Please don't laugh, I have a Sapphire ATi Radeon 9200SE, any chance of being able to play Doom3 on it on low settings. And would it be worth it considering that Doom3 is apparently not v. good gameplay but has awesome graphics.
Please don't laugh, I have a Sapphire ATi Radeon 9200SE, any chance of being able to play Doom3 on it on low settings. And would it be worth it considering that Doom3 is apparently not v. good gameplay but has awesome graphics.
Really the 9200 is very much entry level, as reflected by it's price. I've seen them for sale for about 30 quid.
You really couldn't expect to get much of a gameplay experience out of Doom with one of those.
Toms Hardware doesn't even include it in their last AGP group test.
In the previous test (VGA Charts III) It shows the 128Mb 9200 giving an Aquamark score of 12,461 whereas a 9600XT (which is hardly cutting edge itself and would have trouble running Doom 3 at higher resolutions) has a score of well over double that.
Best get saving![]()
"Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative provided it does not tend to provoke violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having."
It'll play, but I'd spend your money on Far Cry or HL2- or as suggested, get saving for a better card. You can get something like a GF4Ti or a 9500 Pro/9700 for £40-60 secondhand, both will make a 9200SE look pretty silly.
Rich :¬)
As I thought, at the moment I'll live off Wolfenstein ET!!! My CPU woudn't cope with it anyway!
When I got the first 9250/9550 cards in, one of the first things I did was set up my test rig to see if they would play games at allOriginally Posted by Matt1eD
Doom 3 was definitely playable at 640x480 at medium quality (i.e. you could play it and get near 30fps at times)...
...however, the other replies are right when they say that for a small investment, your gaming experience would change massively
You can get a 128MB 9550 or 9600SE from £36+vat (i.e. £42 inc - try here among other places http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatal...00_Series.html)
With one of these cards - your scores would shoot right up and most things will be 'playable' depending on how you vary the resolution/quality settings
If you can get one of the last ever 9700 Pro cards - or maybe a slightly less rare 9800SE card - then you will be in a completely different arena altogether
Just to show balance, you could look at a 5700LE when you look at the 9550/9600SE and maybe a 5700 standard when you look at the 9700 Pro etc...
...that comparison would be based on price - performance is another matter entirely![]()
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"X800GT... snap it up while you still can"
HEXUS
......................................August 2005
Cheers, price is v. important for me being a student. Might try for that.Originally Posted by Andrzej
OK - in that case the best advice is much simplerOriginally Posted by Matt1eD
Given that you will spend every waking hour of the next 3 years of your life studying your chosen field, I am not certain that you need 3D at all because all of those expert opinion pieces and seriously hardcore research sites tend to avoid pictures - let alone moving images - and 12 point Times New Roman looks about the same on most cards...
...that is what being a student is all about - is it not ?
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"X800GT... snap it up while you still can"
HEXUS
......................................August 2005
Don't buy any flavour of 9200 or 9600 SE. The 64 bit memory bus really cripples their performance. Considering they tend to be only a few quid cheaper than the non-SE versions it's a false economy. TBH I wish ATi wouldn't sanction the production of SE cards Andrzej, it can't do your reputation any favours- rather like the 8500LE cards from manufacturers like Crucial and Sapphire that shipped with the memory clocked at 200MHz (or even 166MHz) rather than the 250MHz of the 'built by ATi' cards.
The same goes for any 64 bit memory flavour of NVidia graphics cards too, although AFAIK it's only the FX5200 that's at risk. Often the box or spec sheet doesn't state the memory bus width, but they sometime list the possible bandwidth- look for at least 6.4GB/s.
...but they are definitely cheaper and I got the impression that budget was a big factor hereOriginally Posted by Rave
The reason we do them is simple, there is a massive market for it![]()
I can't tell you how many...
...but we sell TONS of these !
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"X800GT... snap it up while you still can"
HEXUS
......................................August 2005
Mahoosive market is bound to make them cheap, and vice-a-versa.
