx

I assume you are referring to my earlier post? If so, you lampoon yourself better than I can :razz: Read it again, and carefully this time:

Gollum said:
Hahahahaha -

My Geforce2MX < your Geforce4MX.

Yeah.

OK I didn't know about the steam thing. Still you can see why people call you a liar because won't most know about that setting. Anyway why are you going into a game of Cs and boasting about your FPS? If people didn't think you were lying they would jsut think you were a fool for talking about that in the first place :smile:

I only have a Geforce FX5200 128Mb DDR 128bit version

and i get around 30 - 90fps in Half-Life and CS.

althought my Celeron 416Mhz (OCed from 333Mhz) sometimes struggles with half-life. :cries:

but run counter-strike fine, only problem is lag and thats because of my 56k.

i dis like the half-life frame rate cap, as i know i can get over 100fps.

BTW i would of got a ATI card but my AGP slot is up the creek and im waiting for my newer pc parts to be dilivered :biggrin:

DeathMedic3rd said:
I only have a Geforce FX5200 128Mb DDR 128bit version

If you dont like it, send it to me, I'll gladly take it over my GF2TI

ok i'll send it in the post, straight away </sarcasam>

im saying i'd like a better Gfx card, but my current mobo doesn't have a working AGP slot :sad:

and i think i'll wait a bit till i get a better card.

Enter Captain Obvious with an overblown flourish

Sinner, your graphics card is not limiting the performance of games. Your processor is.

you gunna get a new mobo then or a PCI card?

when did i ever say my Gfx card was limiting my games perfomance?

and i've already ordered a Athlon XP2500+ and mobo. but i don't have money for a new Gfx card :sad: so im pi$$ed with that.

i'll proberly get one in the near future when the FX5950 or 9800XT is cheaper.

You know something that would help your computer more then a new processor?

Ram.

The CPU doesn't really define how fast you go, the amount and speed of your ram is much more important. Obviously so is your video card, because it bassically works by it's self on operations.

well i'm getting 512Mb DDr PC2700 RAM to go with this new mobo. the mobo btw isn't a really good one, it only cost me ?35 and that was with a price cut on it.

Well CPU does affect to some degree. I can see a difference between my 800 Duron and the downstairs 2.4 P4 :biggrin:

i know the diffrents between my 416Mhz and my dads 1.4Ghz. sighs

matt - well here the 9600 XT was $360 ... that's about 150 pounds ? if i spent 350 pounds that would be about $900 so i would have bought the 9800 XT which IS over the top :biggrin:

sorry sorry gollum :biggrin: ... too used to nooby cs players saying "me > you" ... and then getting killed the instant after they say it :razz:

I have 640mb of DDR 400. Crono, after about 512mb of ram, speed really depends on your mobo. people underestimate how important the mobo is. The secret to a fast (possibly budget :razz: ) PC is buffer, connectivity, and maybe a good graphics card on the side :smile:

my friend has a 700mhz AMD and with a GFX 5600 and 512mb of ram he gets great frames in all games :smile:

My Sapphire Radeon 9600XT 256mb DDR cost me ?150 ish from overclockers UK, good buy... Unfortunately the activation key for HL2 isn't working so I'm sorting that out with valve- but don't buy the card mainly because of getting HL2!

Its a nightmare obtaining your copy and it take 6-8 weeks delivery from when the game is released! 6-8 BLOODY WEEKS! I CAN'T WAIT THAT LONG!

I have 640mb of DDR 400

Well that's pretty silly. You are losing out on a massive performance gain by not running in dual channel mode...

rofl. im not an idiot :razz:

i have 2 sticks of 256 and 2 sticks of 64, using dual channel :smile: :rolleyes:

lol myrk what im doing is (this isnt reallly illegal) getting a copy of HL2 off one of my friends when it comes out, use the cd key on the hl2 voucher, and then 6 weeks later get the box, manual etc :biggrin:

Myrk- said:
My Sapphire Radeon 9600XT 256mb DDR cost me ?150 ish from overclockers UK, good buy... Unfortunately the activation key for HL2 isn't working so I'm sorting that out with valve- but don't buy the card mainly because of getting HL2!

Its a nightmare obtaining your copy and it take 6-8 weeks delivery from when the game is released! 6-8 BLOODY WEEKS! I CAN'T WAIT THAT LONG!

Should the key work? The game isn't out you do realize...

2dmin said:
matt - well here the 9600 XT was $360 ... that's about 150 pounds ? if i spent 350 pounds that would be about $900 so i would have bought the 9800 XT which IS over the top :biggrin:

The 9600 is a decent enough card but for about the same price you could've got a Hercules All-in-wonder 9800se and softmodded it to a 9800 pro :smile:

It seems that its cut from the same silicon as the pro version, this was about 3 months ago tho' so they may have found ways to stop this sneaky mod.

Where do you get a 64 meg stick of DDR400?

good question. i found it lying around, and im pretty sure it was 400 mhz coz i bought it a couple of months ago for decent price

Are any of these possible with a GF5?

Any of what possible?

These 1337 effects..The black and white, the line mode, inverted..Etc.

Not as far as I know. I seriously doubt it though, Nvidia (or the companies who made the cards) never put much effort into bundled software or features so I doubt they would have cool stuff like that :razz: ... also GF5's arent really reknowned for their superior rendering technology. Basically theyre just beefy gpus with massive fans that take up 2 slots and overheat and blow up every now and then

ASUS released some drivers for their nvidia cards a couple of years ago that did all sorts of effects like that. I don't know why everybody has such a big problem about the 2 slot thing... If you put a card in the first PCI slot with any graphics card then it will only be a couple of millimeters from the GPU fan, so the first PCI slot is essentially unusable anyway.

meh it just seems stupid to have it taking up and extra slot, it's large and a cumbersome way of cooling a card which isnt even worth all the cooling etc

nvidia's drivers are funny, one release gave you wallhack in many games ...

That was the ASUS drivers I just mentioned, they only worked if your card was made by ASUS. I always thought it was (and still is to an extent) ATIs drivers that people maoned about... I can't think of any problems with the nvidia ones?

Gorbachev said:

Myrk- said:
My Sapphire Radeon 9600XT 256mb DDR cost me ?150 ish from overclockers UK, good buy... Unfortunately the activation key for HL2 isn't working so I'm sorting that out with valve- but don't buy the card mainly because of getting HL2!

Its a nightmare obtaining your copy and it take 6-8 weeks delivery from when the game is released! 6-8 BLOODY WEEKS! I CAN'T WAIT THAT LONG!

Should the key work? The game isn't out you do realize...

The Key is to order your copy... the fact that its not working means I'm not getting my copy of HL2 until lazy ass valve email me back with an answer to my problem.