Caltrops - American McGee's Honda Civic

Forum Overview :: American McGee's Honda Civic

by foolio 11/12/2004, 9:36pm PST

I would buy the Radeon 9600Pro, and in fact I did buy it once already last year (and subsequently returned it when it didn't fit into my old-school 1X/2X AGP slot). The card it was replacing? A TNT2. That's right--I had been playing (or as the case often was, NOT playing) games with a TNT2. Counter-strike was about the only game that ran smoothly, that and Quake3. Everything else was a little choppy/unplayable.

So when you tell me to hold out, remember you're talking to the guy who 'held out' with a TNT2 for about three years. Held out, and then 'upgraded' to an onboard GeFORCE MX440 setup, which I've been living with for the last year. This might be the last 3d card I buy for a long while--thus I'm scared to mini-upgrade.

Plus I want Doom3 (yes, that's right--Doom 3) to run well, and a 9600 Pro would make me cut down to Medium detail. Doom 3, and of course HL2, the reason why I'm getting this video card to my house by Tuesday-ish.

For those of you looking into video card performance, there's nothing more revealing than Tom's Hardware's last year's video card roundup. It's actually pretty ridiculous--the aforementioned 9700Pro (which was released like a billion years ago) performed better on Call of Duty than a $600 5950 card. See:

Whatever, it performed nearly as well. I'm just imagining the guy upgrading his computer from his 'old' top-of-the-line-two-years-ago model to his 'new' top-of-the-line model. He fires up the benchmarks and notices like 10% difference.

The newer-generation cards do about double-performance of this generation's, and do especially better at the high resolutions. Anyway, click the image for the roundup.