Video Card

Radeon X850XT PE. Is this card going to be able to cope for the next 12 - 18 months ? or should i save for a while and get something with a bit more ummmpphhh!

Quite simply the card is a good 2nd generation DirectX9.0c card and is good enough for old games. If you want to play FEAR, Prey, Oblivion, Hitman Blood Money, STALKER and all really good titles you will need a card that supports SM3.0 and of at least the 3rd generation of DirectX9.0c cards, such as the Radeon X1x00 series or the nVidia 7x00 series.

Only literally because even a low end current series GPU is more powerful than the previous high-end model and at a much lower cost. A low price nVidia 7600GT is more powerful than a top end nVidia 6800 Ultra, which FYI is also more powerful than the x850XT PE in games like FEAR.

See below to see how a relatively low end nVidia 7600GT outshines an nVidia 6800 Ultra even with 4 less pixel pipelines and a lower specification memory controller! (Source nVidia.com). Another thing to bare in mind is that the x850XT PE is a pixel shader 2 card (PS2.0). Version 3 called Shader Model 3 (SM3.0) allows the GPU to improve on the PS2.0 effects, by reducing the amount of times the GPU has to pass the data through effects pipeline in order to produce the required result. This automatically gives better framerates, even though the 7600 has 12 pipelines and the x850XT PE has 16. So say a game has a pixel shader to process a complex light source shining on a can of soda on a floor. On the x800 it would be something like 4 passes to calculate the scene, whereas the 6800 and the 7600 would handle it in 2 or maybe even 1 pass due to the increased complexity of the SM3.0 pipeline. One last thing to note is that the power requirements of these new cards is less than the previous generation... usually!

nVidia 6800 Ultra:
Graphics Bus Technology: AGP 3.0®
Pixel Shader: Shader Model 3.0
Memory Interface: 256-bit
Memory: 256MB
Internal Memory Bandwidth: 35.2 GB/sec.
Fill Rate: 6.4 billion texels/sec.
Vertices per Second: 600 Million
Pixel Pipelines: 16

nVidia 7600 GT:
Graphics Bus Technology: PCI Express®
Pixel Shader: Shader Model 3.0
Memory Interface: 128-bit
Memory: 256MB
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec): 22.4 GB/sec
Fill Rate (Billion pixels/sec): 6.7 blilion texels/sec
Vertices/Second (Millions): 700 Million
Pixel Pipelines: 12

Thanks, going to have a good search around for a card and i will let you know what i get and how it gets on.

Cheers :bucky!:

OK so this is what i looking to get this weekend. Before i go and get it, could you confirm that its a reasonable card - the specs are below,

XFX 7600GT

nVidia Geforce 7600GT
Ramdac Clock Dual 400MHz
Memory Clock Speed 1.6GHz
Video Memory Installed 256MB DDR3
Memory Interface 128-bit
Core Clock Speed 590MHz
Pixel Per CLock (Peak) 12
Features Shader Model 3.0, UltraShadow II Technology, Intellisample 4.0 technology, nVidia PureVideo Technology, SLI

12 pipes vs 16 128 bit vs 256 bit :Oo:

Memory and gpu much higher clocks,thats could be the only advantage

I just got an x800GTO2(sapphire) and unlocked it to x850xt(look it up online). I am able to play FEAR, Prey, Oblivion, Hitman Blood Money, very well. The prey demo played on high settings, fear on medium/high. No this doesnt support PS 3, but if you dont have to have the best stuff out there, then this card should be fine till DX 10 cards come out and come down in price a little. Probably till next year.

Thats just my opinion. For my full system specs check my sig below

Well I used to have an un-locked x800 Pro to 850XT PE pipelines and clocks. It is ancient and you should not be purchasing anything on this core these days. If you have AGP I would go for the nVidia 7x00 AGP Bridge part.

I had a £100.00 nVidia 6800LE that showed up my £300.00 ATI x850 in Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and Serious Sam 2... nuff said!

The X850XT is easily good enough to play all the above mentioned games : FEAR, BF2, Quake 4 & even Crysis.
The 16 pipes of the X850XT gives it more raw performance than the 7600GT on many games, especially with AA/ AF.

Every system is different ;)

Originally posted by gem555@Jul 2 2006, 05:03 AM
The X850XT is easily good enough to play all the above mentioned games even Crysis.

good luck with that