8400GS vs 9800 Pro - opinions please!

Bit of an odd question, I know, but in terms of raw graphical performance, do you think a GeForce 8400GS 256MB could match a Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB in DX9 (SM2.0) games and earlier?

I'm trying to decide whether to break down my old XP gaming machine or waiting until I get a new gfx card, and as an interim I've got hold of an 8400GS for component testing purposes. Given it's 3 generations ahead of the 9800 Pro, am I likely to get as good performance from it at 1280x1024 in a variety of older games (e.g. Neverwinter Nights, Warcraft 3, Dragonshard) or am I better off sticking with my trusty old 9800 Pro?

Main issue I can see is that with the 8 series nvidia dropped agp and went to pci-e only cards, while AFAIK the 9800pro came in agp only.

So unless you've got one of the old ASRock motherboards that had both AGP & pci-e then you're scuppered.

Sorry, my OP wasn't clear. I have a new (well, new to me, out of used components!) PC I am building to replace the existing XP machine, which I intend to eventually kit out with one or two 7800 / 7900s. None of the games I currently play are CPU bottlenecked on the old machine: the question is whether the new machine with an 8400GS should be better than the old machine with a 9800 Pro, assuming all other components are roughly equivalent.

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Originally Posted by scaryjim

Bit of an odd question, I know, but in terms of raw graphical performance, do you think a GeForce 8400GS 256MB could match a Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB in DX9 (SM2.0) games and earlier?

I'm trying to decide whether to break down my old XP gaming machine or waiting until I get a new gfx card, and as an interim I've got hold of an 8400GS for component testing purposes. Given it's 3 generations ahead of the 9800 Pro, am I likely to get as good performance from it at 1280x1024 in a variety of older games (e.g. Neverwinter Nights, Warcraft 3, Dragonshard) or am I better off sticking with my trusty old 9800 Pro?

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the 8400 GS will be/should be fractionally faster than a 9800 Pro.

It has a slight edge in most aspects AND the drivers will be a lot more advanced, as ATI?AMD stopped supporting 9800 Pro's and X800 and X1600 etc a fair while ago.

The extra ram will be helpfull above 1024x768 as well though it's a lower bit rate controller.

Depending on budget maybe you could get something with a bit more 'oomph off the bay ?

An old high end dx9 card will beat both of thoes and can be picked up very cheaply, well the pci-e versions the agp cards still seem to go for high amounts.

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Originally Posted by Pob255

An old high end dx9 card will beat both of thoes

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Yeah, that's the eventual aim (Geforce 7800/7900) but in the mean time I'm trying to figure out whether to stick with the existing PC or build the new one and run the 8400 in it. This would all be moot but the 7900GT I bought just before christmas as being "in perfect working condition" had *loads* of nasty artefacting when I fired it up in 2 different motehrboards :(

Looks like I'll probably fire up the new one based on Zak's advice :D Perhaps I can fold on it in it's spare time ;)

Seems I encountered the same problem as you, I bought a 9700Pro off eBay, it turned out to have lots of artifacts so I returned it and got a refuned. Next I saw a 9800pro and jumped on that, yet same problem, returned and got a refund. Thankfully they were nice sellers, but it was only about £10-£15 each though. Also bought an X1650 but it was a PCI-E card even though the seller sold it as AGP, didn't pay enough attention to the picture but the seller was nice enough to refund me still. That card also had artefacts though when I tried it in my pc.

Not sure if it's just being unlucky or are Royal Mail dumping their parcels in water or something before delivering them? Mind you this was in November, when there was no snow. I guess right now in some parts of the country the parcels may actually end up being dropped/thrown in water due to the winter weather.

Either way, my old old parents pc is just sticking with the Ti4200 right now. To be honest it's not that bad but for some reason when the pc plays videos/streams etc the CPU does all the work and the graphics does nought. I've seen that with the 785G board I recently bought the IGP does all the work with CPU having like perhaps 2% of the work. Maybe it's the design of the P4 CPUs (I'm not familiar with CPU architect at all so yeah)

You'll find that the Ti4200 was designed before hardware acceleration of video streams really took off on mainstream gfx cards, so there's no hardware on the graphics card to decode the video: it all has to be done in software on the CPU. Same with the 9700pro / 9800pro, tbh. If you're looking for an agp card to accelerate media playback then you should probably be looking for a 2400 / HD3450.

I've just sold a couple of AGP graphics cards on ebay, as well as selling 3 through Hexus, and haven't had any reports of problems with any of them. Sounds like you might just be being unlucky :( Still, it's nice to know that there are lots of very reasonable ebay sellers out there - the bloke I bought mine off was incredibly reasonable and refunded before I'd even got the card in the post back to him!

Ah, so it seems it would have been a waste to upgrade anyway. Still though, 3 faulty graphics cards in a row is pretty unlucky. Lucky the sellers were nice though, left them good feedback.

A 2400/HD3450 is too expensive for what I'm prepared to pay for a system that old though. I think I'll wait for a chance to snap up on a cheap board with integrated graphics.

Anyway, going a bit offtopic on your thread and I haven't contributed so I'll leave it here haha, sorry about that.

No worries; if I do end up on ebay again it's good to know that there's plenty of honest sellers out there :D

Hi all,

Slightly post-event I guess, but I regularly use Tech ARP to compare stuff:

http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=88&pgno=3

In the past their figures have proven very accurate. For me, I'm mostly day-dreaming, as my main computer has a Radeon 9550 AGP in it! Anyway, back to the subject in hand. Looking at the raw texture fill rate, the Geforce 8400GS just pimps the Radeon 9800 PRO with 3600 Vs 3040 MTexels/sec. Therefore, f something is Graphcs card limited, and not CPU or-anything-else limited, you should have a 15% performance gain with the 8400GS. Plus as already mentioned, the later drivers etc would also help.

Gonna shut-up now.... !

Not at all post-event, thanks for the useful input :)

Looks like I'm going to be able to get hold of a 7900GTO now anyway, but it's always good to know how cards across different generations compare.

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Originally Posted by scaryjim

Not at all post-event, thanks for the useful input :)

Looks like I'm going to be able to get hold of a 7900GTO now anyway, but it's always good to know how cards across different generations compare.

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Can highly recommend the 7900GTO, my best mate has one and it is a delicious card! You will be happy with it i am sure

Going from a factory overclock 512MB 7900GT to a cheap 256MB DDR3 8600GT the main thing I noticed was I no longer had to put up with the fan noise from the 7900, the performance of the two was pretty close.

Given the 8400 has 16 shaders, and my old 8600GT had 32, you are at roughly half the performance already of a 7900.

I suspect if you bought a 7900, you would be disappointed.

May I suggest you keep the money, perhaps put it towards something like an ATI 4650 that would be faster and better featured.

Like this one for 38 quid.

Actually, I strongly suspect that my 8400GS is the newer, G98 version with 8 higher clocked shaders. That'd make it about one quarter of an 8600GTS, which is considerably slower than a 7900GS, let alone a GTO.

Considering that in real terms I'm going from a Radeon 9800Pro to a 7900GTO, I don't think I will be dissappointed ;)