If you binned LE/SE models, and just went vanilla, surely you could make more of the better ones, the punters would be less confused, hence trusting you more, hence you sell more.
Just a thought
Originally Posted by Advice Trinity by Knoxville
But, I imagine, the price would go up - in particular, in comparison with the competitor's cheapest card. All the systems that advertise "128MB Ati PCI-E Graphics" and include an X300se want the cards to be as cheap as possible.
don't care. IFyu made just ONE product per range, and stopped confusing the punters, they'd like you, you'd get more referalls and sell more product.
I know it all sounds too simple and therefore can't work, but the enemy or retailing is choice.
It used to be the best friend. But now it is the enemy. If you give a punter to many choices, they wont buy anything for fear of getting it wrong.
Dont believe me? Look around at eveyones lives. Too much choice.
And whle we're at it, sort the numbers out. To find a 9600 with 256 mb being whooped by a 9500Pro with 128 really does confuse people
The saddest thing of all is....the products are so good they are worth learning (for us here in tech world) but not for the punters out there is PC World![]()
Originally Posted by Advice Trinity by Knoxville
Bow down to Zak he speaks the truth...
It takes a lot of concentration to keep up to date with all the new products in the tech industry let alone various versions of the same product. Its hardly suprising that so many people still just buy what they see on the shelf and don't question it for the fear of opening up the huge can of worms that comes with it.
HEXUS|iMc
By student I mean like 15! Like ultra limited budget!Originally Posted by Andrzej
I think you comments are definitely interesting...
...but one thing you need to bear in mind is that ATI definitely works on a global scale
Products that may not seem to make sense in one country/region/continent...
...are invaluable elsewhere
Also, you need to consider customer demand
When a new product (or variant) is launched - it will be in response to a definite demand in the market - and that demand can seem strange to some people
For example, the last time I (personally) used a PCI mainboard would have been about 6 years ago
In the meantime the market has moved through AGP and now ATI is the biggest supplier of PCI Express graphics cards in the world
With that in mind, it seems amazing that one of our competitor's best selling retail cards (maybe even the best seller) for last year was a very low end PCI card
Also, you need to consider the massive OEM design win market - where the top companies are competing for huge contracts
At this level, pricing is very sensitive and the kind of difference that you and I might think nothing of when making a purchase, can be very important
Once that design win is in place - it makes sense to carry on producing that particular kind of product as long as there is demand
Sorry for the elongated reply - but I think the key message here is that everything is centered on creating products that the customer wants to buy - and it is a strategy that has seen ATI's revenue shoot up to $2BN over the past few years so I can't see it changing any time soon![]()
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"X800GT... snap it up while you still can"
HEXUS
......................................August 2005
Well, I had a quick look on ebuyer, on the grounds that they're usually competitive for low to mid range hardware. Here's the cheapest 9550SE:
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...duct_uid=63005
And here's the cheapest 9550:
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...duct_uid=62208
Th price difference ex. vat is £3.79- and yet the proper 9550 will be a hell of a lot faster than the SE. These cards are completely memory bandwidth limited; the core and the memory chips on those two cards are the same, the only difference is a few more copper traces on the pcb of the 9550. I know £4 is a fairly big chunk of a 'white box' manufacturer's margin, but if ATi just didn't sell the SE cards then the retailers would all have to cough up the extra £4; none of them would be competitively disadvantaged relative to the others.
In my opinion, the £4 saving is not worth the 30-50% loss of performance that the 64bit bus brings. I know these are low end cards, but if having a seperate ATi graphics card is a selling point of a system, then in my opinion consumers are being short changed if that card is a poor performer like the SE. If consumers aren't interested in gaming performance, then really they might as well stick with a chipset with onboard graphics. If the SE cards were actually much cheaper to make than non-SE cards I wouldn't be complaining, but IMO the card's performance is being severely hampered for the sake of a very small cost saving.
Rich :¬)
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