ATI X800XT to ?

[Guest CFM56_5b]

Hi,I have an Dell XPS Gen3 with ATI X800XT 256Mb card, Pentium 4 560 (3.6GHz) 1GB PC4300 RAM and 250GB HD.I am thinking of upgrading the graphic card to something better to get my FS9 run smooth.I am evaluating Sapphire Radeon X1950XTX 512MB GDDR4 and Gainward GeForce 7950GT 512MB,1,4ns DDR3.My question is if I can expect any visible improvement in the performance once upgraded from X800XT to one of the mentioned cards?I also wish to hear other suggestions :)Thank you for your help.Aleksandar

[Guest Scratch1964]

Alex,Q "Can you expect any visible improvement in the performance once upgraded from X800XT to one of the mentioned cards?"A YES! Absolutely. There isn't a game on the market that the cards you mention won't run at full throttle.However, unless you are going to run games like Quake 4, UT, Doom 3 etc with 1600x1200 resolution or higher then you really don't need a Radeon X1950XTX or equivalent. You would notice a great performance increase from the new Radeon X1950 Pro costing only $199 for the 256MB or, $239 for the 512MB version. It runs 36 pipelines, well above that of the X800.Out of interest which CPU are you running FS9 on? You may see an even better performance gain if you spent less than half the cost of an X1950XTX on an X1950 Pro and the remainder on a new CPU. Many folks report less than grand performance from GPU upgrades with FS9 because the game is bottlenecked by their old CPU's which were neglected in any upgrade consideration. It may not be your GPU that is responsible for what you might consider 'poor FS9 performance.'It might be a help if you could post your full spec for everyone to see. Then the hardware Gurus' on here might be able to offer a better solution.Scratch1964

[Guest baksteen33]

Without a mention of the display(s) (and/or resolutions) it's hard to tell. Personally, I'ld go for a second GB of RAM first. FS9 with a couple of addons runs very close to the physical memory limit with 1GB. Perhaps download a util called MemStatus to read what your min and max RAM-values are and to determine what you need most? I've never seen FS9 go beyond 150MB on the GPU (@ 1280x). Hope this adds to thoughts, kind regards Jaap

[Guest Scratch1964]

AlexHello again. Pardon my ignorance, please. I clearly missed the info regarding your CPU etc. I must have somehow missed the text in your post after your GPU. Jaap picked up on the 1GB RAM. I too would look to upgrade this, even if only to 1.5GB. Anything extra would help in loading textures.I don't think an X1950XTX would be the best upgrade option for FS9, unlesss you want to play other GPU intensive games on the market. You will see a slight improvement, but is it worth all that extra $$$$...???

[Guest baksteen33]

Nobody's perfect, Scratch! ;-) Adding to your words, with DellTendos and many other OEM/customized boxes, upgrades need to be carefully planned. For example due to custom power supplies. Hence, it's probably a good idea to have a good look inside the box before buying anything. Adding a stick or two of mem should be no prob, provided the slots are there! :-) Good luck and kind regards Jaap

[Guest CFM56_5b]

Thank you all to good replies.Additional 1Gb has been ordered and GPU upgrade is set for spring next year (DX10) :)Thanks a lot!Aleksandar

[Guest baksteen33]

You're welcome, Aleksandar. I certainly hope we led you the right way! :-) This is a bad time for major upgrades. There are so many unknown factors. I came across an interesting issue today I'll post about in the 'other' Avsim hardware forum soon. An Avsim scoop! :-) Pls note you probably won't see a performance increase. RAM adds to smoothness. For more performance it's usually either a new CPU or lower settings... Pls feel free to report back once you're there, I'ld be interested to learn about your findings. Cheers and kind regards Jaap

[G-SWSM]

Hi Guy's.I'm sticking with XP Pro, and FS9.1 for a while yet, and unfortunately my graphics card looks like it might be dead, so I'm thinking about what I have read here about the X1950 Pro,I run this PC with 2 Gigs of Corsair Extreme RAM, with an Intel P4 3.40 CPU, both the graphics and CPU are water cooled by the way.But searching for an AGP version available in the UK for the price ranges mentioned seems to be proving more difficult than I anticipated.I do like the idea of going over to 512 from 256 on the card, but just can't seem to find one for the supposed price range.If anyone can offer any help on this then I would be most grateful.I did like my X80TX PE, but if it is dead, then the X1950 Pro looks like a nice trade-off for value.If anyone has one of these cards, could you let us know if they are any good please, I hate to sound stupid, but I have been out of the hardware side of things for some time, so I'm not as well up on these as I used to be.Thanks for any help all,